Creating a Senior Leadership Development Programme
The ‘Tomorrow Ready’ programme has brought the Exec Team together with a clear understanding of how we lead in the pursuit of continual implementation of our strategic plan. Everyone is talking about the future possibilities, they are genuinely excited about the programme.
– Dr. Tim Whitaker Principal & CEO, Askham Bryan College
The challenge
Askham Bryan College had a clear organisational purpose ‘Learning is in our nature‘, underpinned by a 10 year strategic planned developed by the executive leadership team and board of governors. The leadership plan to implement this strategy was called ‘Tomorrow Ready’ – devised to help navigate current challenges, develop leadership capability and provide leadership tools and support to implement the 10-year university Strategic Plan. What the Askham Bryan College executive leadership team needed was a leadership framework to help them operate more effectively as a leadership team to identify areas where they needed to build trust, resolve unhealthy conflict, get clearer on accountabilities and agree which lag and leading indicators would define their collective success.
Our approach
In collaboration with the college Learning & Development team we devised a two phased leadership development programme to complement their internal people initiatives.
Phase one was to increase personal insights and the self-awareness of the senior leadership team members using psychometric tools and one-to-one executive coaching. While also agreeing the objectives of the leadership development programme through a series of facilitated workshops with the executive team.
Phase two focused on improving leadership effectiveness organisation wide, extending out the leadership development programme to the wider senior leadership team (approx. 14 leaders). Through a series of facilitated workshops we worked on holding senior leaders to account for demonstrating key behaviours within the college DNA framework; encouraging them to regularly take iconic actions, challenge unhelpful conduct and highlighting the absence of any behaviours which later created conflict or ambiguity.
What we delivered
7 x half day workshops with 5 executive leaders
35 + one-on-one coaching hours with the executive team members.
5 x Hogan LEAD SERIES Assessments
4 x half day workshops with 14 SLT members
17 x Myers Briggs Type Indicator assessments
The results
Increased college wide leadership effectiveness by galvanising the collective outcomes from the executive leadership team. The wider SLT reported being able to better identify their role and scope, how they were when managing their teams, and leading in the college across four strategic pillars.
The outcome was the entire leadership team left the programme with a solid understanding of what was important and what wasn’t, the ability to carefully consider the impact of decisions and a framework for how to put things right when mistakes are inevitably made. The team left with clearer ownership of problems and a set of ground rules for how to find solutions vs blaming others. Ultimately the leadership team had a renewed energy and set of collective goals for how they could role model that learning is in their nature.
