Perspective™

A Vertical Development programme incorporating the Harthill Leadership Development Framework providing participants with insight into their respective Action Logics and identification of actions to further develop individual effectiveness.

PerspectiveTM; a Vertical Development programme incorporating the Harthill Leadership Development Framework (LDF)

Overview

Most experienced managers know what they should be doing. Many are also proficient in deploying the requisite leadership skills. Where the challenge often lies is in how they ‘see their world’. Managers and leaders can find themselves stuck in a mind-set of how things were – for themselves as individuals, for the organisation and for their role in it.

This mind-set with its accompanying beliefs and views can inhibit personal and professional growth. Typified by factors such as failure to capitalise on opportunities, simplified cause – effect responses and even unproductive inter-personal / inter-functional ‘point-scoring’, the impact is sub-optimised performance and stalled personal progression.

Most leadership programmes focus on providing further ‘knowledge’; developing skills and competence about what you know. In today’s context that provision of increased knowledge and skill, whilst absolutely essential, is also no longer sufficient. Today’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world poses challenges to existing paradigms and ways of working to which there are not known answers.

As Tsoukas and Neelands of Warwick Business School write – people in leadership positions are routinely confronted with complexity and uncertainty and yet ‘are called upon to act with integrity and make effective decisions, exercising their judgement in ambiguous situations with incomplete information and to act wisely’.

As Tsoukas and Neelands continue, such wisdom is developed through experience, the caveat to this being if we are able to learn from experience on an ongoing basis. For many in today’s ‘do more, do it quicker, always available’ environment, such learning doesn’t readily take place, we become blocked, our paradigms of how we make sense of our experiences become locked.

The PerspectiveTM programme addresses this by making learning more generative. Centred on Vertical Development1 – the ability to think and derive meaning in more complex, systemic, strategic and inter-dependent ways, key elements to the PerspectiveTM programme are as follows.

Programme Outline

Stage 1; Webinar Orientation Session, Individual Expectations & Goal Setting

  • Context for, and overview of, the programme and input on core principles:-
    • Leader as coach and change agent
    • Vertical/horizontal learning
    • Action enquiry and facilitated Action Learning Set methodology
  • Discussion with Line Manager and Talent/Leadership Development;-
    • Clarification of participant learning outcomes and mutual expectations
    • Identification of ‘stretch’ business issue/opportunity to be progressed providing a context for personal learning

Stage 2; Workshop 1 (2 days plus individual questionnaire de-brief)

  • Pre-work; completion of on-line Leadership Development Framework (LDF) questionnaire
  • Day 0; Scheduled arrival for 1:1 LDF feedback and coaching slots
  • Day 1; Introduction to Leadership and Vertical Learning (VL)
    • Context for VL, personal development and Action Enquiry principles
    • The Leadership Development Framework; action ‘logics’ and implications for personal leadership development
    • Personal insights from individual LDF profiles and de-briefs
  • Day 2; LDF profiles and actions (contd.)
    • Sharing of Bridges’ change and transition framework; personal transitions to enable VL and leadership progression
    • Leadership ‘journaling’ structures – personal learning and actions
    • Establishment of Action Learning Sets;
      • Sharing of insights and any unresolved issues from the workshop
      • Review of activities to provide ‘stretch’ experiences

Stage 3; Facilitated Action Learning Set Review(s)

  • Review of insights and progress with individual actions

Stage 4; Workshop 2

  • Day 1; Vertical Learning & Immunity to Change (Kegan & Lahey)
    • Action Learning Set (ALS) review of experiences and enquiry/journal work
    • Introduction to, and completion of, immunity to change maps
    • Sharing of desired and actual behaviours and implications of the identified behavioural gap
  • Day 2; Immunity to change mapping (contd.)
    • Identification of competing commitments
    • Plenary review of emerging ‘maps’ and identification of shared themes
      • Review of immunity to change drivers
      • Organisational inhibitors to performance improvement

Stage 5; Continuation of Action Learning Sets

  • Progression of individual and collective actions
    • Staged review of business benefit and impacts
    • Transition of ALS to self-managing groups

References

  1. Seven Transformations of Leadership; Rooke and Torbert Harvard Business Review, April 2005
  2. Vertical Leadership development Part 1 – Developing Leaders for a Complex World; Nick Petrie, Center (sic) for Creative Leadership White Paper 2014