Client presented with challenges and issues specifically around a lack of leadership, ownership and accountability at the senior management level. The executive team required the senior managers to show more drive and initiative and leadership to enable the executive team to focus less on day to day operations and more on strategic direction and transformation.
The client was seeking to understand the core blocks to their senior managers taking on more responsibility, accountability and ownership in order to determine the appropriate level of support required to help create a change.
Client Context
Industry: Manufacturing
Turnover: $100M
Team Size: Senior management team of 18
Challenge
Inability to drive higher levels of accountability, responsibility and ownership
Approach
Profiling
Team development workshops
Individual development plans
Outcome
Significantly improved levels of accountability
Higher engagement in senior management and leadership discussions
Renewed drive towards results generation
Data Insights
- Thought Code® Individual Profile
- Thought Code® Team Profile
- Thought Code® Organisation Profile
Profile data and subsequent discussions with managers uncovered a common pattern of challenges at the senior manager level as well as issues stemming from the executive level. The quality of both the quantitative and qualitative data enabled the executive team to be open to receiving feedback on how they were contributing to the problem.
- Willingness to be assertive and speak up
- Following proven and workable processes
- Respecting authority
- Establishing habitual work behaviours to drive consistency
- Upholding the status quo
- Playing out if then scenarios to aide planning
- Brainstorming new ideas and areas for improvement
- Willingness to embrace change and adapt/li>
- Utilising metrics and measurement to drive results
- Mentoring and coaching practices
- Driving aggressive growth strategies
- Challenging the status quo
- Developing and empowering others
Approach
Worked with the executive team to provide detailed insight into patterns of behaviour at the senior management level and respectfully analysed and identified patterns of behaviour at the executive level that could be causing or contributing to the challenges presented. This uncovered development needs at the executive level around values driven decision making, strategic delegation, trust, and culture creation.
Provided one on one mentoring and support to each member of the executive team to implement the specific changes required at the individual level to improve capability at the group level and maximise successful implementation of new leadership approaches.
Created and implemented a series of interactive workshops designed to target and unlock specific capability at the senior management level. These workshops involved elements or pre or post work to ensure principles learnt could be successful embedded and actioned.
Outcome
Discussions and workshops enabled the executive team to test and measure different strategies for creating space for the senior management team to step into higher levels of responsibility and accountability. The executive team became aware that their leadership approach was not allowing enough room for senior managers to be as effective as they could be. For example, failing to delegate appropriately, getting too involved in detailed discussions as opposed to remaining strategic, not creating a space for senior managers to learn from mistakes, overriding decisions made at the senior manager level and minimal collaboration with senior managers to help them understand how to make high quality decisions. The different approaches identified in the group executive discussions enabled the executive team to focus a greater percentage of their time on strategic elements of the business resulting in growth opportunities to be actioned earlier. Culture improvements and initiatives were implemented, rather than overlooked, as their importance to business growth was recognised.
Interactive workshops resulted in the following capability improvements supported by anecdotal evidence from colleagues and Executive leaders:
33.8%
perceived improvement in
problem solving
31.5%
perceived improvement in
driving results
37.6%
perceived improvement in
accountability
30.9%
perceived improvement in
making decisions