I’ve heard from many corporate learning leaders that they are rethinking leadership and executive development programs. They are engaging their learning partners in coming up with new designs. Here’s a tool we’ve provided to clients to help them conduct an effective brainstorming session. It can be really cool to apply complexity concepts to the session – but that’s a story for another day. There are actually 10 modules in this brainstorming session. Here are the first 2 – more to come soon.
Brainstorming Session Objectives:
The purpose of this brainstorming session is to describe the long-term vision and short-term tactical plans to design and develop a world-class Leadership Academy. The team will participate in high energy brainstorming sessions on various philosophical and design considerations with the intent of developing a comprehensive framework to guide future action steps. By answering the three critical questions in each strategy session, the team will develop a list of key activities required for creating a solid foundation for our Leadership Academy.
Session 1 – How To Identify and Refresh Characteristics of the Savola Leadership Team For Long-term Business Sustainability
- What processes, activities, and research will be used to define the ongoing knowledge and competency requirements for the Savola leadership team?
- How will knowledge and skill requirements be refreshed as business conditions change?
- How will the Leadership Academy prepare leaders to confront unknown future challenges and contribute to establishing a culture that encourages learning, and rewards innovation, risk-taking and valuing the lessons of mistakes?
Session 2 – Approach to Processes For Selecting and Developing Leadership Talent, and Identifying Predictive Development Paths That Demonstrate High Success Rates
- What indicators of performance, attitudes, motivation, technical knowledge and leadership potential will be defined and tracked to enable us to select internal candidates to move into talent pools for accelerated development or to promote to the next level of leadership?
- How should we analyze and measure the effectiveness of rotational assignments, developmental and stretch assignments, in combination with leadership profiles and types of knowledge gaps to build reliability into our approach for building great leaders who succeed at each successive level of leadership?
- How will our requirements for leadership candidates be integrated into key HR processes for recruiting and selecting external leadership candidates?
These are questions to answer in the first 2 modules of the brainstorming session. There are 8 more. A team that brainstorms around the 30 questions included in the 10 strategy sessions will create a great foundation for building their leadership academy.
