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.

I just spoke to Mary Uhl-Bien, a Professor at University of Nebraska who chairs the Leadership Scholars group of the Academy of Management.  Mary and colleague Russ Marion wrote the book Complexity Leadership: Conceptual Foundations. Mary plans to talk briefly about her research on the Complexity Theory of Leadership at our Global Leadership Congress, and she’ll describe the evidence she’s seend of her theory in practice.  She found that evidence when reviewing people’s leadership programs  that were submitted this year to the Corporate University Xchange Annual Awards for Excellence and Innovation.   Mary was one of 24 independent judges who evaluated leadership and learning programs to identify best practices.

Yesterday, Mary had the opportunity to observe a team at a hospital creating a new process for medical records.  The team include a mix of physicians, nurses, medical records experts and other other administrators.  The group was given an opportunity to start with a blank slate to propose solutions.  Various people within the group spoke about the challenges of keeping patient’s medicines in synch when considering what they take before they enter the hospital, what they take while in the hospital and what will be prescribed to take at home after leaving the hospital.  Senior leaders purposely stayed out of the meeting entirely but simply created the environment that would allow a solution to emerge from the team.  As complexity science demands, there was rich interaction among agents and eventually many new concepts began to emerge from the group.  They are now going to pilot the concept of a “living list” of meds that’s managed for each patient that will consider input from the patient’s pharmacist, nursing team, doctors and others to reduce the confusion patients have the potential for drug interaction problems.

To casual observers, the process didn’t look much different than a typical brainstorming session. But to senior leaders at the hospital, they saw a new dynamic that allowed lower levels to propose and own the solution. The group was not looking to senior managers to make a decision and issue an edict.  The team owned the problem, they owned the success of the solution, and senior leaders have a high expectation the solution and change will succeed more quickly and definitely than it would have had they decided what to do and issued directives to people.

CorpU Award winners in leadership are finding new methods and new approaches to help leaders understand how to create these rich, dynamic and complex environments, and to create the best conditions for innovation.  The work of the Global Leadership Congress is going to be step 1 in defining how we develop leaders to manage the complexity and change in a highly dynamic global marketplace.

Gary Hamel recently released his book “The Future of Management” describing the abyssmal progress management practices have made in the last 50 years.  The Center for Creative Leadership conducted research showing that better than 90% of corporate leaders say the business world has become significantly more complex in the last 5 years.  Development Dimensions International studies show that a high percentage of leaders fail when they move into a new leadership post.  Recruiting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas report that 40% of CEOs don’t keep their jobs for more than 2 years.

Now, new methods for developing leaders are finally beginning to emerge.  We’re seeing a few progressive companies that are centering their leadership development programs around business growth and high performance.  They’re helping middle level leaders find new ways to adjust with the rapid pace of business change.  They’re teaching senior leaders how to create an environment that supports collaboration, and the right kind of experimentation and failure.

These new approaches are surrounding leaders with knowledge from business experts and teaching them how to learn exactly what they need to learn to tackle the business challenges they’re confronting on the job everyday.  They’re recognizing the critical need for greater flexibility in leadership competencies, and the importance of teaching leaders how to apply the appropriate pressure to help the firm continually adapt with marketplace changes.

The Mars organization credits its new approach to leadership development as the primary reason for its becoming the fastest growing food company in the world.  Cigna says its approach to leadership development is accelerating its position as an industry fast follower to an industry leader.

Stay tuned for more details on how these innovators are using their new brand of leadership development to transform their organizations.  Exciting times in leadership development!!

We’re also building a new tool practitioners can use to plan and develop leadership curriculum.  We’re creating a map of business issues and their relationship to leadership topics.  Then, we’re linking a directory of Scholars, Academics, Leaders and Thinkers – SALT Directory - to those leadership topics.  We think it will save people hours of time trying to find the right experts, and locate their books, papers and presentations.

I talked to Mary Uhl-Bien, Professor at the University of Nebraska and Chair of the Leadership Scholars group of the Academy of Management.  She’s going to get Leadership Scholars to complete their SALT profiles.  These scholars also want to learn how they can help corporations by conducting research on leadership and talent issues.  This is shaping up to be such a fantastic and very unique conference on leadership.  If you want to learn more or keep tabs on our agenda updates, sign up here:

Global Leadership Congress

Lots more to come about the program, and how these sessions will give people running leadership programs more value than any conference they’ve ever attended.