Shaping Leadership Culture

Leadership enables Performance

Companies with effective leadership achieve more. These companies are also more successful on the market. Simply because leadership reaches, motivates and empowers all employees. It aligns their actions with the goals of the organization. Or creates creative space for new, better goals.
Managers are under pressure: they have to reinvent themselves and still ‘deliver’. Higher uncertainty, social changes and shorter product and technology cycles demand speed and flexibility. Agile mindsets and methods create hybrid organizations. What does agile leadership mean in this new context? How do ‘high-performing’ teams emerge? And how to create a culture in which effective leadership is possible? Answers to these questions are decisive for the success of companies – in the market and with their employees.

Solutions

What we do

Develop leaders

The demands on managers are constantly (and sometimes suddenly) changing. Leaders’ adaptability and ability to deal with uncertainties are crucial for the success and development of those who are lead by them. After all, these leaders are the role models for the leaders of tomorrow.

How do your leaders need to position themselves for tomorrow? What development programs do your managers need? What should appropriate learning architectures and methods look like?

Strengthen teams

Successful (leadership) teams need a common vision of their strategic direction. And they must grow into a real team themselves. We believe that ‘high-performing’ teams are more important than individualists. In terms of the ‘Growth Mindset’: Every team can step up its performance.

How can your (management) team cooperate? How can we support teams in your organization to collaborate even better?

Change culture

Leadership is not something that happens in a vacuum. It is the corporate culture that provides a framework and helps shape leadership. It is therefore worthwhile to define a target culture consciously and strategically. First steps towards this target include the cooperation between the top management, executives and employees.

How should your corporate culture change? What does good leadership actually mean in your culture? And how does it contribute to your strategy?

How we do it

What we have achieved with our clients

The project

Digitization, ‘New Work’, strategic reorientation. These factors challenged executives at our client – a social insurance agency – more than ever before. The requirements for leadership had to be redefined and re-trained.

Together with our client, we reflected on modern leadership roles and the desired strategic orientation. Based on this, we developed a broad-based training program with adapted goals, new methods and materials. Through a hybrid learning architecture developed by us – both classroom and virtual – leadership principles and leadership skills are now trained and anchored in the everyday life of leaders in our client’s organization.

Our impact

With the newly defined requirements for leaders, hundreds of executives start their new leadership role every year, empowered in knowledge, attitude and behavior. We are particularly pleased with the positive feedback on the training, from participants, trainers and of course our client.

The project

Our client, an infrastructure provider, was undergoing a transformation initiated by its owners. At the same time, the composition of the Management Board changed. In addition, the pressure to perform, which weighed heavily on the company and the Management Board, was considerable.

The new Management Board wanted to not only survive this challenging time, but also shape it as a team. Together we developed a customized team alignment format for the Management Board. In individual and group interventions, clarity and commitment to strategic alignment and cooperation was created. The decisive factor here was the consideration of context, competencies and perspectives of all team members.

Our impact

Today the board itself is a real ‘high-performing’ team. But our support has not only helped at this level: The transformation of the company has also been successfully completed. Our client is still convinced of the sustainable impact of team development and continues to systematically implement it.

The project

For an industrial company, we supported the introduction of a new matrix organization with business units and technical functions. This change also required a comprehensive cultural change: Silo thinking and old hierarchies had no place in the new system.

Together with our client, we initially planned the cultural change. The anchoring of the new organization and culture started with top managers and was then established throughout the organization. New tasks and interfaces were discussed and reflected upon in a cross-functional team, and we improved the cooperation across the board with agile methods and abandoned silo thinking. To anchor this in the organization, we also relied on the support of internal change agents.

Our impact

After just over 3 months, the organization was already working in the new organizational structure and the benefits became apparent. In addition, practical support in day-to-day business successfully identified further optimization needs. A completely new quality of collaboration on core processes could be established.

Contact

Strengthen (top) teams, change culture
Strengthen (top) teams, change culture
Jens Müller-Oerlinghausen
Partner, Head of Leadership Practice
Develop leaders
Develop leaders
Nadeshda Kreya
Associate Principal