Talent management best practice series

Transcription

Talent Management Best Practice Series: Leadership Development
Talent management
best practice series
Leadership development
Copyright © 2013 Korn/Ferry International. All rights reserved.
Copyright
© 2013
Korn/Ferry
International.
All rights
This publication
was issued
to Korn/Ferry
employees.
Unlawful distribution
of thisreserved.
publication is prohibited.
This publication was issued to Korn/Ferry employees. Unlawful distribution of this publication is prohibited.
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Talent management
Talent management
Series Editor J. Evelyn Orr
Contributors Noah Rabinowitz
Catherine McCarthy
Kathy Woods
Janet Feldman
Jacqueline Gillespie
Jonathan Feil
Copyright © 2013 Korn/Ferry International
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9885598-4-4
www.kornferry.com
Table of contents
Foreword
Introduction
Rethinking Leadership Development
Building Your Business While You Build Your Bench
Using the Strategy Activation Formula
Designing a Strategy Activation Program
Conclusion
Appendix A: Strategy Activation Checklist
Appendix B: Case Studies
Notes
THE KORN/FERRY INSTITUTE
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Foreword
The Korn/Ferry Institute Best Practice Series provides a window into
the thought leadership and expertise that Korn/Ferry International
offers as the premier global provider of talent management solutions.
Each installation of the series covers a key area of talent management
and captures Korn/Ferry’s science, philosophy, and approach. These
best practice books provide an introduction to who Korn/Ferry thought
leaders are, what Korn/Ferry does best, and how Korn/Ferry can fuel
organizations’ success in meeting their strategic talent management needs.
Korn/Ferry’s approach is based on science and informed by what
works in practice. The Korn/Ferry Institute Best Practice Series is intended
to summarize key, unique points of view held by Korn/Ferry thought
leaders that inform our methods and approach to strategic talent
management. Consider it a way to spark new thinking and get to
know what Korn/Ferry offers.
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Introduction
Over the years, leadership development has taken on a broad meaning. In fact,
Wikipedia defines it as “any activity that enhances the quality of leadership
within an organization.” Because of this almost unbounded characterization,
we have decided to narrow in on a specific style of leadership development for
the purposes of this discussion. We will focus on the programmatic, structured,
cohort-based learning experience.
This is not in any way meant to de-emphasize the importance of other
approaches such as job rotations, stretch assignments, exposure plans,
coaching, degree programs, or international assignments. In fact, a
combination of approaches can often make for the most powerful
developmental strategy and we use an intentional blend of many of them to
customize an appropriate developmental experience. But for purposes of focus,
and because cohort-based programs are where we uncover the greatest contrast
in approach, it makes sense to limit our scope.
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Rethinking Leadership
Development
The term leadership development typically conjures up a series of images and
ideas. It could be an executive education program at a well-known university.
It could be a group retreat designed to address future-focused competencies.
It could be a keynote speaker brought in to talk about a particular matter. It
could be an outdoor adventure program intended to promote teamwork and
camaraderie. There are many possibilities.
Now imagine a yearlong developmental journey, done in a cohort, in which
participants grapple with real business issues and learn about leadership
while they solve relevant and high-value problems in the context of their
own organization. No generic case studies. No talking heads. The yearlong
experience integrates leadership fundamentals with real-time problem solving
and actual business building. The development experience includes workshops,
assessment, individual feedback, executive coaching, action-learning, selfpaced activities, personalized reflection, and technology-enabled learning.
Participants learn about strategy, innovation, finance, team leadership, personal
mastery, customer focus, and other crucial topics. But these subjects are all
anchored within their business and constant connections are made to behaviors
that leaders can adopt to activate and accelerate organizational strategy. In fact,
the entire journey directly drives strategy execution, with a tangible impact
on results, mission success, community impact, marketplace valuation,
and the bottom line — in addition to changed leadership behavior and
transformed lives.
For several decades, classic leadership development has focused on bench
building and the preparation of future leaders. These are worthy and important
tasks — no doubt about it. But preparation for what? Even some of the world’s
best executive development programs may not be tailored to the complexities
and intricacies of your business. Participants in these programs come out on
the other side more knowledgeable, skilled, polished, and “ready.” But ready
for what exactly? Are they truly prepared for the needs of their business,
markets, industry, customers, and culture? It may be world-class learning
taught by world-class thinkers, but is it giving them what they really need?
Non-contextual development or development done in a vacuum can result in
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lost opportunity and reduced efficacy of the development program itself. It
can produce leaders who are more knowledgeable and competent than they
were before, but not necessarily ones who are better prepared to meet your
organization’s critical strategic goals.
What if you could grow your business while you grow your leaders — merging
those two activities into one? What if you could create leaders who are primed
to meet the specific challenges your organization faces, taking strategy out
of the boardroom and making it a reality for their colleagues, teams, and
customers? What if you could use your own business as the “case study” for
leadership development? We believe that organizations that are able to create
developmental initiatives that use this approach will significantly increase their
chances of winning in the marketplace and position themselves ahead of their
competitors that offer more traditional approaches to leadership development.
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The Strategy Activation approach uses your business context as the platform for
leader development. Using the real-time issues your business faces now and will
in the future, this approach blends high-impact adult learning strategies that
include instructor-led workshops, executive coaching, action learning, virtual
collaboration, self-paced reflection, just-in-time learning, mobile learning,
peer interaction and coaching, assessment, and business simulation. This is all
intended to bring real business issues to the forefront through a blend of classic
and innovative learning methodologies.
The objective of the Strategy Activation approach is to dynamically engage
leaders in your strategy, vision, and culture in order to develop ambassadors,
influencers, and educators who communicate the strategy message to
colleagues at all levels of the organization. This approach will simultaneously
create deeper pools of strong leaders who have the competencies and core
leadership foundations to advance the business, creating exponential value
for themselves, their teams, and the organization. The outcome? Leaders who
directly help an organization turn on — or activate — its strategy and ROI that
can be measured by first-order business metrics: growth, mission success,
product and service innovation, profitability, efficiency, productivity, customer
retention and satisfaction, sustainability, and market valuation.
Heed the Business Case
In today’s fast-paced world, staying agile and adapting to marketplace shifts
are crucial to sustained growth. In mature markets, it is particularly important
to consistently uncover new opportunities and ways of doing business. Most
ambitious growth-focused organizations are pursuing or considering a strategic
shift — a change to their core business model that provides fuel for their
continued growth, marketplace relevance, and financial health. Here are some
examples of strategic shifts from a number of Korn/Ferry clients:
• A large financial services company aims to capture increased market
share in a crowded marketplace by creating the most differentiated
and value-added customer experience.
• An aerospace and defense contractor sets out to mitigate the risk of
decreasing defense spending in the US by moving into commercial
aerospace and select high-growth international markets.
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• A global pharmaceutical company seeks to significantly expand its
North American footprint by establishing a series of distribution
partnerships and developing a differentiated sales force that captures
physician mind-share and time-share.
• An Indian IT services company attempts to fight the forces of
commoditization and eroding margins by climbing the value chain,
competing against the global IT consulting players, and pursuing
sources of more strategic, longer-term, and higher-quality revenue.
• A professional services firm seeks to mitigate the threat of technology
to its core business by broadening out from its traditional service
offering into a wider set of related offerings.
What do all of these situations — and the many more we could cite — have
in common? First, they are major strategic shifts — large-scale changes to
the core business model that have a multitude of implications for people,
process, technology, culture, and finance. Second, they require new thinking,
capabilities, and behaviors on the part of individuals and the organization
to successfully execute on the strategy. Third, they are essential pathways to
growth and sustained marketplace relevance and therefore critical to investor,
employee, and customer confidence. Perhaps most importantly, though, they all
require extremely strong and potentially very new approaches to leadership.
The not-so-good news on these types of strategic shifts is that most of them do
not come to fruition.
• A Bain Consulting study notes that seven out of eight companies in a
global sample of 1,854 large corporations failed to achieve profitable
growth, though more than 90 percent had detailed strategic plans
with much higher targets.1
• Forbes magazine cited that 82 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs believe
their organization did an effective job of strategic planning but only
14 percent of the same CEOs indicated that their organization did an
effective job of implementing the strategy.2
• A 2004 study by The Economist found that nearly two-thirds of Senior
Operating Executives had been unsuccessful in executing on their
most important strategic initiatives.3
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• Charan and Colvin state in “Why CEOs Fail” that approximately 70
percent of CEOs’ failures were the result of poor execution rather
than poor strategies.4
There is a compelling body of evidence that points to a gap between strategy
formulation and strategy execution. Clearly, it is not enough to want it to
happen or declare that it will be so in order for the full value of strategic
thinking to be realized. Something more needs to occur.
Develop Leaders Who Will Activate Your Strategy
Why do some organizations execute flawlessly on their strategy while others
flail? Why do some successfully shift while others remain bogged down in
the status quo? Although there are obviously many factors that affect an
organization’s ability and ultimate success at executing on its shift, it is
our assertion that, in large part, success has to do with how effectively and
aggressively your people “activate” the strategy — turning it from ideas into
action and from action into impact. A simple concept for sure, but one that we
can see from the statistics above, remains elusive for most.
Most entrepreneurial and successful people among us will find opportunity
where others find roadblocks, create momentum where others create drag.
Strategy activating leaders put life into your vision, turning it from idea into
action. They are proactive, practical, and
inspired. They make connections, seek
out opportunities, engage with people,
break down barriers, and generally strive
to create value and be of positive service.
They understand organizational direction
and strategy and successfully reconcile it
Ralph Waldo Emerson
with their own personal aspirations and
ambitions. They are positive and energized by
the promise of achievement and success. They know which levers can be pulled
to drive change and create opportunity for themselves, their teams, and their
customers. They are strong learners, curious, able to change, and willing to take
risks. At the end of the day, they are the vessel and the lifeblood of strategic
change and progress.
“No great man ever
complains of want
of opportunity.”
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To produce positive return and affect shareholder value, Strategy Activation
should harness the power of these types of leaders and produce more of them.
It should be the driving force behind leader development, decision making,
communication strategies, resource planning, and talent management. When
done properly, Strategy Activation can increase marketplace valuation by
linking leadership development to Earnings Per Share, driving a future-focused
agenda, building confidence among the investment community, reducing
inherent people-related risks, and cutting down on the gap between vision and
appropriate action.
Companies that want to close the strategy execution gap must first and
foremost develop their people in tight alignment with the organizational shift
in strategy. This should be done with laser-beam focus, disciplined execution,
and appropriate intensity. For example, if a company is moving to a more
customer-centric strategy and believes that there is competitive advantage in
being more in touch with its customer, then leaders in that organization should
be developed directly in terms of customer centricity. They should learn what
it means, see what it looks like, hear from internal and external experts, try it
out themselves, ponder the implications, grapple with the personal barriers
that may hold them back, and ultimately identify specific ways they can
become customer-centric leaders in their organization. This includes holding
themselves and others accountable for customer-centric behavior. It also
includes taking decisive corrective action when they see behaviors that are not
in line with this new vision.
Simply learning or being taught about customer centricity will not achieve the
targeted change in behavior and therefore is unlikely to produce any kind of
meaningful return. Leadership development done in a vacuum will never serve
as the catalytic force that is needed to convert strategy into action. Leaders
learn from experience. They learn best in real situations in which success or
failure matters.5 Learning from real experiences is more powerful in terms of
achieving movement, action, and momentum. This is why we say that learning
has to occur within the execution of strategy in order to drive impact.
Leaders who activate strategy spur valuation. There is clearly a direct
connection between strong leadership, successful strategy, and higher business
valuation. In his recent research, Dave Ulrich found that confidence in a
company’s future (i.e., quality of strategy and leadership) is increasingly more
important in determining the company’s market value. Secondly, he stated
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that investment bank UBS found that Fortune’s Top Companies for Leaders
significantly outperformed the general market over a ten-year period. Lastly,
Ulrich compared the price-earnings ratios of Fortune’s Top Companies for
Leaders to their respective industry averages, discovering that they were all
outperforming by a significant percentage.6
Clearly, quality leadership stimulates market value. When organizations
systematically cultivate leaders, developing them within the vision, strategy,
culture, and purpose, value is created and compounded.
From another perspective, Alexander Sacerdote, Founder and Managing Partner
at Whale Rock Capital, said that 20-50 percent of his investment decisions are
based on the quality of the leadership team. One of his first considerations
when researching a company, he noted, is “what will this group of leaders do to
valuation?”
There is no doubt that the top leadership team plays an enormous role in how
the investment community evaluates a particular stock. But it’s not just the
C-suite that it is examining. It considers how the leadership of the company is
turning on its strategy and closing the strategy-execution gap. The investment
community also notes the extent to which top leadership is engaging the
whole organization in the strategy, creating an emotional imperative and
thus increasing the chances of successful execution. Since most strategies are
focused on growth, and growth is the key driver of upside valuation, it’s logical
that confidence in the ability of an organization to retain, develop, and engage
leaders with a laser focus on executing strategy is a major driver of valuation.
According to Sacerdote, the direct and indirect investments that companies
make in leadership development are directly linked to a number of positive
outcomes that are important to the financial community.
Earnings Per Share. Using a causal chain, it is possible to link every employee’s
daily leadership routines to Earnings Per Share (EPS). Take for example a defense
contractor that is lagging behind its competitors on the days cash outstanding
of its receivables. By developing the contract manager, account team, and
finance executives in terms of the courage, financial acumen, and influence
skills needed to change the conversation with their customer, they can drive a
reduction in days cash outstanding that subsequently has a positive impact on
cash flow and therefore EPS. Now imagine the exponential effect if every person
in the organization developed a breakthrough leadership routine so tightly
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connected to EPS. Grounding leadership development in these types of realworld applications and making the causal link between behavior and bottomline metrics fuel value creation through the development process.
Reduction of People-Related Risk. Risk is a drag on valuation. Investors don’t
like risk in the strategy or the core business model. When there is any sign of
the leadership team not doing everything it needs to do to fully activate its
strategy or not having the capability to lead the strategy, red flags go up and
investor confidence may be rattled. Strategy activating leadership development
pulls key leaders into the mission, purpose, and strategy of the organization,
enrolling them at the emotional level in what the organization is trying to
achieve. This inherently reduces risk of attrition and apathy, especially among
those essential people who will have the most direct impact on successful
execution of strategy.
Direct Financial Metrics. At an organizational level, high-impact leadership
development activities are an integral part of Strategy Activation. As such, they
use real context as the platform for development, with leaders solving real
problems and innovating for the business as they learn. When done effectively,
this allows leadership programs not only to self-fund, but to be propellants of
improved financial metrics. Some of the world’s most successful companies
have created tremendous value for their shareholders by developing their
leaders with real-life challenges. Cisco Systems, for example, estimates that it
has created upward of $20 billion in new business value through the use of
action learning or real-life leadership development.7
Leadership as a Differentiator. Former Merck CEO Dick Clark paraphrased
Peter Drucker, a respected authority on business strategy, when he said,
“Culture eats strategy for lunch.” Through the lens of Strategy Activation and
marketplace valuation, this saying still holds true. Sacerdote affirmed this
when he commented that “culture is crucially important” in his investment
decisions, especially for organizations that do not have large amounts of hard
capital assets. A well-designed Strategy Activation program develops future
leaders within the culture, preparing them to be cultural ambassadors and to
continue to create valuable differentiation through leadership.
Clearly, quality leadership drives market value and informed investors care
about it and take this into consideration when deciding where to deploy their
capital. When organizations systematically unleash and cultivate leaders,
developing them within the vision, strategy, culture, and purpose, value is
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created, sustained, and compounded. Value-seeking investors are conscious
of this and on the lookout for organizations that can tell a compelling story
of leadership development and its prominent role in closing the ubiquitous
strategy-execution gap.
Strategy Activation does not only impact the business and the bottom line.
It also has a personal effect and changes lives. It is deeply intertwined with
individual leadership growth, progress, engagement, and development. These
two forces — organizational and individual — interact systematically and each
pushes and urges advancement of the other. A good leadership development
program creates as much value and impact for the individual as it does for the
organization. People need to be touched personally, authentically, and as a
whole person through processes that change their lives as much as they change
the life of the organization.
An exceptional leadership development program creates value and impact
for the individual by targeting two fundamental outputs of whole-person
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development. These contribute seamlessly to the leader’s overall growth
and advancement by moving beyond the technical and behavioral level to
addressing the core of an individual. Consider the following valuable outputs:
Real work is accomplished. World War II veteran and author Zig Ziglar wrote
that “motivation is the fuel necessary to keep the human engine running.”
Successful executives are, by their nature, motivated by achievement and
results. Leadership development should capitalize on this predisposition by
giving executives real things to do and by creating a platform for them to have
new experiences and try new behaviors. This will cause them to be energized
by the accomplishment of real work with their teams. Winning is a powerful
motivator. Because it fuels confidence and a sense of self-worth, it is a potent
dimension of leadership development and lifelong learning.
Giving executives the opportunity to succeed as they learn is a crucial aspect
of successful leadership programs. In doing this, these programs need to be
focused on both closing skill gaps and aggressively leveraging strengths. For
many years, our needs analysis process has concentrated on where we are weak
and used those insights as a way to select focus areas and content. A current
popular trend rooted in positive psychology is to center on strengths alone.
The right approach is a balance of both. Strengths propel leaders to success
as long as they don’t have any glaring weaknesses that could derail them. It is
worth investing the time and energy to shore up weak or blind spots in order to
reduce the chances that they would detract from a leader’s strengths.8,9
Each leader’s legacy begins to take shape. Every leader strives to make a
difference and to contribute in a unique and important way. Through selfdevelopment and personal reflection, great leadership development helps
the individual find and define the imprint he or she wants to create and leave
behind with others. Radio talk-show host Laura Schlesinger said in an interview
that “it is humbling and enthralling to know your legacy while you’re alive.”
Creating an imprint and leaving something durable behind is a central part of
each leader’s growth and development. And legacy creation is not an exclusive
claim of CEOs or those at the very top. Focusing on enduring impact advances
a sense of purpose, contribution, and personal worth, making a leader more
effective and influential with others. Businessman and author W. Clement
Stone wrote, “When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will
fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.” Each person
has this latent enthusiasm within. Leadership development should help the
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person discover it, capture it, articulate it, and use it in positive service of self,
team, and strategy.
Strategy Activation is turned on through concentrated and disciplined
development of the people who are responsible to deploy it. When leaders
personally engage with Strategy Activation, they are provided even greater
opportunity to achieve real success and their intrinsic motivation can be
encouraged and heightened. Using the lens of the strategy and culture, they
will also be able to home in on a leadership imprint that will make a profound
difference and leave behind an enduring legacy.
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Building Your Business While
You Build Your Bench
For far too long, we have been thinking about leadership development as an
event or an expense that we look to Human Resources to create and manage.
Through the new lens of Strategy Activation, we reframe the way we think
about leadership development and the way we bring these experiences to
life. Our research and experience shows that there are three key tenets to
be followed when creating these Strategy Activation experiences. The three
tenets are:
• Make it real — context is king.
• Focus on what leaders need to be and do.
• Treat leadership development as a journey.
Make It Real — Context Is King
In a development experience that is part of a Strategy Activation campaign, this
is perhaps the most important of the guiding principles. It suggests that every
aspect of the current and future business context — external and internal —
must be intrinsically woven into the entire leadership development process for
real leadership development to translate to the real business environment.
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Although it is often said that “leadership development must be informed by and
aligned with strategy,” subscribing to the principle “context is king” takes this
premise considerably further. This tenet requires that leadership development
be an integral part of achieving the business strategy. It is not a parallel activity
or something that people “undergo” in addition to doing their jobs. Leadership
development is part of the business and is as crucial to implementing strategy
as any other business activity. In essence, leadership development becomes the
catalytic force that propels strategy out of the boardroom and into the field.
Development is a real business issue. Leaders committed to Strategy Activation
treat their own development and the development of their teams with the
same intensity as they treat finance, sales, and operations. They make it a real
priority. They visibly invest in it — both of their time and their resources. They
create accountability for it. They drive it, measure it, and make it happen.
These leaders see their developmental commitments through to completion
and expect the same from those around them. For them, Strategy Activation is
not a nice-to-have activity delegated down to support staff or bureaucrats. It’s
not a discretionary activity, ripe for elimination during challenging financial
times. It’s not an after-hours activity, bolted on to people’s “day jobs.” It’s not
the last item on the agenda that regularly gets pushed to the next meeting.
And although Human Resources may be the shepherd and designer of the
framework, it certainly does not bear sole responsibility for Strategy Activation.
To act as a force of Strategy Activation, leadership development should be a
central part of the leadership agenda and receive the attention it deserves.
Don’t just talk about the strategy — engage in it. The tenet that “context is
king” means that in defining the leadership development experience, we need
to ensure that we uncover and understand context and then integrate into all
aspects of the program. We incorporate actual customers and the customer
experience by bringing them in for panel discussions or by taking field trips to
their workplaces. We probe the financial model and what is driving company
valuation, analyst opinions, and the key lines on financial statements. We
do this not by working through semirelevant case studies, but by looking at
and dissecting the actual financial statements. We consider the competitive
environment, the global landscape, and how innovation is driving the business.
And we do all of this, of course, in the context of not only industry trends and
dynamics, but most important the specific strategic goals and plans of the
organization.
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“ More and more CEOs and C-suite executives are
viewing leadership development as a business imperative
rather than an HR ‘activity.’ These leaders are actively
involved in the overall design of the initiative and definitely
have a very visible presence in the delivery. One CEO has
personally launched the Strategy Activation journey for
each of eight cohorts that participated over the past
eighteen months. Another global business unit president
takes three days of his time, multiple times per year, to
spend with his up and coming leaders in the organization.
This involvement completely changes the dynamic for the
participants in a very positive way. We’ve also seen
significant business benefits in each of these organizations.”
Kathy Woods
Global Service Offering
Leader for Leadership Development at Korn/Ferry
Traditional strategy rollout involves a process of downward cascade of
communication with an occasional reach-out to involve users of the strategy in
its formulation. This may achieve awareness and sporadic buy-in, but will not
achieve deep change or real learning. Activating the strategy is entirely different
from just understanding the strategy. To activate and accelerate, employees
must be deeply engaged in the strategy. They must have the opportunity to
grapple with the strategy, uncover its complexities, and ultimately develop a
personal point of view on how to catalyze execution.
Even the best top-down communication is a one-way, biased, and passive
activity. Strategy Activation requires dynamic learning that places employees
directly into the heart of the matter.
Using Strategy Activation as a driving force for leadership development, and
leadership development as a driving force for Strategy Activation, means we
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bring the business into the development journey and we develop people in tight
alignment with the organizational shift. For example, if a company is moving
its sales force from a products-focused strategy to a solutions one, then leaders
should be developed directly within this new business model. They should have
the opportunity to transparently compare their own values and capabilities
with this new vision. To illustrate this, consider the following narrative that
elucidates the types of questions that leaders may have.
Selling product requires deep expertise. I’ve always been good at that. Selling
solutions requires a broader, adaptive, and more consultative approach. I’m
not so sure I know how to do that. How do I shift from expert — especially
when that has been the success formula over my entire career — to more of a
generalist? What if I don’t have all the answers? How will I develop a different
kind of relationship with my customers? Will they continue to respect me? Can I
represent products that aren’t in my area of specialization? How am I going to
learn all this new stuff? Isn’t this really just cross-selling we’re talking about? Is
the company going to give me the training I need? Can I be successful in this new
model?
Conversations like this one take place every day as individual leaders wrestle
with the implications of organizational shift. And they are perfect opportunities
for strategy activating development. Just sending out a communication — no
matter how well written — misses the point. Shifting the organization means
shifting the individuals who make up it. To do this, each leader must commit
to overcoming often self-imposed barriers like the ones illuminated in the
narrative above. Even the best communications won’t get you all the way there.
An emotional imperative must be created by letting people own and shape the
change themselves.
Focus on What Leaders Need to BE and DO
Leadership development programs have historically put a very strong focus on
developing the behaviors, competencies, and capabilities that leaders need to
possess in order to be successful. This approach emphasizes what they need
to do. Although this is important, focusing instead on what leaders need to
BE provides more sustainable leadership strength that can endure even as the
market changes and specific competency-based success profiles shift.
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Competencies are valuable tools to define the behavior-sets people need to
develop to accelerate organizational strategy. They are of critical importance to
leadership development as they help target the high-value behaviors that are
foundational to the organization’s purpose, strategy, and mission. However,
competencies do not tell the whole story. There is a layer at the core of the
individual leader that if not developed, will leave competencies stationary and
inactive.
Strategy activating development must place equal, if not greater, emphasis
on what leaders need to BE. These are fundamental mindsets and personal
qualities (virtues) that drive every other leadership behavior and activity.
What Leaders Need to BE
There are four universally important characteristics that leaders need to BE
in order to engage in advanced development and therefore become agents
and promoters of Strategy Activation. These four universally important
characteristics help leaders become enablers of the organization’s progress,
transformation, and growth.
Be Vital. Vitality is defined as the capacity to live and develop. It manifests
itself both covertly and overtly in virtually every aspect of an executive’s daily
leadership routine. It affects drive, persistence, focus, resilience, compassion,
and presence. Vitality is a crucial tool to stave off the powerful effects of
stress, high demand, uncertainty, and tension. It is an essential dimension of
leadership effectiveness and it can be intentionally enhanced.
Vitality can be developed in individuals by focusing on the basic aspects of
life and personal energy management. There are well-documented studies
linking vitality to increased well-being and overall health. In fact, a study by
the University of California San Francisco found an “association of vitality and
other measures of physical and psychological health,” essentially highlighting
that people who focus on their energy typically enjoy the benefits of better
overall health and productivity.10,11
In concentrating on vitality, we also encourage leaders to maintain and practice
a sense of equilibrium. The human’s most comfortable condition is in a state
of balance and stability. However, it is not always an easy state to maintain,
especially under the levels of high demand and pressure that executives
experience today. Leaders who work on personal mastery can achieve higher
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levels of discipline in their life choices and reach greater levels of restraint,
presence, focus, adherence to values, and moral fulfillment. Practicing
balance can help leaders become more inspiring and it can in turn activate
their inherent desire to achieve greater levels of leadership impact. There is a
common saying among executives that “I am one person at work and another
at home.” This is false. We may act differently (sometimes drastically) in each
place, but we are always only one person. Finding comfortable balance and
living the life we desire is a crucial stepping-stone to leadership fulfillment and
should be actively incorporated into leadership development.
Helping leaders make good choices around nutrition, exercise, sleep, recovery,
stress management, and equilibrium can position them to be more inspiring
and proactive. Vital leaders are less likely to react and are generally more
inclined to take the right action and seek out value-creating opportunities.
Be Authentic. A 2012 study by Palanski and Simons supports the proposition
that leadership authenticity and behavioral integrity are related to follower
commitment and performance.12 This makes intuitive sense as authentic
leaders are optimistic, transparent, future-focused, resilient, and ethical.
They reveal more than leaders without this trait. They are comfortable with
themselves and they relate in deeper ways to those around them.
Developing authenticity is not a simple task. In fact, as Kevin Cashman wrote
in his book Leadership from the Inside Out, “of all the principles supporting
sustainable leadership, authenticity may be the most important. It may also
be the most challenging.”13 This is because in order to develop deeper levels
of authenticity, emerging leaders require a set of experiences that challenges
them to go beyond their comfort zone to disclose and reveal their true selves.
Authenticity is central to whole-person development and it should be amplified
before focusing on any specific strategy-related competency.
In developing authenticity, we also maintain that leadership is not a selfish act,
but rather an act of service. Leadership is inherently and fundamentally about
others. The great Yogi and spiritual leader J. Donald Walters may have summed
it up best when he wrote, “Leadership is an opportunity to serve. It is not a
trumpet call to self-importance.” Making service a central part of the leadership
journey helps leaders discover a deeper sense of personal value and contribute
to the betterment of those around them. For this reason, service should be a
foundational dimension of leadership development programs and curricula.
Participants should have the opportunity to serve their teams, organizations,
18
customers, and communities in ways that form new perspectives and deepen
their leadership skills. Most leadership programs focus on the development
of leaders to achieve results. However, providing a developmental platform in
which leaders have the obligation to serve others (not just themselves) instills
deeper inspiration, meaning, and authenticity in the experience.
Be Learning Agile. Learning Agility is defined as the willingness and ability
to learn from experience, and subsequently apply that learning to perform
successfully under new or first-time conditions.14 Simply stated, Learning Agility
is the ability to know what to do when you don’t know what to do. Leaders
higher in Learning Agility are better able to succeed in ambiguous, challenging,
and first-time situations.15 Strategy Activation development is designed to place
leaders in first-time situations in order to stretch them beyond their current
ways of doing things. Without a threshold level of Learning Agility, some
developmental experiences could be met with resistance instead of curiosity
and resourcefulness. Therefore Learning Agility, like authenticity and vitality,
should be a central focus of the leader’s overall developmental program.
Be Self-Aware. Leadership Development, at its core, is a process of change.
Nobody goes through any kind of developmental experience with the goal of
nurturing or preserving the status quo. In order to change, an individual leader
must be willing to look critically at him or herself. Self-Awareness means being
in tune with one’s own strengths and weaknesses, being free of blind spots, and
using this personal insight to perform effectively. It’s also important to note
that self-awareness is one of the five dimensions of Learning Agility, meaning
it has great influence as well on how readily the leader can adapt to new
situations and extract meaning from first-time experiences.
A lack of Self-Awareness, at worst, can manifest as defense mechanisms such as
denial, rationalization, or arguing, presenting a virtually impenetrable barrier
to advanced leader development. At best, the absence of Self-Awareness can
represent a great deal of lost opportunity, when leaders do not fully leverage
their strengths and capabilities in a conscious and purposeful manner.
19
“ I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of working with
cohorts of leaders focusing on authenticity, purpose,
and self-awareness — really pausing to think about
who they want to be as people and as leaders, and
how they can live that every day. It has been personally
rewarding and also quite incredible to see the depth of
emotion this work evokes for people and the really
tangible impact it makes on their lives both personally
and professionally. It really is transformational. In terms
of the professional impact, I worked with one cohort of
ten people. Within six months of the end of the journey,
we saw more than one-third of them get promoted into
new positions, and others shift into very different roles
as they pursued new directions.”
Kathy Woods
Global Service Offering Leader for
Leadership Development at Korn/Ferry
Research on Self-Awareness reveals some alarming facts. In 2012, Korn/Ferry
found that nearly 80 percent of all leaders had at least one blind spot — an
area in which they thought they excelled but others disagreed. The same study
discovered that 40 percent of leaders have a hidden strength that they cannot
fully take advantage of because they are not aware of it.16
Vitality, Authenticity, Learning Agility, and Self-Awareness create the leadership
core that everything else stands on. The good news is that Self-Awareness, like
Learning Agility, Vitality, and Authenticity, is something that can be enhanced.
Strategy Activation development depends entirely on leaders who have
threshold amounts of these universally important characteristics or who are
motivated to intensify them.
20
Typically, leaders find that achieving greater Vitality, Authenticity, Learning
Agility, and Self-Awareness brings many individual benefits. In fact, the
personal rewards of leadership development are not just an ancillary outcome.
We believe that personal impact and personal change are critical to leaders
having an impact on the business.
What Leaders Need to DO
Although we believe that developing the whole person and helping leaders
become Vital, Authentic, Learning Agile, and Self-Aware create the most
sustainable platform for success, we are still asked to help leaders strengthen
more specific competencies to support their growth.
The mission critical competencies required to activate a strategy are going
to be dependent on the specifics of that given strategy. These competencies
are crucially important for leadership success as they provide a formula
for effective behavior in the context of strategic direction. Part of a true
Strategy Activation process is to work with an organization to discover those
competencies that are going to have the most leverage in bringing the strategy
to life. This is generally a very natural and obvious process if the development
journey is truly grounded in the strategy, as the process of bringing context to
the journey inherently allows us to be very clear on the competencies required
to deliver on this context. From that point, it is straightforward to ensure that
we help leaders build these competencies as part of the contextual development
journey.
Although we want to be certain that the competencies we develop connect
directly with the strategy, we have also done extensive research that allows
us to predict with some accuracy a group of competencies that will likely
be important for leaders’ performance in any situation. These are the
competencies that we call “The Big 8.” Based on our research, they are defined
as those competencies that correlate with top performance and potential for
both managers and executives and that are also in the shortest supply in the
global talent marketplace. Hence, we can be relatively confident that in the
process of discovering the competencies that are important for activating
an organization’s strategy, some or all of the following will be at the top of
the list.17
1. Creativity
2. Strategic Agility
3. Motivating Others
4. Dealing with Ambiguity
5. Innovation Management
6. Building Effective Teams
7. Managing Vision and Purpose
8. Planning
21
Korn/Ferry research shows that these eight competencies are universally
important, in low supply, and tougher to cultivate. Therefore, leadership
development programs that include these competencies as part of their skill
building elements will see greater returns on their efforts.
Treat Leadership Development as a Journey
All too often we are asked to “host the two-day leadership off-site to align people
to our strategy” or “pull a workshop off the shelf that will help our leaders be
better prepared for the future.” Leadership development truly becomes Strategy
Activation when it is positioned and designed as a journey, not an event. It is an
investment in the business that parallels the intensity, focus, and time allocated
to all other aspects of strategy development and implementation. Deep
development cannot be achieved in a single shot. It must be worked on over a
continuum of time with multiple touch points, reinforcements, applications,
and reflections.
Every leader has gotten to where he or she is today by traveling on a personal
journey. This individual voyage is full of highs and lows, successes and
failures, wins and losses. Each person’s journey is unique and, when properly
captured and articulated, tells a story of who we are as people and therefore
as leaders. American management consultant Noel Tichy said, “Leadership
is autobiographical: if I don’t know you as a person, how do I know you as a
leader?” Harvard Professor Howard Gardner took it even further when he wrote
that “leaders lead in two principled ways, through the stories they tell and the
22
kinds of lives they lead.” The creation and public articulation of a leadership
narrative is an essential dimension to developing the core of each person’s
leadership potential and capability.
Our experience is that true Strategy Activation involves a leadership
development journey, typically consisting of a yearlong experience in which
participants engage in a variety of high-impact learning activities grounded
in the context of their business and organizational culture. Similarly, within
this process, leaders create their own unique voyage. This is personalized based
on their own leadership narrative, understanding of self, and vision for the
future. This multilayered journey keeps the participants on their feet, highly
engaged, and continuously reflecting on who they are and who they want to be
as leaders. This process of growth, sparked by personal reflection, becomes one
of the most rewarding aspects of the creation and delivery of these programs.
23
Using the Strategy
Activation Formula
We have captured the essence of the leadership development journey using
our Strategy Activation Formula, which serves as the governing framework for
building a program that activates the strategic shift by engaging your people.
Context
We’ve focused heavily throughout this paper on the need to use context as the
platform for leader development. What do we mean exactly when we refer to
context? Context is the use of real business problems, issues, and policies as
the cornerstone for leader development. These real-life scenarios capture the
pressing issues of today and the future and use them as challenges for leaders
to work through. Context also embeds your culture, reality, markets, customers,
and industry perspective into the learning. Essentially, through greater levels of
context, we increase relevance, opportunity for impact, and access to real value
creation.
To put a finer point on this, traditional strategy rollout involves a process of
downward cascade of communication with an occasional reach-out to involve
users of the strategy in its formulation. This may achieve awareness and
sporadic buy-in, but will not engender deep change or real learning. Activating
the strategy is entirely different from just understanding it. To activate and
accelerate, employees must be deeply engaged in the strategy. They must have
the opportunity to grapple with the strategy, uncover its complexities, and
ultimately develop a personal point of view on how to catalyze its execution.
24
Even the best top-down communication is a one-way, biased, and passive
activity. Strategy Activation requires dynamic learning that places employees
directly in the heart of the matter.
Additionally, in this formula, context is squared because of its exponential
impact on overall Strategy Activation. Without high degrees of context, it is
essentially impossible to build a strategy activating leadership development
program.
One of the most important things to think about when we consider context is
how we are going to capture and integrate it into the learning journey in a way
that tells a story and is meaningful and real to the leaders involved. The trouble
with many leadership programs is that they present a series of disjointed topics
that the learner is then forced to integrate. A better approach is to build in the
integration so the learner can focus on application and relevance rather than
connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated learning objects.
Integration can be achieved by using red threads or core connectors that string
through the life of the entire development journey and ground it in its purpose
and intended outcomes. Red threads can be defined by looking at the major
strategic shift of the company and identifying the most crucial changes that
will support it. For example, for a company looking to significantly expand
its presence in Asia, the red thread could be “The West to East” shift. For an
organization moving from a products focus to a services one, the red thread
could be “Services that Deliver.” For a media company seeking to shift its
presence from paper to online, the red thread could be “Our Digital Future.”
For an organization in the process of absorbing several new acquisitions, the
red thread could be “Communication and Trust.”
In reality, these red threads are integral to the challenge the business faces
and are inseparable from its ultimate resolution. As the leaders travel through
the program, all activities, experiences, and content must be directly linked
back to the select few threads that provide the continuity and stability for
the overall program.
25
Learning
This factor includes the quality and relevance of the curriculum or program
content. It revolves around what participants are learning, the acquisition of
new behaviors, skills, and mindsets and the use of engaging learning modalities
that are appropriate for the audience. Some of the key things to consider to
ensure that the learning appropriately addresses all these factors are described
below.
Engaging and energizing. Adults need to own their own learning. They
will tolerate certain amounts of lecture or presentation, but eventually they
will want to take control and drive it themselves. Strategy Activation design
pushes a lot of the control to the learners. They are presented with problems
to solve, given very few answers and just the necessary amount of instruction.
Participants make presentations, teach one another, interact with leaders, and
in many ways create their own curriculum and learning experience. This pulls
them into the process rather than treating them as passive learners who simply
need to absorb a predefined curriculum that has been designed on their behalf.
Programs high on the learning factor engage participants with appropriate and
varied learning strategies, introduce highly relevant and substantive content,
and push participants into new modes of thinking, being, and acting. One of
the key aspects of the learning factor is that multiple modes of learning are
used so that different learning styles are catered to and so that participants
learn without necessarily realizing it is happening. In essence, they learn by
doing, which we know is the most effective and sustainable adult-learning
strategy.
Multimodal. Adult learners do best when they are engaged and given
opportunities to experiment. A multimodal approach draws in the learner
through a wide variety of learning strategies. The exact blend of pedagogies
we apply depends of course on the design, but can include workshop, virtual
classroom, group coaching, individual coaching, simulation, structured
dialogue, technology-enabled learning, self-paced learning, and e-learning. The
most important success factors are that these learning strategies are selected
carefully, integrated methodically, and that they create a seamless and engaging
experience for the participants.
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Purposefully ambiguous. Allowing leaders to grapple with complexity is one
of the most effective adult-learning strategies. Strategy Activation, by default,
provides ample amounts of ambiguity as leaders wrestle with real-life problems
that don’t have simple answers and contain ample implications. Although many
learners will ask for absolute clarity and may even push back if their task is not
entirely spelled out, engineered ambiguity encourages leaders to stretch their
capabilities and more accurately resembles conditions of real life. Korn/Ferry
research reveals that Dealing with Ambiguity is one of the rarest competencies
found in the talent marketplace. And in today’s chaotic business environment,
it is also one of the most coveted.
“ The ladder of success
is best climbed by
stepping on the rungs
of opportunity.”
Purposefully pushing leaders to test
their abilities of managing ambiguity
sets the program up for higher
order outcomes and deeper levels
of learning. In his latest book Need,
Speed, and Greed, veteran Economist
correspondent Vijay Vaitheeswaran
Ayn Rand
wrote that “the current education
system that our and other countries
developed was suited to the industrial revolution, a one-size-fits-all model
for education that treats people as commodities. But we’re in an innovation
age where creativity, individual initiative, willingness to think out of the
box and disrupt established business or even lifestyle patterns is much more
important.”18 Vaitheeswaran declares there, in not so subtle terms, that the
traditional top-down and absolutes-based approach to education fails to
take into account the complexities of today’s world and marketplace. If, as
Vaitheeswaran suggests, easy or singular answers no longer exist, why should
our approach to education be satisfied with the ultimate identification of a
“right answer”? The goal here is not to absorb knowledge, but rather to wade
around in the pool of ambiguity, producing thinking skills that will act in
service of strategy, self, and others.
Opens the door of opportunity. An invitation to participate in a leadership
development experience can be a tremendous opportunity, filled with
possibilities. It opens doors and creates a platform for people to learn, succeed,
and grow. However, different people approach this opportunity in different
ways. Nomination into a leadership development program should not create
an elite class nor should it produce entitlements or unrealistic expectations.
27
It should give people who have already demonstrated strong performance and
potential the opportunity to accelerate their development. How they approach
this opportunity is a personal choice and, in itself, a part of the program. Will
they embrace the opportunity, give of themselves, engage with the learning,
and ultimately take action in service of self, team, and strategy? Or will they put
up defense mechanisms, punch holes in key ideas, grandstand for attention,
disengage, take mental field trips, or worst of all, diminish the opportunity for
others to learn and grow? The leadership program should create opportunities
for participants to choose how they want to show up. And evaluation and
observation mechanisms should be built in as well. The program should not
be conducted in a vacuum, nor should it be free of consequences. Participants
should be given every opportunity to succeed, collaborate, and win. Then they
should be assessed on how they perform in the program experience.
Led by leaders. No external partner knows your business as well as your own
executives. Internal leaders should be central participants in the shaping
and delivery of content, adding their expertise and creating the relevant
connections to action opportunities. Internal leaders should act as facilitators,
storytellers, context-creators, subject matter experts, mentors, sponsors, and
coaches. The leader-led model embeds context into all learning and also places
senior leaders in a position where they can model the changes they are seeking.
They can be coaches in applied learning challenges, not only suppliers or
messengers of readily available information. This, in turn, takes their leadership
to another level and positions them as true
people developers and capability builders.
An important component of making this
successful, though, is to ensure that the
executives are supported in their preparation
for and participation in the development
journey. Being a successful executive and
Mother Teresa
business leader does not necessarily translate
directly to being an effective learning leader.
Hence it is incumbent on us to help executives tailor their messages and
approaches to engaging with their people in the learning journey.
“Life is an
opportunity;
benefit from it. …”
Integrated into cultural context. Leadership development can be a powerful
tool to drive culture change and advancement. To do this, program participants
should be exposed to the history and legacy of the organization in order to
understand how the culture got to its current state and how the culture may
28
need to shift in the future. They should then be engaged in a discussion on
culture creation — having multiple opportunities to promote the desired
culture through the daily activities of their leadership.
Application
According to TrainingIndustry.com, businesses globally spent $287 billion on
employee learning and development in 2011, yet according to International
Data Corporation (IDC), half of every dollar invested in training is wasted.19
One of the root causes of this waste is the evaporation of learning before it is
embedded into neural hard drives and therefore into actual behavior. In other
words, without immediate application, learning will disintegrate and erode
over a relatively short period of time.
Application is the key to overcoming this tendency and converting learning
into action and action into outcomes. There are numerous ways to ensure that
meaningful application of learning takes place. Three that we believe are most
relevant are described below.
Living case studies. As we have mentioned, real-time problem solving creates
a powerful platform for leadership development. Generic or standard case
studies can often help individual leaders develop their strategic thinking and
decision-making skills, but the connections to your business can often be
tenuous or unconvincing. Using real and relevant case studies allow leaders to
hone all the desired behaviors and skills, and they learn to do so in the context
of your business, industry, and culture. Living case studies can be created
to illustrate and practice skills around strategy, innovation, customer focus,
team leadership, and other important leadership responsibilities. Living case
studies can be surfaced and designed by talking to on-the-ground resources
who struggle with the translation of strategy into daily action. They can also
be selected by using a top-down approach that relies on critical initiatives and
their spin-off problem sets as the real-time content for case studies.
Action learning. Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle bluntly wrote that
“talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.”
Creating opportunities for leaders to apply their learning — to take action — is
essential to the implementation of strategy activating development. Action
learning (also known as applied learning or workplace challenge) uses actual
organizational problems as opportunities for leaders to exercise and apply new
leadership behaviors and routines. The projects can be chosen using multiple
29
approaches, but regardless of how they are selected, they should be of strategic
significance to the organization. The organization should also be prepared and
committed to accepting the recommendations that are produced as outputs.
These projects are not hypotheticals. They are real initiatives and should receive
real support and organizational commitment.
Constant connections. Again, leadership development done in a vacuum may
produce certain value for the individual, but doesn’t necessarily yield large
rewards for the organization. To create organizational relevance, participants
need to be constantly challenged to make connections from their learning
to real-life opportunities. This means that debriefs, activities, exercises, and
discussions need to link back to organizational challenges and context.
Additionally, participants in leadership programs should be tasked with on-thejob reflection and engaged in developmental “micro-moments” in which they
think about the application of new behaviors and translation of concepts into
action. This is real-time development on an organizational scale.
Intensity
When a global quick-service food chain decided to dramatically alter the
course of its terrible food-handling and sanitation record, it would have been
unrealistic to think this problem could be solved through skills-based training
alone. A complete Strategy Activation program, with learning at the core,
was necessary. It required multiple touch points with all involved to discuss
values, leadership, communication, change, measurement, outcomes, process,
and problem solving. Employees even needed to overcome fear of retaliation
to feel comfortable reporting violations. Bottom line, the intensity and scope
of the development had to match the ambition of the strategic shift. This was
not a training problem; it was a culture problem. And it required an intensive
leadership development journey to change the course of the organization.
Developmental intensity is the importance given to strategic leadership
development as reflected through accountability, sustainability, sponsorship,
commitment, and follow-through. As an example, when a professional services
company decided to diversify its suite of offerings and expand its reach with
clients, it would have been unrealistic to think any single training session could
magically get consultants to make this shift. An entire activation program
was needed during which leaders contended with the implications of this
change, became comfortable with their transforming roles, worked through
new processes and relationships, and practiced a new model of interaction
30
with their clients. This shift required strategic development, whole-person
development, aligned communications, and sustained focus and intensity.
Intensity shows up in several ways, including manager involvement, senior
leader sponsorship, aligned communications, investment of time and resources,
reinforcements, consequences, and cultural alignment. The biggest drag on
developmental intensity comes when organizations are unwilling to invest
the necessary time and resources to catalyze their strategic shift. It’s akin to
buying an expensive piece of hardware to drive business growth and then never
installing it properly. You may get some use out of it, but it will never fulfill its
promise for the organization.
One of the key ways to ensure we achieve the intensity we need in a leadership
development journey is to incorporate relevant measurement. It is crucial to
gauge the program based on metrics that matter to the business. For too long,
we’ve been judging our leadership development efforts on the satisfaction of
the learners. If they declare it to have been a worthwhile experience, then we
must be doing something right. This is insufficient and essentially what we
fondly call “milk and cookies” measurement — feel-good responses that tell us
how the learners perceive the development experience.
Although we can’t discredit the learner experience as a vital success factor,
it doesn’t give us what we really need — value driven metrics. These can be
produced only through contextual development that is grounded in solving
real business problems. It’s a simple formula. We must track the learning and
application of new leadership behaviors and routines and then key in on the
changes that are produced as a result. There is an entire science behind the
measurement of leadership development activity that goes beyond the scope
of this paper. However, the paramount message is that a robust measurement
strategy that evaluates activity and outcomes is essential to the build-out of a
leadership program that truly activates strategy.
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Designing a Strategy
Activation Program
Building a leadership development journey that activates organizational
strategy and the individual’s emerging leadership capability should follow a
disciplined design process. The graphic below illustrates the eight-step sequence
to move from concept to program design:
Step 1: Define the Shift: As we have repeatedly mentioned, the essential first
step in the design process is to clearly articulate the organizational shift. This
should be expressed in the form of a problem statement such as “how do we
accelerate the pace of innovation and bring new products to the market in
order to stay ahead of the competition?” Or “how do we create a differentiated
customer experience that captures share in a crowded marketplace?” The shift
then becomes a red thread or backdrop for the entire design of the program
and all learning objectives anchor back to it.
Step 2: Define the Demand: Once the shift is well defined, we can establish the
things people will need to do in order to activate and accelerate the change.
This involves a profiling exercise in which we detail the critical behaviors
and capabilities needed by leadership to bring the change to life. The most
32
commonly occurring capabilities revolve around cross-functional collaboration,
strategic thinking, risk-taking, systems thinking, developing people, and taking
action despite ambiguity.
Step 3: Establish the Core: We’ve discussed how the four universally important
characteristics of Vitality, Authenticity, Learning Agility, and Self-Awareness lay
the foundation for all subsequent behavior change and leadership growth. Any
leadership program must deeply address these four dimensions if any further
change is to be expected.
In the design process, the question is not whether we should address these
four aspects of leadership, but rather what is the most appropriate way to do so
in the context of the organization’s culture and current way of doing things.
Although these are the individual’s responsibilities, the context and program
need to shine a light on them and bring them forward as a central part of the
design. This will contribute to the “demystification” of historically sensitive
topics that have been acknowledged as central to success in our complex and
uncertain world.
Step 4: Understand Current State: Now that we have defined the shift and the
demand as well as established the core, we can ask, “how far away from this
vision are we?” This gap analysis will inform all subsequent design activity as it
will dictate the pace, intensity, style, and approach to Strategy Activation that
must be embraced in order to close the gap. Current state can be defined by
using a structured approach that includes diagnostics, assessment processes,
interviews, data analysis, and observations.
Step 5: Design Architecture: With the gap well defined, we can now lay out the
blueprint or road map for our leadership program. Based on size and scale of
the shift and subsequent gap, we determine pacing, sequencing, and duration
of the major programmatic touch points. The output of this step is a blueprint
for the program that details all participant activities, touch points, and the
pedagogical strategies that will be deployed. To the right is an illustrative
program road map that outlines a typical design and program flow.
Step 6: Build Program: With the road map established, we can now proceed
to the detailed design of the actual program. This entails the creation of all
participant materials, the build-out of agendas, electronic media, activities,
workbooks, job aids, and resource materials. Because the exercises are so
contextualized, this requires input and collaboration from both the client
organization and the instructional design team. It is also an iterative process
of co-creation, not merely an assembly of prefabricated content or existing
material.
Step 7: Implement Development: Finally, the program can be deployed.
Faculty members work with internal leaders-as-teachers to facilitate, engage,
and conduct the program while transforming the business. Participants
travel through the leadership journey, working, reflecting, collaborating,
and changing. Their experience should be intense, difficult, powerful, and
rewarding. It should inspire and motivate them to activate organizational
strategy and engage in individual growth.
Step 8: Feedback Loop: A good Strategy Activation program is always a work
in progress. Context is constantly changing so the program must keep up.
Feedback should be continuously collected from program sponsors and
participants, and adjustments should be made to consistently strive for
increased levels of impact. Additionally, as measurement is so crucial and
data begins to flow in, designers can take action based on qualitative and
quantitative feedback to seize opportunities to increase impact.
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34
Conclusion
Today’s leaders, and the leaders of the future, face a set of unprecedented
challenges. Globalization, pressures of competition, and the drive to grow
market share are as fierce as they have ever been. We believe that closing the
strategy execution gap becomes paramount for organizations to both thrive
and survive. Companies that are able to narrow the strategy execution gap will
outpace their competitors and experience greater mission and financial success.
They will also likely be seen as category leaders and be able to attract and retain
the best talent worldwide.
Updating your approach to leadership development and linking it more closely
to the actual activation of the strategy will result in leaders who are able to
shift and flex with your organization as it navigates an ever changing landscape
and strives to differentiate itself from its competition — often with lean or
limited resources. This occurs because they will fully understand what needs
to happen to be successful and the hard work that is necessary to keep an edge
over others. They will be able to execute in a fast paced, uncertain world and
to anticipate future challenges while engaging others in getting the day to day
work done efficiently. They will have had practice grappling with real issues
the organization is facing. They will be able to make a positive contribution
to your organizational culture and collaborate with an increasingly diverse
workforce because they will have been given the opportunity to do so through
the learning process. They will have advanced as individuals and human beings,
discovering greater levels of purpose, meaning, and contribution.
Learning how to lead in the context of your business will bring about a
quantifiable ROI when we measure what matters to your organization, get
people actively engaged in the strategy, and treat leadership development the
way winning businesses do — as a business imperative.
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Appendix A: Strategy Activation
Checklist
Does Your Leadership Program Align with
the Strategy Activation Approach?
Using the checklists that follow, you can evaluate a current or planned
leadership development program on the four dimensions of the Strategy
Activation formula: context, learning, application, and intensity.
The checklist below provides a simple tool to assess an existing or work-inprogress leadership development program on the context dimension.
Context Checklist (Scoring Sheet)
Program uses real strategic problems as living case
studies (3 points)
Participants learn about the organization’s strategic vision
and how they fit in (2 points)
Participants interact with real customers (1 point)
Participants explore the financial workings of the organization
and how they create value within that model (1 point)
Participants interact with organizational leaders and
create meaningful dialogue on relevant topics (1 point)
Program promotes the cultural vision of the firm (1 point)
Participants get a perspective on their industry, markets,
and regions (1 point)
Total Points (out of 10)
36
Learning Checklist (Scoring Sheet)
Program engages participants with varied and engaging
learning strategies (2 points)
Content is relevant and at appropriate level of complexity/
difficulty for participants (2 points)
Content is substantive and research-based (1 point)
Participants’ experiences are honored and valued, and they
have ample opportunities to learn from one another (3 points)
There is an appropriate blend of business topics with whole-person
development subjects (2 points)
Application Checklist (Scoring Sheet):
Program provides opportunities to apply learning on
the job (3 points)
Program provides opportunities to reflect on on-the-job
application (3 points)
Participants have the opportunity to present their results and learnings
in front of senior leaders (1 point)
The organization will consider implementation of ideas
generated as a result of the program (2 points)
Participants create business value as they learn (1 point)
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Intensity Checklist (Scoring Sheet):
The managers of the program are involved and contribute
to the leadership development experience (2 points)
Senior leaders actively sponsor and participate in the
program (2 points)
The amount of developmental time matches the scale
of the strategic shift (3 points)
A strong measurement strategy is in place to monitor
execution and results (1 point)
The program is seen as central to execution of strategic
direction (1 point)
Reinforcement strategies are in place to drive learning
transfer and avoid “learning evaporation” (1 point)
Interpreting the Scores
Plug your scores on each of the four dimensions into the formula and calculate
your overall score.
{Context² + Learning + Application} x Intensity = Strategy Activation
The maximum possible score is 1,200 and the minimum score is 0.
0-200: Minimal Strategy Activating Value. May be at risk of negative ROI.
Could be perceived as generic, irrelevant, or immaterial. Likely not engaging
for participants. Likely difficult for participants to connect outcomes to real
workplace problems or needs. Overall developmental experience is seen as
disconnected from business strategy.
201-500: Moderate Strategy Activating Value. Potentially produces valuable
outcomes. Participants make connections, but they may be tenuous and
unconvincing. Participants experience some personal transformation, but
it may not be enduring or sustainable. Value may be created, but it may be
difficult to measure or appraise.
38
501-800: Strong Strategy Activating Value. Participants learn and engage
in a way that creates value as they develop their leadership skills. Strong
connections are made to important business issues and relevant problems.
Participants go through significant personal transformation and identify
opportunities to deploy new behaviors in service of themselves, their teams,
their customers, and the organization. Measurable outcomes can be captured
and analyzed.
801-1,200: Maximum Strategy Activating Value. Participants are empowered
through the program to dramatically alter the course of the business.
Participants grapple with the most pressing issues of today and the future.
Measurable value is created as an outcome of the program. Participants
experience deep personal transformation that they apply in service of
accelerated strategy execution and themselves, their teams, their customers,
and the organization.
39
Appendix B: Case Studies
Case Study #1: The Power of Contextual Development
A financial services organization struggled with a problem in two of its
operating divisions – retirement solutions and personal investing. These units
were managing the same clients and competing in many cases for the same
dollars. Moreover, their clients were receiving different statements from the
same financial organization and even worse, differing points of view on the
same investment opportunities. The situation was leading to client confusion,
frustration, and attrition. This was a real business problem to say the least,
especially for an organization placing heavy strategic emphasis on the creation
of a differentiated and winning client experience.
What was behind this? Because the two units were competing for the same
customer wallet-share, they were acting in silos to protect and preserve their
own personal outcomes, but ostensibly to the detriment of the customer
and the larger organization. More money to retirement means less money
to personal investing. Territorial behavior had led to deeply rooted personal
mistrust and conflict. These two operating divisions were unwilling or unable
to have the difficult conversation around how to fix this entrenched rivalry.
This led to unproductive behaviors such as information hoarding, lack of
collaboration, and misaligned client communications.
We used this exact situation as the case study for learning how to address and
manage conflict. We used much of the same content, theories, frameworks,
and ideas found in a traditional course on the topic of conflict management,
but embedded inside the context of this relevant and complex business
problem. The leaders in the program dialogued about the real conflict as the
way to practice new leadership behaviors. Then they looked for other real-life
opportunities to use those same behaviors. They solved the problem as they
learned.
As a result of this approach, the leaders in the financial services organization
were able to achieve a productive breakthrough in the conflict that led to
new levels of collaboration and real business outcomes such as higher client
retention and satisfaction. This created value for the leaders, their clients, and
the business, which constituted a powerful learning opportunity and made
good business and financial sense. In solving this problem, there was no single
40
right answer. Success did not come in the form of demonstration of a skill or
playback of rote knowledge. Rather, success was defined as an outcome that got
past the conflict and produced a viable solution — any solution — that served
the strategy, the customer, the organization, and the individuals. Positive
change and movement were the goals.
Case Study #2: Estée Lauder Companies
The Context: Asia 2.0
As the world came out of the financial crisis, a group of consultants in Korn/
Ferry’s Asia practice noticed an emerging trend in the region’s talent markets.
Organizations wanting to capitalize on the opportunities in Asia were
constantly being challenged by three shifts: the Innovation shift, the Consumer
shift, and the Talent shift. The Consumer shift, one of the most significant
in Asia, was driven by the increased growth of the Asian middle class and
the heightened spending power of this group of consumers. More and more,
organizations had to innovate in Asia to ensure the unique needs of these
consumers were being met. These two shifts were dictating a very different
workforce requirement, and the war for talent in Asia seemed to have taken
on a new level of intensity as the region was increasingly being viewed by
companies as the center of gravity for global growth, while the qualified people
available to lead that growth were in short supply.
The Challenge for Estée Lauder Companies
Like many other firms, Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) has been undergoing a
major transformation in this region. As dynamic Asian markets began to take
the lead in determining the health of international economies, ELC needed to
step up from being simply a “multinational company” to becoming one of the
world’s first truly global enterprises.
Estée Lauder Companies outlined a new strategy of transformation that meant
that leaders had to learn how to operate in novel ways with one another, focus
on the new emerging consumer, and understand nontraditional channels to
market and grow at a rapid rate through innovation.
This fresh approach created new challenges for the business in Asia; one was
to implement the transformation strategy over the next four years and another
was to ensure that the top two hundred leaders in the region were able to
41
develop at a speed that kept pace with the business transformation.
Fast growth on both an organizational and individual level is not an easy
mandate. Talent in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is scarce and demand for it
is high given that opportunities tend to expand exponentially in today’s Asian
markets. The need for growth is fast surging ahead of the availability and
capability of the talent pool. Coupled with the requirement that leaders be able
to handle the unique cultural diversity of the region, the war for talent becomes
even more intense.
It was within this context that ELC developed a new approach to managing
talent. The “Home for Talent” vision guided the firm to create a strategy to
effectively “Buy, Borrow, Build, Bind, and Boost” talent for the organization.
As part of that blueprint, the Asia Pacific Leadership Institute (APLI) was
established.
The APLI’s “Build” approach is anchored on four pillars: Talent Management,
Leadership Development, Learning and Development, and Employee
Engagement. These precepts are seen as discrete yet linked to work toward
a common goal. Essentially, the institute’s entire system endorses a holistic
attitude that views every individual’s development as a unique journey of
continuous molding and self-discovery that requires focused attention.
A crucial component of this journey is the identification of what leaders need
to be and do at ELC to be successful. ELC Global developed a clearly articulated
view of future leadership success that included the ELC High-Touch Leadership
Competencies Model. These steps provided a common leadership language and
expectations, and presented guidance on how the organization’s leaders could
achieve outcomes in line with the business transformation strategy.
The Transformative Leadership Program
The APLI’s “Build” strategy was a long-term investment of time and resources to
prepare ELC’s regional managers to become the leaders of tomorrow. And with
the fast pace of Asia’s growth, the bridging of skill gaps in leaders at ELC APAC
had to be accelerated.
The comprehensive nine-month integrated Transformative Leadership Program
(TLP) is geared toward building total leadership capability. It goes beyond
traditional leadership programs that focus only on classroom learning. Instead,
this extensive curriculum has been custom designed based on ELC’s business
42
strategies and leadership requirements. It drives capability improvement in
select leadership competencies through a number of carefully chosen learning
components, including:
• Nine days of cohort learning sessions
• Action learning projects
• Team coaching
• Comprehensive multisource- and self-assessments
• E-Learning
•B
usiness simulations
Throughout the nine months, participants journey together as an intact cohort.
ELC APAC leaders engage in a sustained and enduring learning immersion
process that challenges them to do more than merely acquire additional
knowledge. They work on projects and build close bonds and support networks
across the entire ELC APAC. The application and testing of learning transfer
are grounded in how both individuals and their cohorts apply and act on the
program’s content on the job.
One thing is made clear to participants from the beginning of the program:
they are accountable for their own transformation. “Nine months is just to help
them learn, relearn, and even unlearn things; the journey doesn’t end there,”
said Figin Seng, Regional Director, Learning and Development, APAC, and Dean,
Asia Pacific Leadership Institute. “Leaders need to desire to create their own
leadership brand. They need to desire to gain support from line managers and
those around them.”
For this reason, participants find themselves doing much more than attending
a workshop or program. All ELC APAC leaders are tasked with internalizing
and taking responsible at-work actions to enhance their own leadership
performance through integrated coaching and cohort/peer feedback. At the end
of the nine months, the leaders do an individual presentation of their Action
Learning Projects before a panel of judges.
43
The panel usually comprises senior leaders who take time out of their busy
schedules to judge. The amount of time both the participants and senior
leaders commit to the program stands as a tangible testament to the level of
expectations that ELC APAC has set for the future of leadership within the
region.
“Commitment from senior management has never waned even though we’re
in our tenth cohort,” Seng explained. “Each cohort has a lot of senior leaders
supporting it in many different ways. It includes our regional president and
senior vice presidents, vice presidents and managing directors … even those
flying from global headquarters in New York!”
In the last twenty-four months, ten cohorts (more than two hundred people)
have been put through the program; there have been 160 graduates thus far
and the program has had a positive impact on the way leaders head their teams.
Fifteen percent of the people who have participated in the program now have
greater roles in the company.
In addition, ELC APAC has gained deep insight into how the talent pool achieves
readiness for the transformation of the business, including that:
• The firm is in a stronger position to establish its leadership bench —
allowing for investment and development of key people to take on
future leadership roles.
• The strategy to build from within has been realized and gained
credibility for the organization.
• The TLP continues to raise the bar on many aspects of leadership in
ways that empower future key ELC leaders to be ready to excel in their
roles.
• Leadership development has played a significant role in improving
employee engagement across the company.
• The TLP has become a strong brand within the organization and is
connected through emotional engagement across the APAC region.
44
Notes
1. Zook, Z. and Ledingham, D., “Winners Narrow Their Sights to Expand” (white paper, 2008),
retrieved from http://www.bain.com/bainweb/PDFs/cms/Public/BB_Software_growth.pdf.
2. Mankins, M.C. and Steele, R., “Turning Great Strategy Into Great Performance,” Harvard
Business Review 83, no. 7/8 (July-August 2005): 64-71.
3. The Economist, “Strategy Execution: Achieving Operational Excellence — the Benefits of
Management Transparency” (white paper, 2004), retrieved from http://graphics.eiu.com/files/
ad_pdfs/Celeran_EIU_WP.pdf.
4. Charan, R. and Colvin, G., “Why CEOs Fail. It’s Rarely for Lack of Smarts or Vision. Most
Unsuccessful CEOs Stumble Because of One Simple, Fatal Shortcoming,” Fortune (June 1999),
retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/06/21/261696/
index.htm.
5. McCall, M.W., Lombardo, M.M., and Morrison, A.M., The Lessons of Experience (Lexington, MA:
Lexington Books, 1988).
6. Ulrich, D. and Ulrich, W., The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That
Win (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010).
7. Bersin & Associates, “Action Learning Facilitates Business Growth: A Look Inside Cisco’s
Progressive Executive Development Approach” (white paper, October 2009), retrieved from
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac49/ac55/Bersin_C3_Case.pdf.
8. Eichinger, R.W., Lombardo, M.M., Stiber, A.J., and Orr, J.E., Paths to Improvement: Navigating
Your Way to Success (Minneapolis: Lominger, a KF company, 2011).
9. Eichinger, R.W., Dai, G., and Tang, K.Y., “It Depends Upon What You Mean by a Strength,” in
The Perils of Accentuating the Positive, ed. Kaiser, R.B. (Tulsa, OK: Hogan Press, 2009).
10. Gump, B., “Vitality and Vigor,” MacArthur Foundation (November 1997), retrieved from
http://www.macses.ucsf.edu/research/psychosocial/vitality.php#relationses.
11. Schwartz, T., Gomes, J., and McCarthy, C., Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming
the Way We Work and Live (New York: Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, 2010).
12. Leroy, H., Palanski, M., and Simons, T., “Authentic Leadership and Behavioral Integrity as
Drivers of Follower Commitment and Performance,” Journal of Business Ethics 107, no. 3 (2012):
255-64.
13. Cashman, K., Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life (San Francisco: BerrettKoehler Publishers, 2008).
14. Swisher, V. V., Becoming an Agile Leader: Know What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do
(Minneapolis: Lominger, a KF company, 2012).
15. Lombardo, M. M. and Eichinger, R. W., The Leadership Machine: Architecture to Develop Leaders for
Any Future, 10th anniversary ed. (Minneapolis: Lominger International, a Korn/Ferry company,
2011).
16. Orr, J.E., “Survival of the Most Self-Aware: Nearly 80 Percent of Leaders Have Blind Spots
About Their Skills” (white paper, Minneapolis: Korn/Ferry International, Korn/Ferry Institute,
2012).
17. Hallenbeck, G.H., “ ‘The Big 8’ Skills Give Lift to Rare-Air Executives” (white paper,
Minneapolis: Korn/Ferry International, Korn/Ferry Institute, 2012).
18. Vaitheeswaran, V.V., Need, Speed, and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform
Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2012).
19. Harward, D., “How Big Is the Training Market?” TrainingIndustry.com (January 10, 2012),
retrieved from http://www.trainingindustry.com/blog/blog-entries/how-big-is-the-trainingmarket.aspx.
45
About the Korn/Ferry Institute
The Korn/Ferry Institute generates forwardthinking research and viewpoints that illuminate
how talent advances business strategy. Since
its founding in 2008, the institute has published
scores of articles, studies, and books that explore
global best practices in organizational leadership
and human capital development.
About Korn/Ferry International
Korn/Ferry International is a premier global
provider of talent management solutions, with a
presence throughout the Americas, Asia Pacific,
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The firm
delivers services and solutions that help clients
cultivate greatness through the attraction,
engagement, development, and retention of
their talent.
Visit www.kornferry.com for more information
on Korn/Ferry International, and
www.kornferryinstitute.com for thought
leadership, intellectual property, and research.

Talent management best practice series

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