Leadership Development

360 feedback is a great way for leaders to get a different perspective on how they are performing, as well as their strengths and development areas.

360 feedback typically involves asking several people who know you well (through direct reports, peers, line manager and other senior stakeholders), to give feedback on your strengths and development areas. It can be captured using various online tools or through some short calls between the stakeholders and the coach.

The coach then identifies themes (often split under strengths and development areas) from the feedback and can put unattributable quotes under the theme headings, so anonymising the feedback.

From this point, the feedback can be shared with the client, which is best done in a 360 feedback session. This allows the coach to prepare the client to receive the feedback with a positive mindset and allows the client to share their reflections on the feedback with the coach, who can then help the client decide what they may take from the feedback to shape their coaching goals or other development plans.
 

This process is all part of developing the client’s self-awareness, particularly their awareness of how others see them, which then shapes how they see themselves.

Throughout my career, I have designed and delivered many leadership offsites or awaydays (call them what you will).

Setting up an offsite for success depends on understanding where the team are, what challenges that team is facing, how team members interact with each other and what they think is important for them to focus on at their offsite.

This understanding is gathered from discussions with the offsite sponsor, who is often the leadership team leader. Capturing the themes that the leader sees as key, then sharing these with the offsite attendees in 1-2-1 calls and asking them what else is important to consider is a great way to co-design the offsite.

This is also helpful for all the attendees, as it encourages them to feel they have inputted into the offsite design, helping foster engagement for the offsite.

One of the reasons coaches can make great offsite facilitators is that they know that when people explore a topic, develop their self-awareness around it and come up with their ideas as to how to move forward, they develop greater feelings of responsibility to see things through than if they are simply told to do something.

You want people leaving the offsite motivated to put into practice what they have agreed and not forget about it as soon as they get back to work.

A well-designed and facilitated offsite can work wonders for team connections and shared ownership of key priorities.

Imagine the scenario where a critical role in your organisation is vacant for six months, either because the incumbent went somewhere else or needed a leave of absence!

Do you leave the position vacant, get an expensive (unknown) interim in, or take a punt on someone internal who might be up for it, or do you already have an identified and developed successor ready to step in?

The cost to the organisation of the vacant, interim and not yet ready internal option is potentially very significant and may well hold strategic initiatives back for six months or more. In today’s rapidly changing markets, is that a risk you would be willing to take?

Like many things in life, failing to plan is planning to fail!

If people are the greatest asset an organisation has, which is becoming more and more the case, we should be planning for their careers and those that follow them with the same attention we give to tracking the market and how we plan for that.

So, what does succession planning entail?

• Set up a succession planning board which oversees succession planning (this may be your organisation’s board)
• Identify the critical roles in your organisation that you need identified successors for
• Capture the key criteria for these roles
• Assess their readiness based on how well they match criteria now and rank them
• Carry out analysis of your data to identify themes and focus areas
• Prepare Development Plans for successors to get them “ready now”.

I can design and deliver leadership development programmes to your specific needs. Working with you as sponsor and the programme’s attendees through a diagnostic phase to identify the key development areas, before designing the programme delivery.

A recent example is the maternity return programme:

A package of group sessions and webinars for both new mothers and their line managers. This programme is experiential in nature and includes a combination of therapy and coaching in a group discussion environment. To provide this holistic programme, every session is facilitated by both an executive coach and a psychotherapist.

For Mothers: Four one day group sessions spanning late pregnancy, maternity leave, up to 6 months upon returning to work and a final session, 6 months plus into being a working mother.

For Line Managers: Two one-hour webinars coaching line managers through group discussions and role plays around the “dos and don’ts” of how best to support a mother on her journey back to work.

A second example is a recent business partner team development programme: 

A global team of 16 individuals with similar roles and seniority who wanted to connect more as a team, share common challenges, solutions and experience and generally get to know each other better.

The programme design was based on conversations with three sponsors and a number of the participants. This formed the basis of the diagnostic themes for the programme.

These included:

• Connecting as a team
• Developing active listening and peer coaching skills
• How to better communicate with their front office colleagues
• How to manage difficult conversations and stakeholders
• How to manage their own resilience.

The design focused on encouraging the participants to share experiences and challenges they had faced and peer coach each other in the process.

The programme was delivered as five two hour online sessions over a four month period.