APAC People Development Summit 2006

Leadership development continues to be a major focus as organisations recognise the important role managers play in implementing change. Many are now beginning to pay greater attention to the underlying emotional intelligence abilities that impact leadership effectiveness. February 2006 sees our Managing Director presenting at the Asia Pacific Leadership and People Development Summit 2006 in Sydney. Michael will deliver a three-hour interactive session focusing on Emotional Intelligence and Leadership on the 22nd of February.

His session will focus on:

• Engaging the heart and the head: A full-range leadership model
• Transformational leadership and the role of emotions
• Strategies for developing transformational leaders

For more information please visit the Liquid Learning website at www.liquidlearning.com.au.

Navigating change at an Australian icon

A great number of well intended training programs fall into the ‘event’ category and are quickly relegated to the ‘been there done that’ folder as companies endeavor to develop as many people as quickly as possible. Event training has its place, but it rarely results in strong transfer of learning or lasting behaviour change in the workplace. A major Australian company undergoing significant change, from an internal and external perspective, has made a substantial commitment to providing over 2,000 senior executives with the skills needed to successfully navigate large-scale change. These changes are significant and include such challenges as major restructuring, wide-scale outsourcing and changes to longstanding work practices. We have been working with this company over the last 10 months to design and deliver an innovative approach to building change skills at the senior executive level.

Our solution is a four-day change program utilising an action-learning approach. This strategy encourages participants to apply a variety of skills and tools to real-life change initiatives that they select prior to the workshop. Participants are exposed to the latest research on change including the role of leaders and those teams involved in implementing change. A major component of the program addresses the challenge of identifying and planning for resistance as well as opportunities to practice these skills in a simulated environment.

The program is designed around an in-house change model and is supported through a variety of practical problem-solving and decision-making tools that address the human aspect of change. Participants undertake a leadership multi-rater based on the Transformational-Transactional leadership model (Bass and Avolio, 1997) and receive feedback on their results during the program. A company-wide change readiness survey is also utilised to give participants further insight into the behaviours and actions that leaders need to exercise before, during and after change. The change survey was designed to reflect and support the in-house change model which aligns closely to Kotter’s (1996) eight-step change framework.

A program like this utilises a variety of learning activities including experiential activities and simulations designed to put participants ‘in the shoes’ of those impacted by change. Case studies, small group discussions and change team presentations ensure that the theory and tools are directly applied to the change project. One-to-one executive coaching further reinforces the learning as participants work with an external coach to apply the program theory to real-life change situations. The coaching focuses on leadership behaviours and is delivered during the four to five-week gap between the first two days of the program and the final two days (a standard two by two-day block format).

Feedback on the program has been some of the best we’ve received and was all the more surprising given the seniority of the participants and their previous exposure to a vast array of ‘management training’ in the past. Some recent comments include:

• I wish I had the opportunity to do this six months ago
• Working through the change tools and models was extremely beneficial
• I liked the practicality of the sessions
• I appreciated working together as a team on a real world example that we will apply back in the workplace
• The program reminded us to think about the people not just the business