Vision-based Leadership for Organisations & Communities

How often do you, as a Leader, ask yourself questions like:

How well do my organisation's Strategy and Operations reflect its Vision?
How can I use what it says about the organisation's purpose, meaning and values to engage and inspire all our stakeholders?
How well do I use the Vision to give direction and focus to individual and team contribution?
What does success look and feel like, and how will we know when we get there?
How do I make sure that decisions we take today make sense when viewed long-term?
How can I measure our progress and improvement in a larger than operational context?

Our “Leading with Vision” strategic leadership, management and team development programmes are designed to enable you and your organisation's managers to answer these questions and to use its Vision to lead and inspire.

Each truly bespoke workshops is tailored to meet your organisation’s specific needs, culture and objectives. Once outcomes are clarified and agreed, delivery can be tied into your business’s planning schedule, reporting process and appraisal procedures.

Although each programme is unique, the quality of delivery is maintained by applying consistent values and principles: principles proven to deliver inspirational change.

Generic, Vision-based programmes overviewed here include:

Delivering the Vision
Strategic Agility
Leadership Coaching
Management Team Development
Feedback as a Tool for ongoing Personal Development

Delivering the Vision

This programme is intended to get your Vision working for you, whether you’re in business, education or government. By enabling everyone in your organisation to identify what its Vision, Values and Purpose mean to them you unleash their combined potential to achieve challenging strategic goals and deliver dynamic operational performance.

Our approach:

We start by facilitating your senior teams to:

Check the relevance of your current ‘over-arching’ Vision.
Develop a Strategic Vision from themes contained within the organisations’ Strategic Core Competencies and its current and future customers and markets.
Clarify key Strategic Outcomes (the “Mission”)
Confirm the time horizon for delivery
Identify who needs to be involved, when and why.

We then enable your managers and team leaders to cascade this approach down through the organisation, encouraging everyone to identify and deliver their contribution to achieving the organisation’s Vision and Purpose.

Benefits include:

A Vision for the organisation with which people can identify and which inspires them.
A Strategy, projects and plans that deliver results which make sense long-term, whilst allowing for unexpected change.
An objective, strategic context for operational (short-term) decision-making that allows accurate assessment of impact.
Better thinking and questioning skills throughout the organisation.
Increased commitment via increased involvement.

Elements of the approach have been used – in whole or in part – with organisations and communities as diverse as Pharmaceuticals (e.g. Global business IT to develop Vision, Strategy and communications), Petcare Company (HR and Change programme), a South-Midlands District Council (at start of Local Area Agreement process).

Associated development programmes include:

Strategic Agility

Originally designed to improve management competencies in Strategic Thinking and Communications, this modular programme incorporates current business models and tools into a practical approach to developing strategies and plans that deliver the organisation’s Strategic Vision and business Outcomes, including a new approach to ‘What if?… scenario planning.

“This is the first time I’ve actually understood what ‘Strategy’ means and how it works.” Member of Board of Trustees, Major UK Charity.

Leadership Coaching

Accredited in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator profiling and as a “Thinking Environment” and Business Process coach, Dee has worked for over 15 years with managers at all levels in an organisation and at many different stages in their career. What they all had in common was a passion to improve their performance and contribution as managers and leaders.

Building on current experience, we work together to:

Improve the quality of listening and thinking
Increase awareness of, and confidence in, self as manager and leader
Develop creative, practical and inter-personal skills (EQ)

Management Team Development

A government organisation, experiencing unprecedented growth and change that included the addition of a whole layer of management, asked for help in developing the now-middle managers and their direct reports into a cohesive management team, whilst equipping individual managers with improved skills and competencies / behaviours.

Our approach consisted of:-

Conducting interviews at all levels to clarify needs and objectives and to become familiar with the organisation’s culture and working practices.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment, to provide clues to learning styles, improve communication and instil an understanding of each others’ differences.
Coaching at the more senior management level to develop skills and confidence in identifying and dealing with performance issues within a shifting context, whilst remaining one-step removed (i.e. managing managers).
Management and team skills development sessions: including Performance System enhancement, personal development tools (e.g. Transactional Analysis ‘Drivers’) and using Feedback for developing self and others.

On completion, each session was assessed against ongoing and changing objectives, and subsequent modules were updated or completely redesigned as required.

Feedback as a Tool for ongoing Personal Development

A multi-national team, based in Germany, asked us to facilitate a team development day, focussing on improving communications within the team. Having experienced a series of feedback workshops we had delivered for the parent company, the team’s manager specifically asked us to include elements of our “Pro-active Feedback” approach, paying particular attention to the organisation’s newly-introduced competency framework.

Case Study

A major organisation wanted to ensure all their people’s efforts were focussed on achieving the business needs by delivering the Vision at grass-roots level. Once the Vision and Strategy are known and understood by everyone, the organisation acts as a single, dynamic organism responding rapidly to changes that impact on key customers, products and markets.

What we did:

Worked with managers and team leaders to develop a tailored, practical approach.
Developed a step-by-step “Routemap” with guidelines, to support teams from start-up through to measuring performance improvement.
Transferred skills, via internal trainer-facilitators, to ensure every team achieved success.
Cascaded the Vision down to team level Vision statements.
Ensured Vision-alignment by clarifying contribution.
Clarified the key success factors to delivering the Vision.
Equipped teams with the planning skills to achieve these Key Success factors, in-line with high-level organisational strategy.
Clarified the relationship between Strategy and Operations and enabled teams develop appropriate performance measures for both.

Key benefits as seen by the Client:

Developing a process with team leaders from across the site ensured a consistency of language and output that facilitated sharing and learning from each other
The process was great team building and had many benefits other than just sharing a Vision
The work combined a top-down approach (corporate strategy) with a bottom-up approach (what each team delivers), which facilitated alignment to our purpose and Vision across all levels of the corporation.

"The process we developed gave each of us a better sense of the overall purpose and how our individual contribution made a difference – a sense of being valued." Sandra M, Innovation Manager, R&D

"This is the first time that I have seen the Vision of a team being used constructively to focus objectives" Lab Team, Global FMCG R&D

References are available for all our interventions.