Leadership Execution

“Something to chew on over your breakfast”

The word execution in a leadership context sounds like an oxymoron. The reality is that, despite the growing investment in leadership development, its been found that 70% of organisations have been unsuccessful in executing leadership systematically across their business.

Stepping up leadership at the personal, interpersonal, and team levels is a prerequisite; but to build a great place to work and engage staff who connect positively with customers, involves an execution process that implements across organisational silos and takes leadership to an enterprise level.

One company that effectively embedded leadership at an enterprise level is the Warehouse Group.  Not only did they sponsor senior executives on the Strategic Leadership Programme, Leadership Programme for High Potential Team Leaders, and the ISL | MBA, they also developed their own in-company leadership academy that trains leaders right down to store level – both in terms of leadership and management.

A short version of the story, was explained at a broad level by Mark Powell to a small group of CEOs at a recent ISL CEO DINNER in Tauranga.

The Warehouse Group ethos and leadership is captured in their ‘Way-We-Work’ process. This is executed through a 2-day in-company course that provides each and every manager/leader with:

• A clear vision
• Clarity of purpose
• Vocabulary
• Set of principles
• Leadership framework
• Logic-of-enquiry
• Set of leadership and problem solving tools
• Meeting processes
• Communication processes and skills

For example, the CEO or senior leader can walk into any Warehouse store and quickly and effectively get a sense of how the branch is operating and obtain a verbal situational analysis update. This is possible because leadership processes have been executed across the organisation; the CEO and the manager speak the same language and use the same tools and logic-of-enquiry.

Results speak for themselves. Staff and customer engagement have increased to ‘best-of-sector’ over recent years. Whilst ISL has played a small part, the bulk of these developments were designed and developed by Mark Powell, Anna Campbell, the senior executive team and the OD team. They own and live the process which is now deeply embedded in their organisational DNA.

For some years now, ISL have recognised that personal, interpersonal, and team leadership are important but insufficient at a whole-of-organisation level. This is why ISL has been actively developing a set of team and enterprise-level workshops underpinned by frameworks and leadership dashboards to aid leadership development and to monitor leadership performance. Anonymity at a personal level is assured and the focus is on developing, growing and flourishing in a way that adds value to all stakeholders.

To Learn more:

Email us at info@leadership.ac.nz

Alternatively, give Geoff Lorigan a call on: +64 9 366 1560 to discuss ISL development Workshops, Frameworks, Processes, Profilers, and Digital Dashboards.

We are currently actively involved working with the senior leadership teams at two of Australia’s universities as well as an International Airport and are rapidly building our knowledge and experience in this emerging field.

This Leadership Execution ‘thought piece’ was written by Geoff Lorigan as a follow up to the recent CEO DINNER held in Tauranga, at which Mark Powell (former Group CEO of The Warehouse Group) was guest speaker. It is aimed at sharing what ISL regards as ‘Next Practice’ with a view to encouraging CEOs and senior leaders to leverage their leadership development investment and make a difference at the whole-of-organisation level.

Readers are invited to share their views, examples and experiences in the comments section below.