By Chally Kacelnik
We don’t believe in delivering leadership development programs that run out of steam and sense when you leave the room. We like delivering programs that connect directly to what people do back at work. That means they need to have genuine applicability. One of the ways we forge that connection is by involving organisational leaders, both in their capacity as participants’ managers and as subject matter experts.
We tell participants that the person they report to has a very important role to play as they undertake the program. Their role is to guide their participant(s) toward completing program assessment tasks that will be of most benefit to the individual, their team, and their organisation. Because we link program assessment tasks back to actual work requirements, we ask leaders to provide program participants with the space and support needed to learn from the program content and exercises. Participants’ leaders also show up at assessment review days throughout the program, and the presentation day at the end, in order to support them and see the impact of the work they’ve been doing.
We also appreciate the impact of having organisational leaders come and speak to program participants, whether about their own leadership journey or their specific subject matter area that we’re digging into on the program (such as safety or business planning and management). This helps participants to dig into a shared experience and expectations within their organisation, and it inspires them to see the real applications of what they’re learning on a program theory day. We like to keep things practical, so when a leader is able to, say, help engage program participants with their organisation’s new expected safety behaviours, we’ve got an opportunity to reinforce those and make them part of how work happens from now on.
Leaders are really helpful in fostering leaders, as it happens. We engage a range of organisational leaders in our leadership programming in order to better engage participants.
At LKS Quaero, we deliver leadership development programs that benefit participants and their organisations in direct, trackable ways. For more information, visit us at lksquaero.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.
