Adaptive Organisations - Leadership

Adaptive Organisations - Leadership

Target Audience:

  • Current managers and leaders who want to shift their leadership style from traditional command-and-control approaches towards enabling adaptability and self-organisation. These professionals recognise that the pace of change demands new ways of leading and are looking for practical frameworks to guide their transformation.
  • HR and Organisational Development professionals responsible for leadership development programmes within their organisations. They seek a structured approach to cultivating adaptive leadership capabilities across their leadership population and to understanding what truly drives high performance in modern organisations.
  • Executives seeking to transform their organisations into more adaptive, responsive entities. They need to understand both the principles underpinning adaptive organisations and the leadership behaviours required to create and sustain them.

Course Overview: With this course, you will develop a solid understanding of modern leadership in adaptive contexts, from understanding what makes organisations truly adaptive, through building and enabling high-performing teams, to developing meaningful leadership skills in yourself and others, building the foundations for successful leadership in agile and adaptive organisations.

What to Expect:

  • A fresh perspective on leadership as an emergent, interaction-based phenomenon
  • Understanding of why and how market dynamics demand organisational adaptability
  • Practical knowledge for building and sustaining high-performing teams
  • Core leadership skills including communication, feedback, empowerment and self-management
  • Approaches for continuous leadership development - both your own and others'

Your Benefits:

  • Develop a leadership approach suited for fast-changing, complex environments
  • Build the capability to create and nurture high-performing, self-managing teams
  • Gain practical skills that immediately impact your leadership effectiveness
  • Understand how to work on the system, not just in it
  • Learn to develop leadership capacity across your organisation
  • Enhance your credibility as a leader who enables rather than directs

Module 1: Leadership

Redefining What It Means to Lead

Upon completion of this module, participants will be able to:

  • Leadership as Interaction: Explain how leadership emerges from interaction rather than being bound to a fixed position or role
  • Leadership Definitions: Recognise at least one leadership definition suitable for adaptive organisations
  • The Value of Leadership: Articulate the value of leadership and sketch the problems leadership may solve in their own context

Module 2: Adaptive Organisations

Understanding the Context for Modern Leadership

Upon completion of this module, participants will be able to:

  • Market Dynamics: Explain why and how market dynamics have accelerated and describe the consequences of faster market dynamics for organisations
  • Principles over Rules: Explain the impact of working with principles in organisations
  • Organising for Adaptability: Identify principles for adaptive organisations in existing systems

Module 3: High-Performing Teams

Building the Foundation for Collective Excellence

Upon completion of this module, participants will be able to:

  • Team Fundamentals: Distinguish between a team and a work group, and articulate the definition of a High Performance Team
  • Prerequisites for Performance: Understand the prerequisites and importance of High Performance Teams
  • Team Self-Management: Understand the differences between self-organisation, self-management and autonomy
  • Bootstrapping Teams: Understand how to establish a high-performing team

Module 4: Meaningful Leadership Skills

Developing Your Leadership Toolkit

Upon completion of this module, participants will be able to:

  • Core Skill Awareness: Understand the importance and impact of communication, feedback and feedforward, empowerment and self-management
  • Leadership Toolkit: Learn methods related to communication, feedback and feedforward, empowerment and self-management to improve your leadership competence

Module 5: Creating Adaptive Organisations

Leading Systemic Change

Upon completion of this module, participants will be able to:

  • Leadership as an Organisational Trait: Understand how organisational improvement is everybody’s responsibility
  • The Purpose of Leadership: Understand the role of the leaders as promoters, catalysers and supporters of organisational evolution initiatives, and the importance for leadership of collaborating as an actual team
  • Continuous Adaptation: Understand how successful change needs inspecting and adapting, and how an adaptive organisation changes continuously
  • Working on the System: Understand the difference between working in the system and working on the system, and recognise the importance for leadership to be present in the change process
  • Systems Thinking: Understand the organisation as a system of communication, explain how the system determines human behaviour, and describe how to create systems awareness

Module 6: Leadership Development for Adaptive Organisations

Growing Leadership Capacity

Upon completion of this module, participants will be able to:

  • Self-Development: Understand the importance of self-development in leadership and how it happens through both hard and soft skills in relation to the company mission
  • Developing Others: Explain the value of developing leadership skills in others
  • Development Planning: Implement a plan for leadership development to increase value in the organisational context

Prerequisites

  • Some leadership or management experience
  • Experience working in or with teams
  • Basic understanding of adaptive organisation, ideally acquired via a basic educational offering in agile, lean, …

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