Executive Insight: Enabling Transformative and Sustainable Change
Over 20 years, Bridge has learnt how to develop leaders in a way that genuinely enables transformational and sustainable organisation change. These insights shape the principles underpinning our work:
1. Make it real - hardwire the individual development and business imperatives.
It is undoubtedly possible to run individual development processes that build greater trust, openness and a focus on developing enabling attitudes and behaviours. These can often be impactful and emotional experiences that form a powerful reference point. Whilst we would not challenge the value of this work per se, we believe that this does not necessarily translate into delivering maximum impact for the organisation. All too often the hard work of behavioural change is embarked on without hardwiring the context of business imperatives.
2. Make it meaningful – focus on building an authentic leadership legacy that inspires each individual
It is equally important to help leaders to ‘lift their heads up’ from the immediate demands and challenges of the organisation, and focus on creating a legacy that inspires them to step beyond doing a good job, leading them to feel that they are building something to be proud of. This tends to manifest itself in creating not only a robust organisation, but also takes the culture of the business forward such that it feels like a great place to work.
3. Make it personal - focus primarily on ‘me’ and leverage strengths, then understand the power of difference and leadership partnership i.e. the ‘us’
We generally encourage a greater focus on trading on the strengths of team members rather than simply focusing on development needs. Leaders who aspire to becoming the consummately rounded executive risk leaving behind the cornerstones of what helps them be at their best when it really counts. This leads naturally to the valuing of the difference of others and the consequent relevance of leadership partnership.
4. Make it stick – build a process of development rather than simply running an event
Leadership development can be very event focused. Whilst well run development events are important, they are only as impactful as the pre and post work that surrounds them. Exploring how well individuals are bringing to life their good intentions is vital. The nature of this work varies in accordance with the objectives of the process but, as a rule, events that are well positioned and followed by a process of embedding for each individual tend to have at least twice the impact of stand-alone events.