Leadership Labs
A Leadership Lab brings your managers and leaders together to work on a real business challenge. While they solve the problem, they build the practical habits of leadership.
In most organisations, the strategy is already clear enough. The challenge is getting the behaviour behind it to show up in how people lead, day after day. These Labs are built to work on the "how" so the "what" sticks.
Delivering a strategy is hard.
We find there is often a skills gap between those who deliver operational excellence and those who lead the strategy.
Most development does not close that gap. The knowledge and experience that makes your managers good at their work often means they find it difficult to deliver a strategy through their teams. Their knowledge was never in question, they just need to be developed as strategic leaders. That is why we created Leadership Labs.
A cohort, not a course.
A Leadership Lab is co-designed with you to build leadership and management habits over a few months, by setting them a real challenge from your business for them to solve.
We recommend your Lab is made up of cross-departmental participants to accelerate organisation-wide collaboration. Rather than hand you a fixed curriculum, we start from your context, your pressures and the behaviours your leaders actually need, and design the Lab around them. The cohort learns by doing, practising on a live project in their collaboration groups, then presents what they have built to your senior leaders.
The challenge is real, the project is needed by your business, and the change is sustained by you, long after we have stepped away.
What makes a Lab different
- Real work, not case studies. People practise on a problem your business genuinely needs solving.
- Practice, not theory. Each part of the programme turns one idea into something people do, (not just know).
- Co-designed, not off the shelf. We build the Lab around your leaders and your context.
- Built to be handed over. We leave the tools, rhythm and coaching behind, so it lasts without us.
Built around you and your leaders.
Leadership Labs work across the layers of an organisation, from first-line managers to senior teams. We shape the cohort around the tier that matters most to you right now, and we can run more than one layer at once.
The everyday practice of leading well.
Every Lab is built around the behaviours your leaders actually need. These are the themes that come up most often, and we shape the work around the ones that matter to you:
Designed around your business, in four phases.
Every Leadership Lab follows our 4Cs framework, the same architecture behind our award-winning global programmes. It keeps the work grounded in your context from the first conversation to the final handover.
We design the Lab through conversations with you, your leaders and your people. We agree the live challenge the cohort will work on, and the metrics of how the success will be measured.
A name, a look and a story inside your organisation, so the Lab feels like something to be part of rather than another course to attend. Your people will want in!
The cohort works through a series of sprints, learning leadership behaviours in each and practising them in two places: their cross-departmental project team working on the business challenge, and back in their own team. Optional peer coaching holds their accountability throughout.
The cohort presents its work to your senior leaders at an executive showcase. They demonstrate how they have grown as strategic leaders, solved a real business problem and collaborated across your organisation.
The building blocks of a Leadership Lab
No two Labs are identical, so we draw on the elements below and design the mix around your cohort, your challenge and the rhythm of your business.
A live business challenge
You choose a real problem that your organisation needs solving, which the cohort works on it throughout the programme, in small cross-departmental project teams.
Sprints built around your leadership behaviours
The programme runs in short sprints, with your leadership behaviours and values at the centre of each. Experiential learning and peer feedback sits at the core of this process.
Live cohort sessions
Participants receive a mixture of leadership training content and process in their live sessions together. The sessions are spaced out across the programme and timed to fit around their working day, in person or online.
Peer coaching
Leaders are paired up and meet between sessions to talk through what they are trying and what is happening. The pairs act as 'learning buddies' and hold each other accountable so their new behaviours get worked on in everyday situations.
Cross-functional project teams
We recommend that the participants form small teams drawn from across the business, or from different sites, brands or functions. This means the participants can practise the new behaviours learned on the live challenge with colleagues they may not know so well.
An executive showcase
At the end of the programme, the cohort presents to your senior leaders how they have grown as leaders, solved a real business problem and collaborated across your organisation. Your business gets the output from their project sprints, and the cohort get visibility with the people above them.
An internal coaching network
We can train and supervise a group of your own leaders as coaches over the course of the programme. By the end, you'll have a coaching capability that belongs to the business and carries on once we have left.
A communications strategy
We work with your internal comms people to give the programme a name, a look and a story inside the organisation. This creates desire for the programme and a rhythm of updates that keeps the cohort engaged and the wider business updated.
Sustaining the change
We understand that you will want to bring this process into business as usual. We therefore work with you to offboard the programme; we hand over the tools, content and the comms plan so you can run the next cohort yourselves if you choose to.
A cross-brand, award winning Leadership Lab.
Immediate Media reaches more than 75 million people every month, in an industry being reshaped by AI and shifting audiences. The business needed a new layer of leaders who could act as agents of change rather than wait for direction, so together we created 'Futures'.
What we did
Over two years we brought together two consecutive, cross-brand cohorts of emerging leaders from across the business, deliberately mixing functions so the silos began to break down from the first session. Over several months they experienced leadership workshops and one-to-one and peer coaching, which supported the two innovation sprints. Those sprints were real commercial challenges, from launching new products to reaching new audiences.
How it stuck
Senior leaders, including the CEO, sponsored the work, coached participants and gave feedback at the final showcase where the cohorts presented what they had built. To make sure the change outlasted the programme, a number of those leaders trained as internal coaches and became the Immediate Coaching Network, which still supports the business today. As one participant put it, "it felt like a cultural shift rather than a training course".
Their depth of experience in organisational culture, change, leadership and team dynamics means they raise the bar every time we work together. A true trusted partner in every way.
Award-winning and research-informed.
We design leadership development that works in your context, for your business.
Our Leadership Labs are built on the same 4Cs architecture as our award-winning global programme for the global company Valvoline, which reached more than two thousand people across 28 countries. Behind that work sits our own doctoral research into how leadership behaviour really moves from knowing to doing, while people are handling the daily pressures of their job.
Let us explore what a Leadership Lab could look like for your managers.
The first conversation is where we listen to your context, talk through where the pressure is, and share how a Lab might be shaped around it. If it feels right, we move into a proper design conversation, with no pressure and no obligation along the way.
Nick
Nick has spent the last 25 years leading businesses and departments in both high paced start-up SMEs and large, complex, global organisations.
He is so obsessed with understanding and creating the conditions for leaders and teams to work at their best that he’s started a doctorate specifically focused on exploring the behaviours and tools leaders should adopt for effective team and organisational productivity.
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All The Tools You Need To Build A Successful Online Business
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