Clear Leadership — Through Changes Fast!

A unique set of skills that will radically increase your capacity to guide organizational change!

Business leader, this course is for you, if:

 You feel tired of being the only initiator and driver of changes in your company.

    You are struggling to implement technologies or process improvement as your employees do not seem to come along.

    You want results fast — you can’t afford to analyse and plan changes for months. You need results!

   You want to take your company to the next level — FAST!

  You dream of the day when each and every one of your employees is standing for the wellbeing of the whole company.

   You want your employees to be motivated and eager to implement changes.

Why should I choose the Clear Leadership program?

It is naive to hope for a better result if you don’t change anything. However, over the decades, the research has shown that 2/3 of change initiatives fail. In past 15 years a new approach — dialogic change management — has emerged and shown consistently amazing results:

• 90% of change initiatives succeed.
• Changes that used to take 2-3 years are now implemented in 2-3 months.
• At the same time the stress level of employees (and managers) and employee turnover are lower than before the changes.

Who should attend?

• Managers who are responsible for the developing their organization to be more resilient and agile in responding to changes both inside and outside of the organizations.
• C-level executives, division heads, HR Partners.
• Managers, who are responsible for designing and managing specific organizational change & development projects – Business Development managers, Change project managers.

About the program

Most research estimates that only about 35% of change programs succeed (Eaton, 2011).

The Clear Leadership program is specifically designed by Dr. Gervase Bushe, one of the most influential researchers and consultants of change management & organizational development, to equip managers with the mindset and corresponding skills to raise success rate to 90%. And as a result, to enable creating better organizations, that deliver excellent results for all its stakeholder (workers, owners, managers, customers, suppliers etc).

Read more about Dr. Gervase Bushe

What are critical skills needed from a leader to effectively manage organizational development & change processes?

To paraphrase legendary quote from Peter Drucker, then “stories and emotions eat change initiatives for breakfast” (see also the iceberg of change). Development and change are not that hard. It is made hard by approaches that focus too much on the upper part of the iceberg. All parts mentioned on the iceberg are eventually needed. Questions is, what are pivotal skills to achieve what organizations wants to achieve. Approaches that have shown the success rate around 90% (mostly categorized as “dialogic” approach to organizational development), tend to put emphasis on stories and emotions (but not forgetting the rest of the iceberg).

Content of the course

The course is a combination of researched tested theory and highly interactive activities and skills practice. The skills part is crucial – people leave the course able to think differently, see organizational reality more clearly but also to do things differently. Key areas deeply rooted in human behaviour and related to radically increasing effectiveness of change interventions:

• Every human creates its own experiences.
• Humans are sense-making beings (stories).
• Humans are anxiety avoiding beings (emotions).

Agenda of the course:

Day 1: Aware Self

• Why our normal way of «managing people» destroys partnership.
• How our normal ways of managing anxiety create interpersonal mush.
• How to uncover all of one’s experience through the experience cube.
• The negative effects of mystifying language and the positive effects of clear language.
• The different impacts of talking to others right here, right now versus our normal way of talking.

Day 2: Descriptive Self

• How to describe your experience in transparent ways.
• The difference between being descriptive and being judgmental.
• How to describe your judgments in ways that clarify your experience and reduce defensiveness.
• The first part of conducting an organizational learning conversation.
• What partnership is and why it’s the core of collaboration at work.

Day 3: Curious Self

• Listening through the experience cube.
• Where your reactivity comes from and how to park it.
• Understanding the role of shame in reducing interpersonal clarity.
• How to confront others in a way that gets them to be descriptive, not defensive.
• The second part of conducting an organizational learning conversation.

Day 4: Bringing the Skills to Work

• An opportunity to integrate all the skills from the previous three days.
• The entire Organizational Learning Conversation process — the core skill of managing change.
• When to have learning conversations.
• How to coach others through a learning conversation with you.
• How to mediate learning conversations between others.
• How to use appreciative processes to create change.

Learning outcomes

Most importantly, Clear Leadership gives leaders an experiential, grounded understanding of how to help individuals, teams and the whole company to successfully function in VUCA-world, where change is happening in even greater pace. To achieve that, the course:

1. Helps leaders to understand one of the key processes in managing organizations, the process of meaning making — how it takes place and what leaders have to do to clear out the problems it inevitably creates.
2. Provides a set of tools to have “learning conversations” which are one of the most effective ways to disrupt unproductive patterns and create new more suitable patterns of interaction.
3. Gives skills on how to create and hold a climate of clarity, where it is safe to experiment and tell the truth.

Executives all over the world have said that after the Clear Leadership program:

• The organisation became much more transparent to all employees as mutual understanding improved
• General stress level was reduced (for C-level and frontline alike).
• Development projects started to move significantly faster.
• Employee motivation improved (as the number of demotivating events was reduced).
• Employee turnover was reduced significantly.
• We did less, but achieved more — we took the company to the next level!

About the trainer

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