Other voices
Our experience in working with the senior leadership teams in a wide range of organizations and industries is that both the quality of direction setting and the engagement with the necessary change following the directional process, increase when ‘Other Voices’ are involved.
In spite of all the talk about ‘diversity’ and the paradigm change needed to be successful in the more complex world, senior teams – top 5 to the top 500 depending on the size of the company and the definition of ‘top’ – are very often still composed “of the same stuff” – they have gone through similar education and learning, and have a strong tendency to fall back on the paradigms, orthodoxies and behaviors that brought the success of the last 10 years.
Bringing in ‘Other Voices’ – younger, more female, different opinions, other cultures than represented by the senior top-team, with the potential to move to the more senior circles of tomorrow – not only accelerates change, it also provides senior management with a ‘sanity check’ on their own efforts. It also constitutes a serious and meaningful development tool which brings respect from and motivation in a group on which you have to build the future of your organization anyway.
The ‘Other Voices’ approach can be applied in a wide range of projects:
- As part of or following up on more traditional leadership development programs for your high potentials. It brings them a real life taste of the dilemmas senior management is facing and provides you as senior management a cross-silo view from the next generation, a sanity check on the work of senior management, fuel to accelerate change and strong engagement from the next generation.
- Adding ‘Other Voices’-workshops – with high potentials, younger leaders with a more diverse background than the senior team – to the program you have developed for your senior teams (and letting the ‘others’ go through the same program as the seniors). Goal: widening the perspective, deepening the discussion. Finding overlap is encouraging, finding differences is equally important.
We have applied this approach in very different contexts and with very diverse purposes.
- Co-creating a values-driven aspiration and its consequences for management practices. A series of workshops for high potentials followed by a dialogue with senior management.
- As a tool to identify ‘orthodoxies’ (deeply held beliefs that can hinder progress) and in interaction with senior management identifying which ones should be overturned, redefined or kept alive because crucial in tomorrow’s value-creation processes.
- Making the organization more ‘customer centred ’ by applying ‘new rules of interaction’ connected to the next generation.
- Identifying ‘future facts’ as a basis to set the direction for future strategies of the organization.
For more information Get in touch with Bart
