In today’s increasingly interconnected and crisis-prone world — where challenges pile up faster than solutions — leaders like you face more barriers than ever. You’re called upon not just to manage individual problems but to steer your team through a constantly shifting terrain of interconnected issues or “polycrises”.

We know you are busy, which is why we designed this abbreviated learning experience just for you, our CCL Alumni Network.

It is designed to the spark relationships and breakthroughs leaders need now. Together with other local alumni, you will explore the leadership trends shaping our world.

This is a complimentary experience designed specifically for our valued alumni. With only 30 seats available, your registration is a commitment to invest in yourself and further your own leadership development journey.

*If your availability changes, please let us know by canceling your registration at least 7 days prior to the event to open up your seat to another leader.

What to Expect:

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• A custom-programmed learning experience exploring ways to manage a web of interconnected challenges amplifying each other’s effects
• Direct connection with CCL faculty AND one of our Senior Research Scientists
• The opportunity to connect with local leaders and expand your professional network
• Space to reflect and reconnect on your continued leadership journey
• Breakfast and lunch

The post From Polycrisis to Possibility: A CCL Alumni Network Experience in San Diego appeared first on CCL.

One of the largest regional credit unions in the United States was built on a directive approach to leadership, where leaders control and are responsible for the goals and work of their teams. This leadership style worked well as the credit union grew.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed how the organization worked, introducing a hybrid work model and a heightened emphasis on employee wellbeing. The credit union’s members increasingly expected a modern, digital experience and so did newer employees. In addition to its technology, it needed to modernize its leadership and people development strategy.

As it looked to the future, the credit union recognized the imperative to transform.

A Cultural Paradigm Shift

The increasing relevance of digital transformation brought a new lens; it was the perfect setting to take a closer look at the organization and begin making improvements to better equip employees so that they could, in turn, take even better care of members. To do this, the credit union introduced leadership development as an official function in the organization, and in doing so realized transformation required significant shifts.

“People often forget that transformation starts with changing mindsets, and that can be a massive leap for a traditional organization that has always done things a certain way. Our senior executives understood that to continue to hold our position at the forefront of finance, we had to embrace new ways of communicating, relating to, and leading people,” said the credit union’s Vice President of Leadership Development. “We had the will; we just needed the way.”

The credit union already had, in pockets of the organization, people who were actively mentoring and supporting leaders, but wanted to make the shift to deliver consistent leadership development at scale and gain buy-in across an organization during a fundamental cultural shift.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)® came alongside to support them.

Featured Solutions

All-in-One Leadership Development Subscription: CCL Passport

Access tailorable training and tools with an all-in-one leadership development subscription to help you support and scale your in-house corporate leadership training initiatives.

Better Conversations Every Day

Our conversational skills training program increases communication, active listening, and feedback skills, providing coaching training for leaders that improves organizational culture.

Solution

“When the credit union came to us, we knew the first thing we needed to do was really listen to understand. We also wanted to make sure that they knew they were not alone,” said Anne Credi, CCL Strategic Business Partner.

“Since COVID, organizations have been coming to us, in some phase of transformation — each knowing that the change is inevitable to their survival, yet struggling with its complexity within an increasingly unpredictable environment. We knew the credit union was headed in the right direction, and we were impressed that they knew they had to engage and motivate all people leaders around this shift. The question was, how?” recounted Credi. “Our priority was to join forces with the credit union — understanding their needs and leveraging our evidence-based solutions to achieve their goal. We understood they needed meaningful leadership at scale, where leadership development wasn’t limited to small groups of high-potentials; rather, a solution that allowed everyone to be included — allowing a rising tide of shared understanding, practice, and language of leadership.”

The solution? CCL Passport.

A Subscription to Trusted Leadership Development

CCL Passport offers a flexible, licensed leadership development subscription to content that organizations can modify and add their brand to. But Passport isn’t just a subscription — it’s a partnership. We work closely with organizations to provide unlimited use of our programs, content, and tools, and help them navigate and make the most of their leadership development journey. Backed by our 50+ years of research and experience pioneering industry best practices, Passport makes scaling leadership development affordable, replicable, and fast.

“CCL Passport was exactly what we needed. At the time, there were just 2 of us in the newly formed leadership development function, and Passport helped us prioritize goals with content that is fully developed and ready to implement. It had digital content that we could scale to all 1,400 leaders and in-person classroom content with presentation decks, facilitation guides, workbooks, and communication plans. Passport is very much like the easy button for leadership development content. The only hurdle was deciding which content to launch and when, and that’s where our partnership with CCL has been instrumental,” said the VP.

We collaborated with the credit union to identify the best place to start. They chose Better Conversations Every Day (BCE), a coaching skills program designed to help participants improve their leadership, coaching, and communication skills with in-person classroom training and practice.

Initially, the credit union invited all senior leaders to voluntarily participate in the BCE program with the goal of creating evangelists on the executive and senior leadership teams. We ran the first session, training and certifying 3 credit union trainers to ensure they felt confident delivering the program.

A group of 24 senior leaders attended the first session. While the VP and her team had anticipated a slow rollout to the rest of the organization, the participating leaders were so enthusiastic about the experience that they insisted BCE be rolled out for all credit union leaders within 2 months.

To date, over 1,000 of the credit union’s 1,400 leaders have voluntarily attended BCE.

Results

The impact has been magnetic. “What has taken me most by surprise is the demand for more and the dedication to communicating better. We have leaders who have asked to return to class because they feel that they need one more practice day with their peers of having better conversations,” said the VP. “The demand is high and attendees are constantly asking us what else we have to offer.”

The impact has not just been on other leaders — the VP has experienced it herself.

“As the VP of a brand-new department at a large organization, I needed (and still do) all of the support I could get. I truly credit our CCL success manager with coaching and encouraging me, challenging my own limiting beliefs, and supporting me through this journey,” said the VP. “One of the most surprising impacts we’ve seen has been how leaders who thought they were going to a program to learn how to get their people to do their jobs better come out of it having become more self-aware, with a better understanding of their own leadership opportunities for development and better equipped to lead. Another important impact is the connections leaders make with each other because of BCE, and their willingness to support and coach each other long after leaving the classroom.”

By the Numbers

Meaningful Impact

The VP reports that she and her team hear of leaders who are going back to their teams and asking for a reset on how they’ve been leading.

“One of my favorite stories is of a direct report who did not know that their leader was going to the BCE training. That leader came back and began to implement the learnings by truly listening and asking powerful questions. The direct report could not figure out what had happened to change this leader’s communication style. So the direct report resorted to checking the leader’s calendar to try to figure out what could possibly have happened to instigate this big of a change. It’s stories like this that make me feel so grateful that a meaningful shift is happening — one person at a time,” reported the VP.

To help the development stick, the credit union intends to make BCE mandatory for all newly hired or promoted leaders. The credit union also plans to include CCL Passport content in their leadership onboarding program and include BCE communication competencies in job descriptions. The credit union is currently exploring delivering digital Passport content to support the development of all 8,000+ employees.

“CCL has been a consistent support system for our small team. From the beginning, CCL has been careful to truly understand the needs of the organization as well as the goals of leadership development. They’ve been very responsive and supportive for the entire time we have worked together, always providing timely updates to content and suggestions that expand our mindset of what is possible. CCL Passport has equipped us to scale true impact very quickly. We would not be where we are today without CCL,” concluded the VP.

Participants Say

The post How a Regional Credit Union Scaled Leadership Development to Thousands With a Team of 2 appeared first on CCL.

Government leaders today face an array of challenges, which we explore, along with the implications for development, below.

Top Challenges of Government Leaders vs. Business Leaders

Do leaders in the public sector face different challenges from their private sector counterparts? If so, do those differences alter the skills and behaviors required for good leadership? How might these differences impact leader development? For decades, our research team has been working to understand which skills leaders in different fields need most to succeed.

To answer these questions, our researchers studied 1,500 US federal government civilian leaders and a sample of more than 500 private sector business leaders who attended our leadership programs over 5 years. We found that leaders from both sectors named similar leadership challenges and prioritized them in parallel, for the most part. Here’s what we found were the top challenges in government vs. the private sector:

However, we also noted that the unique setting and context of the public sector lead to subtle, but very real and noteworthy, differences, too.

A deeper look at the data shows that the government environment impacts some of the challenges its leaders face. In particular, many government leaders feel acute financial and constitutional constraints that may impact their ability to motivate employees, navigate fiscal concerns, deal with problem employees, and drive organizational change innovation in a traditional environment with complex regulations and bureaucracy.

These key differences alter how public sector leaders should behave, the skills they need to succeed, and the development necessary to help them meet those challenges.

4 Skills Government Leaders Need to Succeed

To understand the skills government leaders need to be successful in an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA), we conducted additional research, based on an analysis of leadership effectiveness data from more than 16,000 managers working in the government sector who attended our leadership programs over a period of several years.

As noted in our white paper, we found 4 skills most critical for government leaders’ success:

• Leading employees;
• Leading change;
• Developing participative management skills; and
• Understanding boundaries and how to span them.

We also found that the ability to put people at ease is the leadership competency most highly rated in terms of importance among the government leaders we studied.

Government Leaders: Strengths

Our research shows government sector managers are skilled in several important areas, such as resourcefulness, straightforwardness, and composure, as well as building and mending relationships, decisiveness, and doing whatever it takes.

Understanding differences is another strong point of government leaders. Those who are able do so are seen as quick to acquire new knowledge, resourceful, and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve agreed-upon goals.

These findings show that government agencies have a group of interpersonally skilled, intelligent, and committed leaders — a powerful asset on which to build.

Government Leaders: Challenge Areas

3 Top Priorities for Government Leadership Development

Clearly, government leaders are recognized for their commitment, service to the nation, and unwavering dedication to their mission. However, these same leaders fall short in several important areas. These are the biggest government leadership challenges that our researchers uncovered, and increasing capacity in these ways should be a top priority for leader development in the government sector.

1. Leading Employees

Our research shows that leading employees is something managers learn from a variety of experiences during their careers. Yet while leading employees was seen as the most important competency for government leaders, it was rated as next to last, in terms of leader effectiveness.

Leading employees in the public sector is highly challenging, and government leaders can benefit from further development in the key skills required to create direction, alignment, and commitment among their employees. Core skills in this arena include identifying and hiring talented staff, delegating and following up, and developing employees.

Agencies that seek to retain their top talent and develop them in this area often focus on identification and development of high-potential employees, making sure they have training and opportunities that offer them a broad and deep foundation for moving forward within the organization.

2. Responding to and Managing Change

Change management was rated as important by more than half of those who responded in our study, but was in the bottom half of the leadership competencies in terms of effectiveness.

Government sector leaders can learn more about responding to and managing change and can develop a more participative leadership style. This means placing greater emphasis on involving others in decision-making and getting more input before taking action. These are skills that can be developed through training initiatives focused on enhancing self-awareness and by working with a coach over time.

Developmental assignments are the linchpin for leaders with the confidence to manage change. Assignments that are outside of their primary technical area provide a different perspective. They can see how their technical area fits into the greater whole, so they can better understand and manage change across the organization.

3. Providing Cross-Organizational Experiences to Increase Boundary Spanning

Too narrow a functional or departmental orientation is the most likely reason for managers in government to derail.

Leaders at all levels can encourage the development of this leadership competency by providing opportunities for their direct reports and high-potential leaders to reach outside their own functional or departmental experiences. A diversity of experiences (different assignments, developmental relationships, classroom training) can round out skills and broaden perspectives, reducing the possibility of derailment.

Government leaders who seek to remain in their own silo are doomed to obsolescence. Without access to additional resources — even when unit performance or challenges merit those investments — leaders may need to collaborate even more intently and effectively with peers to accomplish the mission. That’s why it’s critical that government leaders are able to collaborate across boundaries.

Participative management encourages the involvement of employees at all levels of the organization to create resources through relationships and organizational synergies. Often, this includes increasing collaboration and communication across agency and departmental silos.

Implications for Leadership Development of Government Leaders

In a VUCA environment, government organizations can’t afford to put resources into generalized leadership development and simply hope they’ll achieve the right outcomes.

Instead, well-targeted leader development initiatives are essential to close critical competency gaps and ensure individual and organizational success in the public sector. Effective and well-trained government leaders will be able to meet the nation’s needs, manage the work, and find innovative and effective solutions to complex challenges.

Using our research on government leaders as a starting point, public sector agencies and organizations have the opportunity to reassess their current leadership capacity and can begin focused efforts to develop skills their leaders need, both today and for the future.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

We’ve been delivering leadership development programs for public sector employees for decades. We can help individuals, agencies, and departments work together to overcome government leadership challenges. Learn more about our GSA-approved leadership programs for individual development, or partner with the experts in our government leadership development practice.

The post Creating Tomorrow’s Government Leaders: An Overview of Top Government Leadership Challenges appeared first on CCL.