Leaders of the Future

THE FUTURE ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE AND IT’S TIME FOR A NEW BREED OF LEADER TO EMERGE

The recent economic crisis has placed leadership and how it is deployed in the spotlight like never before. It has also starkly demonstrated that many organizations simply did not have robust enough plans to survive without significant trauma. For many traditional leaders the last few years have simply been a challenge too far, as they have been caught holding on to false assumptions about how the future will unfold. Those in leadership roles now find themselves in many cases leading organizations that are bearing the scars of the recent recession. Their people are feeling battered and bruised and, in many cases, fearful of any more change that might threaten their livelihood.

To explore these ideas and to understand how our LOF programs can be shaped to suit your organization, please contact us. We will be delighted to help you build an exciting program that delivers real value today and secures the future of your organization.

In this video, Malcolm Follos explains how Sensei’s innovative Leaders of the Future program will contribute a real and sustainable R.O.I. for your organization

The Sensei Approach

To help leaders respond to this challenge in a smart and intelligent way we have developed Sensei’s ‘Leaders of the Future’ service, an innovative and cost-effective way to develop future leaders in today’s cost conscious climate. Our approach will:

Deliver the sustainable value needed now to help fuel the growth of your organization
Embed a culture of candor that will unleash pent up enthusiasm and focus energy on improving performance
Provide a leadership pipeline that helps you future proof your organization

The recent global recession has taught us all some painful lessons and we have to take these on board if we are to ensure we have any future at all.

Developing leaders of the future is always an important but rarely an urgent priority for non-executive directors, CEOs and their executive teams. In fact, in the current economic climate it is common for this activity to be considered as just part of the overall training and development budget and this, as evidence shows, is one of the first budgets to be cut when the cost squeeze is on. Rather than fight this reality we have developed a more novel and, we believe, more realistic line of attack to develop the leaders your organization needs to future proof your business.

We have helped clients such as Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, British American Tobacco, Maersk and Homeserve to create leadership development programs that deliver real value, as well as a leadership pipeline that helps future proof their organization.

HIGHLY TAILORED DESIGN THAT RECOGNIZES OPERATIONAL AND STRATEGIC REALITY

This service draws on our award winning global consultancy skills and the latest training and facilitation techniques developed while supporting some of the world’s leading organizations. Our starting point is to work with you to co-create and design a highly tailored approach that recognizes your current operational and strategic reality. Your world view and the value you need to deliver to give you an acceptable ROI guides what we do and how we will do it. Our aim is to ensure that the investment you will make in developing your future leaders is at least self-funding and preferably value-generative.

EXAMPLES OF ‘LEARNING THREADS’ WE CAN DEPLOY IN YOUR DESIGN

Sensei Breakthrough Coaching
Leadership Journeys
Community Value Projects
Strategic Deep Dives
Participant Mentoring
Operational Value Performance Projects
Study Sessions
Participant Skill Share Sessions
Visit and Learn Experiences
Team Stretch Activities
Modular Highly Interactive Workshops
Culminating in a ‘Leaders of the Future Conference’ – the participants’ chance to share what they have achieved with your executive team.

of the challenges your organization will face in the future and mix it with our view of the challenges you may face. This approach, derived from helping some of the world’s leading organizations, will enable us to develop a unique and bespoke design that we can be confident will really take hold in your organization’s DNA.

A co-designed approach of this kind is a long way from the ‘plug and play’ programs that are now so common in the leadership development and training marketplace. In the Sensei design our consulting expertise complements our training and facilitation skills to ensure your leaders are exposed to a learning experience that really resonates and prepares them for the future.

The duration and the ‘learning threads’ deployed will vary to suit your organization’s reality, degree of ambition and current operating constraints. Topics covered may be as diverse as:

The art of leadership and what history can really teach us
How to liberate the latent passion for change and tap the hidden productivity that is discretionary effort
How to lead global, geographically dispersed, virtually connected teams
What style of leadership has succeeded in your organization in the past and what the future requires
The role of the leader in reshaping and changing the prevailing operating culture to make it fit for the future

Making the most of the globally connected, network savvy and internet enabled talent that is the current generation of graduates entering your organization.

LEADERS OF THE FUTURE AT A GLANCE…

Sensei’s ‘Leaders of the Future’ service has elements of both give and take. Each participant will be exposed to leading edge personal development experiences that will equip them for life. In return they will be expected to give something back, both to your organization and to the community.

Each student will have to complete at least one ‘Leadership in Action’ project that will be scoped and selected at the start and designed to deliver significant value to your organization. They will also take a leading role in designing and completing a project that is of genuine benefit to local residents.

In this way Sensei’s innovative ‘Leaders of the Future’ service will contribute a real and sustainable ROI for your organization as well as providing a positive impact in the local community.

CASE STUDY – BENEFITS AND RETURN ON INVESTMENT

One of our International clients headquartered in the UK had a substantial and growing business in Asia. They recognized that if they could develop their country leaders to a point where they could take on a regional EVP role, this would save them the cost of their current expatriate packages of around USD 750k each. The design we co-created took 8 country GMs through a 12 month learning experience and produced three leaders capable of taking up EVP positions. The ROI was never in doubt.

In this video Richard Ferguson, Malcolm Follos and Tim Vernon of Sensei UKE Ltd. share their thoughts about the key differences between developing Leaders in mature and emerging markets.

WHITE PAPER: 2020 LEADERS – HOW ARE THEY GOING TO BE DIFFERENT FROM THE LEADERS IN THE PAST?

Excerpt from the Sensei White Paper

by Malcolm Follos, Managing Director, Sensei UKE Ltd.

To request the full report, please click here.

Executive Summary

At Sensei we are committed to helping our clients gain a deeper understanding of how they can use Human Performance to deliver strategically significant results. In this White Paper we focus on the challenge of developing a talent pipeline and examine how the best organizations are identifying and developing Leaders of the Future.

To help us gain insights into the challenges organizations face in this space, we interviewed leaders from a number of organizations in different sectors: Global Manufacturing Companies, Public Sector, Professional Services Firms,

European Facilities Management Providers, Global Engineering & Technology Services and Financial Services Organizations. Each leader participated in a confidential, structured interview and the insights they provided have been used to calibrate our own thinking throughout this paper.

To complement the current leaders’ views, we also interviewed a number of recently graduated young professionals from a similar range of organizations to get their perspective on this topic. We compared their aspirations with what current leaders think and drew some conclusions that can benefit all leaders who are wondering how best to develop their talent.

One of the key conclusions is that, whilst many good intentions abound and the topic is clearly important, it is rarely seen as urgent. Many of today’s leaders seem keen to focus their scarce time and energy on responding to the current economic environment and the operational realities this is creating. This lure of the short term is understandable, however there is a big opportunity being missed, we fear.

The young leaders we spoke to are watching, waiting and are keen to step up and take leadership responsibilities. This is an untapped resource that can be deployed to tackle current performance issues whilst at the same time helping to future-proof your organization. This energy needs to be used well, even more so in the current climate, which demands radical actions, new ways of thinking and new ways of working.