Tools for leaders

“We should take care not to make the intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve.” Albert Einstein

For The Watson Practice this is all about working with the leadership team. Creating some space for action and opening an improvement dialogue within the team.

As with how we approach coaching our leadership work is highly personalised.

To help build meaningful improvement in leadership team performance we need to understand the purpose, strategy, culture, and customer experience of their business – the current priorities and a sense of the current reality.

We start with an in-depth conversation with the CEO and then a non-attributable conversation with each member of the Leadership Team.

We present our findings back to the Team and then we’ll get together as a team – talk about where we are at and how the team currently sees and agrees on opportunities for improvement. And then we will collaborate on designing the first things to explore and act on.

All our clients are experienced leaders often with extensive knowledge – so, we don’t teach leadership, work off cliched models or waste time on exploring the latest theoretical approaches.

We work with the team in the room, the individual people in the room in a practical and experiential way. Stimulating real conversation and practical outcomes.

We don’t advocate any particular leadership philosophy or model (we’ll adapt to yours if you have an established one) we do have experience with lots of customisable tools and techniques to choose form and we’ll even build specific ones for your needs if necessary.

In practice…

Working with the Global CEO, we designed and created the means to bring together the 58 members of the global leadership team of a top-tier professional service business, to collaborate and design their future firm.  We used the past, present, and future milestones of the firm, strategic priorities, and performance data – and designed a series of conversations based around compelling visuals and graphics. This helped the leadership team address and agree on a consistent ways of working on clients, people, and operations. The visual approach proved very effective in bridging cultural and language differences.

Beyond the workings of the team on the business – emotional intelligence is the most frequently raised specific element of leadership skills. We are well equipped and qualified to facilitate an exploration of the emotional competencies with the whole team and with individuals.

This is currently a powerful and popular learning and development need for senior managers.