Partner with Your Executives to Co-design their own Leadership Development Program

Jerry Pico, Head of Learning & Development, Daiichi Sankyo

For many business and human resources (HR) leaders, the idea of letting an organization’s business leaders co-design their own leadership development program is still a radical idea – when I introduced it in my organization, it was met with a lot of skepticism, “You want to do what?!”, and, “Why would you want to do that – they don’t know anything about how to do that?!”. However, when implemented at the right time with the right people – it can have an amazing impact on your organization’s leaders, culture and business results!

The idea came to me several years ago while working for a DAX 30 company and designing a leadership intervention to support a global culture transformation. During a conversation with a senior executive I mentioned that I’d be speaking at a conference of HR leaders in the coming weeks – he made this request of me, “Can you please tell your peers that before they design a new process or program that the business needs to implement, to ask them if they need it want it or even have the capacity to implement it.” That comment stuck with me ever since, and I’ve shared it with my peers on numerous occasions.

HR often develops new practices and programs for compliance reasons or to improve a people process without really considering how it will impact the business, which is why I’ve involved the business in all of the programs I’ve developed for them ever since we had the conversation. I like to think about it as working in product development and marketing!

So, when I was asked to create a leadership development program for our executives three years ago – I decided to take that practice to a new level. The circumstances were perfect for this kind of intervention:

• It had been four years since the executives had had any kind of programmatic development as a team

• The company was going through a transformation in order to shift its market position and needed its leaders to behave differently

• We work in the pharmaceutical industry, which is highly specialized and several leadership diagnostics we conducted indicated that we hired experts and then moved them into leadership roles

Initially, I proposed the idea to my manager, the CHRO, and subsequently to the CEO and CFO – they all approved and let me pitch it to the company’s senior leaders, the Executive Management Team (EMT, n=25). Initially, they all liked the concept, but were skeptical about how it might actually work. Over the next few months, I delivered two more presentations in which I fleshed out the details and began priming them. Eventually, I won them over to the idea, and began working on our collaboration.

"The leaders needed to find ways to develop their team members and trust them to make decisions on their own"

The dominant management culture at the time was very top-down and directive – however, I knew this wouldn’t be sustainable as the organization transformed and the environment became much more complex. The leaders needed to find ways to develop their team members and trust them to make decisions on their own – basically, they needed to shift from transactional operations’ managers to become more people developers who, could give and receive feedback and empower their teams, so they could focus on developing and implementing the new strategy. The other major issue is that they needed to learn to trust each other and function more collaboratively as a leadership team.

With the support of the CEO and CFO, I facilitated a series of workshops (ca. 3.5 days) with them over the next nine months, and together we designed a multi-year program consisting of five core modules with several supporting or bridging modules. The executives chose the topics for their development and self-selected into teams for each module to co-design them as follows:

1. Self-awareness (Mindfulness)

a. Coaching Certification Program

2. Building Trust & Effective Teams

3. Feedback & People Development

4. Being Inclusive

5. Developing a Mindset to Embrace New Ways of Working

The modules were originally scheduled to run for 1 week in a F2F offsite every 4 to 5 months over a period of 2.5 years, and were adapted to a longer intermittent virtual format once the pandemic hit.

The ways this worked in practice were that the team of executives who responsible for a specific module, developed the OKRs and content for the module, which our team turned into a Request for Proposal (RFP) and chose a short-list of potential vendors to deliver the program, then the team members were responsible to review the proposals that were submitted, attend the vendor pitches and choose the vendor to deliver the specific module, they also worked with the vendor to refine the content, activities, and choose a venue (when F2F) or timing of sessions when virtual, e.g., 4 hours every other Friday afternoon for two months, etc.

Pharmaceutical

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