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HDA OVERVIEW
HDA Case Studies

Hi-Potentials Career Self Ownership – Professional Services

Background

The organisation was growing rapidly via continuous acquisitive and organic expansion. Underpinning this growth with a solid leadership development strategy was considered key to the organisation's future commercial success; specifically, the organisation was seeking leaders who align to a recently-developed Group Leadership Model which had been validated both internally and externally.

In addition to validation, there had been a positive internal response, and subscription to the governing principles of the Group Leadership Model, which comprised four key elements:

Governing Principles (‘’Heart’’ – comprising individual motivations and values)
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Capacity (‘’Head’’ – comprising individual intellect & traits)
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Skills, Knowledge & Experience (‘’Hands’’ – comprising individual experience toolkits)
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Individual, team, level outputs

It was envisaged that this model would directly impact recruitment, performance management and individual development decisions across the organisation.

The Group Leadership Model in turn generated a comprehensive set of leadership role profiles. This structure in turn identified four streams of core leadership across the Group: Business Leadership, Growth Leadership, Programme Leadership and Professional/Specialist Leadership; the implication being that optimum individual career progress paths can be tracked within the Group, and this provided a highly transparent and compelling framework for individual career development and for succession planning.

HDA was asked to support the Emerging Leaders Programme, with participation following an internal talent identification process, culminating in divisional nominations of candidates with potential to develop over the next 3-5 years. Success criteria for inclusion on this programme included performance, pro-activeness in developing others, and so on.

Group leadership development programmes were comprehensive, and comprised an integrated development curriculum, including a broad range of elective programme elements, development centre diagnostics, internal coaching, 360 degree surveys, experience-based development, etc.; with both in-house and external vendor coordination of the various diagnostic and developmental elements.

Whilst programmes had been comprehensively developed, it was believed that a gap remained in individual expectations around career progression. Developing an active dialogue around ‘’where do I want to be, and where am I going’’ needed to be added to the personal development mix. The objective was to develop personal ownership (belief & buy-in) of personal career progression within the Group.

 

Our Approach

We set out to achieve the following personal career development objectives for participants on the client's Emerging Leaders Programme:

• to generate a clear expectation of the need for personal ownership of participants’ career development plans, and to create personal accountability for individual leadership and career growth;
• to establish a strong ‘opportunity cost’ argument, to create an awareness of the need to make best use of opportunities arising or created by individuals for personal career development – the principal objective being: ‘how can I make best use of the resources and opportunities available within the Group, whilst I am with the Group, to develop myself at a rate that I would be unlikely to develop myself outside of the Group?’;
• to identify where participants are now in terms of level of accountability, and where they want to be (linked to the client's four role profile categories), to generate thinking around optimal career development paths within the four client leadership categories;
• to focus participants on their specific personal strengths and weaknesses, with a view to them actively identifying their personal marketability opportunities and areas for development;
• to create a personal marketability inventory, leading to a competency-based ‘personal brand’ which will be of value both within the client, within the framework of its role profile categories, and potentially outside of the client, (the opportunity cost argument being that the client would retain its leadership talent whilst that talent continues to enjoy developmental and career progression opportunities within the Group – a strong theme we wanted to generate with this group to encourage personal ownership around the taking of lateral career development opportunities);
• to create an awareness of the range of formal and informal career development resources and opportunities available within the Group; ranging eg. from formal development programme elements, to informal opportunities to ‘drop-into’ and participate in career enhancing projects, etc.
• to provide practical coaching and guidance on becoming an effective networker within the Group, and developing a 20 second CV and Elevator Speech which supported these
• to provide practical coaching and guidance on creating a personal brand
• to provide practical coaching and guidance on what success means in each participants’ role (making an impact in current and next roles), and making the most of the first 100 days in any new role

 

Outcomes

HDA’s Personal Career Development Programme took the form of individual and workshop-based career coaching sessions for participants on the Emerging Leaders Programme, including focus on the following: .

1. Career Self-Ownership - opportunity cost exercises

2.Personal career ‘marketability inventory’ exercises, leading to the development of a draft ‘personal brand’ document

3. Preparation for internal interviews and development centres

4. Managing and coping with career changes : lateral and upward moves

5. Personal Branding for Success

6. New ways of working

7. The importance of self-promotion

8. Personal values

9. Building an expert reputation

10. Developing credible story-telling

11. Effective networking and stakeholder mapping

12. Making an impact

13. Understanding the de-railers of success

14. Effective influencing

15. Making the most of your first 100 days in your next role

Feedback from the Emerging Leaders group was broadly that the HDA intervention had assisted them to add perspective and self-ownership to their further development, whilst embracing the broad HIGH-SPEED developmental opportunities provided by the client.

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For further information: call 08452 60 95 40 or email info@hda.co.uk

To discuss potential HDA contributions, please contact us at email: info@hda.co.uk