OPDC’s approach to building leadership skills and effectiveness has been developed and proven over more than 20 years. We are constantly fine-tuning; adding new content and using new techniques to engage clients, but at the heart of our success for clients are four pillars:
- We use our clients’ real and current challenges: people, strategy, operations, and change related as focus points for learning. This enables delegates to ‘live the learning’ and apply it do their day-to-day work. This is often the link to measurable ROI and business value; showing that the cost of our engagement is repaid many times over.
- We tailor design and delivery to resonate with each clients specific context. Our leadership development programmes and leadership capacity building engagements use tried and tested delivery techniques and content. But each client has specific challenges and specific needs, so we work with them to co-create interventions. We listen deeply to what’s being said and quickly tease out underlying root causes of problems. This collaboration brings together the client’s understanding of their business realities, and our understanding of the behaviours, activities and techniques that make leaders successful and effective learning techniques. This process of co-creation allows clients to retain ownership of their leadership capability and development and enables them to utilise their own resources or other third-party experts where appropriate. This way, clients work with us where it makes sense rather than feel unduly dependent on us.
- The various leadership behaviours, activities, tools and techniques we include across all our work with clients are clearly and consistently connected to each other. Programme delegates, coachees and workshop and event attendees learn from and apply a common set of behaviours and skills. Not only does this help with reinforcement, it underpins the creation of a common understanding of leadership across the organisation and creates an expectation across the workforce of how to engage with colleagues and address business challenges successfully.
- We aim for sustained learning and behaviour change – not just a short-term impact. We are very aware of how learning and application of new skills can dissipate over a short period of time; to counter this common training outcome, we embed learning sustainability and reinforcement into our designs. Similarly, from the standpoint of business improvement, we know how solutions created in workshop and event environments often fail to be enacted. So we ensure that meaningful and achievable action plans, with appropriate accountabilities, are outputs of the interventions we facilitate for clients.
All our work across leadership development programmes, senior leader capacity building, workshops and event facilitation is built on these four pillars.
Contact us if you’d like to discuss your leadership challenges and know more about how our approach can work for you.