HRD & Training Professionals responsible for:
- Human Resource Development
- Corporate Training/ Education /Succession Planning
- Leadership Development
- Team Development (intact, virtual, ad hoc, cross-cultural teams)
Traditional leadership training methods no longer work. Leaders need new mindsets, global competition demands new behaviors and different skill sets.
Ask yourself:
- Are your current training and development programs answering these challenges?
- Are they achieving sustainable results and increasing engagement?
- Is the learning relevant and transferable?
- Are you being asked to measure the ROI on your training dollars?
Using the ARL methodology you can develop your leaders and solve key business
challenges simultaneously. Because the ARL process focuses on solving actual organizational business challenges, the participants in the programs are not only more committed than they would be to a case study, but they gain the required competencies as they solve their challenge.
To give a sense of an ARL challenge, you might be interested to read the lead-in to a chapter in the book about designing an ARL Leadership Development Program for the top 60 leaders in a newly merged global company.
Read the story
Chapter 2: A Successful Merger (of ARL book referenced later)
“In the early 1990’s George, the Chairman and CEO of a U.S. multinational corporation, decided to go into the coffee business. This idea came to him after he had a particularly delicious coffee dessert. Thus inspired, George sent Raul, a trusted president who was leading one of the businesses, with the company check book to buy enough commercial companies to give George global market share.
Raul set off into what was a new world for him and soon after acquired three companies in the commercial business — one in the USA, one in the Latin America and one in Germany. As each of these companies had also recently expanded by acquiring a company each, the three companies really represented 6 companies — each with its own culture, customers and plants scattered across sixteen different locations in five continents, plus their own products, some competing and some complementary. Adding to the complexity, the presidents of these three companies were of very different nationalities; one was British, one was German and one was Spanish.
George was pleased when he learned that these acquisitions gave his company a respectable market share in a completely new industry and in a gesture of acknowledgement, invited Raul, of Hispanic origin, to become the CEO of this new organization—Global Coffee. Raul accepted the challenge of merging these six companies into one integrated company.
Raul assembled his new team — the three existing presidents plus a VP for Finance and a VP for Human Resources and Organizational Development from the United States. From the start, the Executive Team seemed to do well in its periodic meetings. However, two years later the desired cultural and business process integration across the six companies had still not taken place and the anticipated business synergies were not being realized. Although the Executive Team made sound business decisions, its members’ direct reports and those on the level below them were slow to implement the decisions. There was a general lack of cooperation and no real “buy-in” to the merger. It seems that Executive Team members had not been able to convince their direct reports of the rationale for following through.
Concerned by the situation, Adam, the VP for HR/OD decided to conduct a culture survey. The results confirmed what he had suspected. A number of areas needed attention for the company to prosper: teamwork was poor; trust had to be developed; communications were ineffective; conflicts were not well managed; innovation in strategic thinking and action was lacking; and change management skills and processes had yet to be developed. If Global Coffee were to become a truly global company with the flexibility and ability to leverage all its assets (people, plants, products, processes and customers) quickly, it needed more than the Executive Team’s lip service; the entire organization needed to think and act differently. Major change was required and the team’s direct reports were the key.”
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