Leadership Development
for organisations

What makes leadership development stick

Leadership development is more than a seminar or a training course. Development that lasts means leaders do not merely acquire methods; they shift stance, develop new perceptions and integrate insight into their daily leadership work.

The most common reason programmes evaporate has little to do with content. It is the contradiction between what is taught in the module and what the organisation actually rewards. Someone who learns to name mistakes openly, then experiences consequences for doing exactly that in the next quarterly review, will not apply the method – however good the training was.

Every programme therefore starts with clarifying context: which leadership behaviour does your organisation in fact reward? Which decisions run counter to the stated leadership principles? Where do structures need to change so the desired behaviour becomes possible at all? These questions are uncomfortable, and they are the precondition for a programme to achieve more than good atmosphere.

What is on offer

Albath Consulting designs leadership development as a tailored learning architecture – a considered concept for your specific challenges:

• Leadership workshops and impulses – on leading through change, decision culture, feedback and learning culture, and working with resistance.
• Team development for leadership teams – clarifying roles, strengthening collaboration, making unspoken conflict workable.
• Blended learning designs – combining in-person modules, short online units, peer consulting and accompanying one-to-one coaching.
• Development programmes for emerging leaders – structured development paths, often following a development centre.
• Transition support – accompanying leaders into new roles, particularly the move from expert to leadership responsibility.
• Board work – developing supervisory boards, advisory boards and Verwaltungsräte in their effectiveness as a body.

How a programme is built

An effective programme follows no fixed number of modules, but one principle: there must be practice between learning units, and that practice must come back into the group.

A typical twelve-month design: a kick-off with the sponsor to clarify goals, three to four two-day in-person modules, peer consulting groups of three or four people meeting independently in between, one or two individual coaching sessions per participant, and a transfer module at the end where concrete undertakings are reviewed.

Between modules, each participant works on a real undertaking from their own area of responsibility – not a case study, but an actual change that is due anyway. This is the point where development and business stop competing for time.

Leadership and culture change

Leadership development and culture change are closely linked. When organisations want to change their culture, it begins with the people who lead – but it does not end there. Culture is what happens when nobody is watching, and it is shaped far more by incentive systems, appraisal processes and promotion decisions than by published principles.

I accompany organisations across the DACH region through that connection: leadership behaviour that shapes culture, and culture work that strengthens leadership. In practice this often means a programme contains not only modules but also the recommendation to adjust an appraisal system or change how a committee decides.

Measuring impact

Participant satisfaction is not evidence of impact. Indicators are therefore agreed with the sponsor at the outset: employee survey results in the areas concerned, turnover, decision cycle times, changes in 360-degree feedback before and after, internal succession rates.

Not all of this can be attributed causally to a development programme, and I do not claim otherwise. But a programme that touches none of these measures has not earned its budget – and that question is worth asking beforehand, not afterwards.

For corporates and the Mittelstand

My clients come from large corporates such as Robert Bosch, NORDEX SE and SEG Automotive – and equally from mid-sized and owner-managed companies. The requirements differ considerably.

In corporates the issue is usually fit: a programme has to align with an existing competency model, slot into global curricula and work in more than one language. In the Mittelstand the starting point is typically different – no people development function, no academy, little experience with external programmes, but short decision paths and the ability to get very concrete very quickly.

For such organisations I start small: one format for the top leadership circle that has to prove itself before being extended. What works gets built out; what does not gets dropped rather than pushed through.

When a different format fits better

Where an individual leader has a specific concern, executive coaching is the more individual and usually faster route. Where it first needs to be established who brings which potential, an assessment or development centre comes first. And where a leadership team does not work together, no programme for everyone will help – targeted team development with that specific team will.

For engagements focused on the Swiss market, the corresponding content is available at albath-consulting.ch.