ABOUT FAIRLEAD

Fairlead is a consultancy borne from 20 years of seeing and doing the hard work helping leaders and organizations to change in order to meet ever increasing demands. Contexts were unique, technology was different, and specific challenges were diverse. But three things remained consistent: Leadership always matters, cultures are really hard to change, and any transformation effort that did not put people first would fail. We have distilled our collective experiences across countries, industries and organization life-phases, to bring leading edge solutions that help organizations and their leaders get healthy and fit to win in this exciting and complex century.

 
Mandy Chooi

ABOUT MANDY

Founder & Principle of Fairlead

Mandy is an organization and leadership transformation consultant passionate about building great leaders who lead deep change that truly matters. She has strong business and cultural acumen from working with leaders in large multinationals, including tech, professional services, manufacturing, banking and FMCGs and Start-ups in the US, Europe and Asia on their unique journeys.     

The two main passions in her work are Purpose and Change.

Purpose: Helped leaders and organizations to be grounded in and leading from their purpose. Mandy created highly customized experiential programs that effectively resulted in lasting personal and organization change in leaders in several global organizations.

Change: Worked with leaders to transform their organization culture, recognizing that shifting complex human systems such as culture is beyond conventional change management. Created an approach that is constantly adaptive and aligning.

As a coach, Mandy helps individual leaders build a strong foundation based on Purpose and Values, and enables the client to dare beyond what's comfortable.

Some she has provided value to include large organizations such as ING Bank, Axiata, Uber, Danske Bank, as well as Start-ups and rapid Scale-ups.  

At ING, as the Global Head of Talent, and the Head of People Strategy & Innovation, her impact included a new agile leadership brand and a custom program to bring out individual leadership purpose, to achieve authentic and courageous leadership with the right skills for the bank’s new strategic direction. And a performance culture based on a core of values and behaviors co-created with all employees. Global roles at Honeywell, SC Johnson and Motorola achieved similar impact.

 

SOME EXAMPLES OF OUR WORK

The client is a large organization heavily disrupted by technology, global trends and consumer tastes. We worked together at the beginning of a journey to transform from a culture of top down, hierarchical leadership style to one characterized by experimentation, agility and empowerment. They needed a way to rapidly build leader capability and change the performance culture.

Fairlead helped by 1) co-creating an innovative performance management approach that emphasized personal stretch development and 2) designing and delivering a customized leadership development program that enabled their top leaders across all their international markets to lead in the new way.

Worked with ING Bank on the Think Forward transformation journey on a variety of initiatives as part of the efforts to build a Performance Culture and an Agile workplace:

  • Creating the Values and Behaviors.
  • Redesigned the top leadership team (Leadership Council) as an extension of the Management Board.
  • Redesigned the performance management philosophy
  • Designed the flagship leadership program (TFLP) to align and accelerate the development of the top 300 leaders.
  • The first TFLP phase focused on Purposeful Leadership.
  • The second TFLP phase takes that further and delves deep into the application of skills that further enable the Agile workplace. [The above was during Mandy’s tenure at ING. Fairlead was chosen to deliver Phase 2 of TFLP to all top leaders.]

The client is a tech firm that needed to radically dial up their speed of innovation. From interviews with a diverse range of stakeholders it became clear that the culture was one of the main barriers. More specifically it was the “nice” and “kind” culture that seemed to make honest open feedback difficult. Also challenging another’s opinion or decision was not easy for everyone, including the senior leaders.

We designed a program for their leaders to become aware of their tendencies, both as individuals and as teams. With the awareness we created exercises based on difficult conversations, Radical Candor (K. Scott), and Conflict as a Thinking Tool. We also prepared the top leaders to not only do and role model these skills, they presented, taught and coached their teams on the same. The engagement scores showed great improvement.

We worked with a large multinational on designing a continuous learning culture supported by a new technology platform. Fairlead designed an innovation bootcamp and brought in a wide diversity of participants from all markets, functions, levels and interests. The experience allowed the group to co-create unique and personalized ways to express what a continuous learning culture looks like, and how to design development journeys for existing business needs.

Innovation and co-creation techniques were used to ensure focus on the user’s journey, and not designing from the function’s perspective. The results were journeys that were a good mix of online/offline, individual/social learning, and learning/teaching.

 

Masterclasses

Masterclasses are in-depth learning bootcamps that bring leading edge thinking and challenge the status quo. They often span 2 or more days of intense, experiential and hands-on experimenting. Intended for practitioners to gain understanding and practical skills to apply new approaches to their work. We customize the specific objectives and content design to the needs of the participants.

Purposeful Leadership for Innovation and Transformation. [Monterrey Institute of Technology and Education (Tecnologico de Monterrey), Leon, MX]

Personal Leadership Purpose – For Personal and Organizational Branding [The House Agency, UK]

How do you get feedback as the boss? Feedback is the best way for already accomplished leaders to keep growing. Yet why is it not happening? [Runs in Europe & Asia]

Constructive dissent and conflict – a vital thinking and teaming skill [Runs in Europe & Asia]

Leading transformation in Complexity. Hint: It is NOT extreme change management! [Runs in Europe]

Co-creation for HR and Corp Functions. The next horizon of effectiveness is to co-create services that are positive employee experiences, and that enable people do their best work easier. [Runs in Europe]

HR Improv – what HR can learn from Improv, comedy, design, and art to innovate better, faster and with more diverse collaborators (not the usual suspects)? [Runs in Europe]

Using storytelling to uncover organizational purpose [Global]

Why are we not collaborating? I want to... why don't they just work with us? Uncovering the underlying reasons that block collaboration [Global]

Designing for FIT - Create and sustain organizations that are principled, grounded and flexible [Global]

Keynote, talks, conference design & chairing, event moderator

Designing a performance culture [International Human Resource Community, 2017]

Performance Culture; Transformation that moves the needle [HR Core Academy, 2017]

Aligning learning and development with business strategy and transformation goals [Connexus Corporate L&D Summit, 2017]

Transforming to a Culture of Purpose and Performance [HRD Summit, 2017]

Making HR Future-fit. HR’s role in digital transformation and the impact of AI on design of work [Frazer Jones, 2018]

Designing adaptable organizations for agility – the ING transformation [CRForum 2018]

Why organizations need Purpose and Self-awareness [Fifteen seconds; Conference for Business Innovation, 2018]

Talent Futures, Executive Knowledge Exchange [iVentiv, 2018]

HR bots: Employee Engagement the AI way [Frazer Jones, 2018]

Chair of Agile Summit 2019 [Corporate Parity, 2019]

An evening with an expert: The Agile Workplace, with Mandy Chooi [Hedley-May, 2019]

The Art of "Yes, and..." in transforming the Learning and Development profession. [L&D Cares, 2020]

Arthan conferences on Future of Work - Building conscious societies of the future. Talk on designing for fit in the 21st century. [Athan conferences, 2020]

Sankalp Global Summit - to create a thriving ecosystem for business-led solutions to achieve the UN SDG Sustainable Development Goals. Workshop on designing the 21st social enterprise. [Sankalp Forums, 2020]

Harman International Asian American Townhall - Talk on creating trust and belonging through giving voice and listening. [Harman Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, 2021]

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