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.
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.
Keynote, talks, conference design & chairing, event moderator
