The Challenge

The organization wanted to strengthen leadership, but the question was not simply which leadership training should be purchased or which management concepts should be taught.

Leaders were working in different departments, managing different teams, and dealing with different operational realities. At the same time, they were all part of the same organization and needed a clearer shared understanding of what leadership should mean in that environment.

The challenge was therefore to develop an approach that created common expectations without ignoring the practical experiences and needs of the people who were already leading teams every day.

What We Did

Instead of beginning with a predefined leadership model, the work started with a World Café involving team leaders and managers from across the organization.

The facilitated discussions explored what leaders considered important for the company, their teams, their own leadership responsibilities, and the way different parts of the organization worked together.

The results provided the foundation for an organization-specific leadership approach. Rather than simply adopting an external framework, the organization could connect established leadership principles with the issues and expectations that had emerged from its own leaders.

Based on those findings, a leadership curriculum was developed and translated into a structured development program. Approximately 60 leaders participated in the resulting leadership development activities.

What Changed

Leadership development became connected to the organization itself rather than being treated as a stand-alone training activity.

Leaders had a shared framework for discussing their responsibilities, while the development program addressed topics that had emerged from their own organizational environment.

Over time, the work influenced how leaders approached their teams, how they interacted with other departments, and how they thought about their responsibility toward employees and customers.

The process also created something that a generic training program would have struggled to provide: a leadership approach that leaders could recognize as belonging to their own organization.

What We Learned

Leadership development should not begin with the assumption that the organization already knows exactly what its leaders need.

Leaders themselves hold important information about the pressures, expectations, relationships, and organizational barriers they experience every day. Bringing those perspectives into the design of a leadership approach makes the development work more relevant and creates stronger ownership.

External leadership concepts can still be valuable. But they become more useful when they are connected to the organization’s own context instead of simply being placed on top of it.