How Organisational Design Training for leaders differs from leadership training

"The system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance."

- W. Edwards Deming

Leadership training often centres around leadership styles (servant leadership), one-on-one coaching (supporting individual employees), team archetypes and personalities, or team-level productivity and efficiency. While each of these are important, teams working in a broken system - misaligned incentive structures, unclear company-wide priorities, inconsistent values - will consistently underperform regardless of how much leadership or team-level coaching they receive.

Organisational Design Training focuses on getting the systems and culture right first. This not only improves team and organisation productivity and efficiency, but sets your leaders and teams up to get more out of traditional leadership training.

What is Organisational Designer Training?

Organisational Design is the ability of your organisation’s leaders to intentionally shape your organisation’s culture, systems and practices. As a learning organisation, you will be capable of adapting to changing circumstances - both those in the next quarter and on the distant horizon. Our Organisational Designer Training for Leaders focuses on:

• Seeing the Whole. As a team of senior leaders, we help you zoom out and understand the interconnected layers of your organisation, how they interact, and how and where to intervene.

• Creating an Extraordinary Community. For better and worse, organisational culture is resilient and enduring. We train your teams how to continually shape an extraordinary culture.

• Making Organisational and Customer Priorities Clear. We help you integrate techniques for understanding your market and customer, and design decision-making and prioritisation systems so your teams can cut through the noise of day-to-day demands and focus on what matters.

• Optimising for Efficiency & Quality. We help your leaders design systems and structures that produce efficiency and quality so your individual teams are set up to succeed.

How We Train Leaders to Be Organisational Designers

We recognise that each organisation's context is unique, and so is that of each of its leaders. We design each training programme based on what will have the most immediate and enduring impact.

• We prefer to start with an assessment. Organisational Designer Training begins with a compressed assessment of your organisation's capabilities and maturity in each of the nine organisational dynamics, to understand where training investment spend will have the greatest impact.

• We tailor our Organisational Designer Training to your unique needs. Our training modules span complexity theory to psychological safety, and value stream analysis to organisational design. We adapt these to your team's need.

• We develop Organisational Design Pods. Shaping culture and systems is an ongoing effort, and not something we believe can or should be outsourced. We help your teams establish a cadence of working together on organisational dynamics challenges, so they continue the work beyond our engagement.

• We rigorously assess the impact of our training and workshops. Through baselined metrics, surveys, and 1:1 interviews, we focus on rate of adoption, speed to competency and personal confidence. We can also support organisations in assessing the ongoing impact of our training or initiatives undertaken by the organisations.

How to Get Started

Organisational Designer Training isn't right for every organisation. Our process starts with an introductory call and virtual whiteboard session to better understand your needs. When off-the-shelf training courses or bounded workshops are more valuable, we'll point you at the experts who can provide it (even when it's not us).