A management programme built with a business school. The content was good. The real dial mover was a hundred days of work on problems the executive committee actually cared about.
A leadership programme for the company's managers, with credible content. We developed it with a business school, and the content was good.
Good content on its own rarely moves a business. Most leadership programmes run beside the work, not inside it. Managers learn in a classroom, executives read about potential in a report, and nobody above the programme has a stake in what happens next.
So the question became: how do we build sponsorship into the design itself, so the executives own a piece of the outcome?
I asked the CEO what issues were keeping him up at night. The executive committee turned them into a list of strategic projects: real problems the business needed solved.
Managers chose their projects and worked in teams. For a hundred days, their sponsor supplied the budget and removed the blockages.
Each team presented to the executive committee, and the executives rated each team's effort in a session I facilitated.
Projects went into implementation with the team that had done the work, even when the job had become so cross-functional that, on paper, they were the last group you would choose.
In the rating sessions, one executive would ask another about a manager who had impressed them. Not long afterwards, that manager would be promoted. The executives weren't reading about potential in a report. They had watched it for a hundred days, and they had a stake in the result because each of them had sponsored a project.
The people who find the answer are the ones who care most about making it work.
When each executive sponsors a piece of the real work, a leadership programme stops belonging to L&D and starts belonging to the business. That is the difference between a programme people attend and one the organisation protects.
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