Workshops
Workshops and Action-Learning Seminars
We provide a focused suite of services designed to build leadership competencies in your management team while focusing on specific organizational initiatives. This ensures that professional development efforts are aligned with your organization's strategic priorities. This approach also serves to significantly heighten individual awareness, ensuring that individuals view their actions within the broader context of organizational objectives. The result is a more synergistic and highly collaborative team that is capable of consistently delivering superior results.
Workshops in Collaboration with International Institute of Management
Custom Defense Sector Workshops
Welcome to the Workshop
Leading from the Inside Out:
Unleashing the Collaborative Genius of Action-Learning Teams
The ALT model assumes that great knowledge exists in the team and it provides a practical process for tapping into this knowledge. Even more important, the ALT helps ensure that the knowledge of the team is translated into action that makes a real difference for the organization.
---Marshall Goldsmith
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
This comprehensive workshop based on the groundbreaking new book (Wiley, 2006) overturns basic assumptions about operational reality while demonstrating how organizations can diagnose issues and execute on key strategic initiatives. Participants learn how to leverage organizational communities of practice by intentionally cultivating their evolution into strategically focused Action-Learning Teams (ALTs).
OUTCOMES
- Provides four stages for development of strategic initiatives, including the tools, procedures, and leadership qualities needed for aligning organizational core systems in each deployment phase
- Describes how to conduct a concise 'needs assessment' and gather essential preliminary data
- Outlines the creation of innovative ALTs as fluid constructs with minimal need for traditional management controls
- Clarifies how training, policy, communication and structural changes may be required to manage the emerging adaptive system, including the alignment of process with front-line support and reward systems
- Identifies key stakeholders needed to make transition work; key questions to explore; tendencies to avoid; leadership styles and communication tips for each phase of project and organizational alignment
- Practical examples and proven theories are distilled to foster an ongoing culture of innovation that attracts and retains top talent.
Learn more about the Leading From The Inside Out Workshop here.
PRAISE FOR LEADING ORGANIZATIONS FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Leading Organizations from the Inside Out is a great gift to leaders in all three sectors, leading the teams that could transform the enterprise. Action-Learning Teams and After Action Review inspire language and action that can mobilize leaders and teams to build the viable, relevant, and successful organization of the future.
--Frances Hesselbein, Chairman, Leader to Leader Institute
Leading Organizations from the Inside Out gives companies and their leaders critical tools and perspectives that enable them to deal with the fast pace of business in today’s world. It offers an especially effective way to initiate change and develop your people at the same time. Don’t just read this book...apply its principles.
--Bill Owens, President and CEO, Nortel Networks
I have had the opportunity to work with small and large organizations. It is amazing to me to see how small organizations work through tough cross-functional issues. In effect, small firms are Action-Learning Teams. Something happens to an organization as it matures. ALTs give way to traditional corporate hierarchy. Medium and large organizations would be well-served to read and adopt the practices outlined in Leading Organizations from the Inside Out. I know from experience that the practices outlined in this book can positively impact the culture of any organization.
--Steve Hooper, General Partner/Founder, Ignition Partners (Venture Fund)
Action-learning and leading have come of age, thanks in no small part to the authors of this vital book. If the top military and commercial programs are using these concepts to break through traditional barriers, I should all sit up, take notes, and experience excellence in action.
--Ken Shelton, Editor of Leadership Excellence
Action-Learning Teams built on a foundation of trust, honesty, and a dedication to true excellence will soon become the hallmark of all successful organizations. The volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous leadership environment that we all face demands the speed, adaptability, and flexibility that these teams embody.
--Major General Robert Ivany, ret., Former President, U.S. Army War College
Action-Learning Teams fill the gap between creating the foundations of team dynamics and unleashing talent in a collaborative aligned effort to achieve measurable results. If you need people to work together to solve a problem, improve a process, or create a new product, then this research-based approach provides the “how to” for attaining the best from having people work together.
--Richard Schuttler, Center for Advanced Studies, University of Phoenix
Leading Organizations from the Inside Out is a must read as it clearly articulates solid, user-friendly processes for helping teams create strategic results. As an Executive Coach and former U.S. Navy test pilot and squadron commander, my experience is that concepts like Soft-Focus help leaders distinguish what is most important in the midst of complexity, overload and constant change.
--Linda Shaffer-Vanaria, President, Enterprise Coaching of Carlsbad
From the Book
“Decisions and strategies reserved for the managerial and professional ranks are moving to the periphery of the organization, as is the need for critical, often improvisational judgment and thinking.”
“Action-Learning Teams (ALTs) are groups composed of critical stakeholders that are tasked with enabling the creation and application of new strategic capabilities. They are focused on generating a superior end-customer experience. They are generally cross-functional and cross-organizational in nature, designed to close particular process gaps or to generate new capacity for the organization where none existed before.”
“As leaders, we must become expert at creating a context conducive to innovation…. The problem is that context is, like culture, ubiquitous, taken for granted and invisible. As such, it is as powerful as it is illusive and difficult to change.”
“The ALT needs to be aware of the impact of the change effort on the skills and attitudes of all stakeholders throughout the organization and within its extended context, integrating supporting methods as well as the leadership of the organization. The ALT itself can be methodically trained to act effectively in unpredictable circumstances, keeping the structure of the organization fluid and adaptable to innovation and change.”
ABOUT BRUCE LARUE:
Dr. LaRue has participated as a consultant in high profile projects such as Boeing's 787 Dream Liner, and he is a leadership consultant for the Defense Logistics Agency. His articles appear regularly in Leadership Excellence magazine. His book is already being used in graduate university programs, and is available at major bookstores including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. Dr. LaRue has taught at the University of Washington, The Fielding Graduate University, and Adizes Graduate School. Visit www.BruceLaRue.com.
More on the Action-Learning Process
In our workshops and seminars, I integrate both behavioral and operational dimensions of team development within four key phases of the change process: Inquiry, Design, Deployment, and Integration.
Inquiry is a deep and incisive discovery process that illuminates the specific gaps in the organization, reveals how they are measured, and directs the focus of the team. Inquiry reveals the blind spots: the areas of gaps in knowledge, understanding, and process that have created dysfunctional patterns of behavior. Inquiry is about understanding where to put your organizational crowbar in order to obtain the maximum amount of leverage.
Inquiry is a disciplined process designed to systematically expose and question the basic assumptions about organizational reality. It is a focused questioning that requires organizations and individuals to examine the paradigms and models that limit their thinking.
Design is a process that explores how to create a road map for true innovative change. This is the blueprint of how to bridge the gaps uncovered in the Inquiry phase. It makes use of brainstorming with a team in a specific way that will generate new ways of thinking and break the old patterns of creating solutions from within the same “box” from which the problem was derived.
This process engages the key stakeholders as well as the end user, the customer or the client in the creation of that solution. Design explores the concept of piloting a project whenever possible and testing the design before deploying it throughout the organization.
Deployment examines how to break the barriers that typically impede change in an organization. It explores how teams can create common interests and deploy their chosen initiatives with speed and power. Deployment begins to change the fixed identities that organizations establish for themselves. It examines how to overcome common resistance to change such as complacency, which arises in highly controlled environments or organizations that are over-managed. It attacks the self-dramatization that causes companies to resist change, continuing their collective stories about how they are victims of management, or the organization, or even the marketplace. Engaging in the proper method of deployment breaks the illusion of powerlessness that creates resistance to change.
Integration is designed to synthesize lessons learned and make them a part of the organization's DNA by deploying short-term wins, engaging reluctant managers, and ensuring that the change initiatives become woven into the fabric of the entire company. The process of integration helps create new norms and shared values throughout the organization that reinforce the new initiatives by systematically reshaping organizational culture. Integration, when done properly, becomes a permanent new and empowering way for those in the organization to view themselves and the outside world by engaging customers and other critical stakeholders in the constant evolution of new solutions.
The structure of this unique workshop allows me to determine the key challenges and opportunities facing your organization, and to develop specific initiatives designed to leverage change that will promote heightened levels of employee engagement and sustainable growth for your organization.
Read more about Action-Learning Teams here.
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