Talent review, design and facilitation. Beyond meeting immediate recruitment and succession planning needs, the most successful companies use talent management as a tool to drive strategic change, innovation, effective merger integration, and longer-term organizational health. Connect & Transform helps clients define a bespoke talent agenda that builds upon their core competitive strengths, considers emerging change and potential constratints, and shapes a leading edge talent practice.  Connect & Tranform’s  Integrated Emerging Talent System enables individual managers to identify developmental paths in a relevant way; therefore, managers are better prepared and proactively engage in powerful developmental dialogues that define meaningful growth assignments and frame highly effective coaching and leadership development tracks. 

Succession planning & follow up. The volatility of recent and current market dynamics, along with the rash of CEO and senior level executive exits across multiple industries and geographies has resulted in acute interest from regulators and investors as to the effectiveness and mere existence of succession plans for key leadership roles.  Amid the obvious sabotaging by many an insecure and controlling executive to the tertiary investment in future talent and critical leadership development, board members and investors find that the lip service to and assurance of robust succession processes and slates for critical roles are but vapor and smoke screens. Connect & Transform sees succession planning as the most sensitive and vulnerable aspect of talent management given today’s level of external scrutiny by various important stakeholders. Using an integrated and proprietary framework of models, processes, tools and solutions, Connect & Transform guarantees a qualitative succession planning slate with or without attracting new talent, and helps clients shape an explicit succession strategy that is cognizant of emerging workforce and marketplace dynamics, stands up to regulatory and investor scrutiny, and is poised to maximize future value creation.

High potential development (re)design and follow-up. Traditional management development tracks aim to prepare future leaders by focusing on the What and the How of their expected contribution in future roles. Clearly, skills and behavioral dimensions are very important; however, most diagnostic processes lack a realistic assessment of the thinking skills necessary for a leader to successfully operate at the next level of work complexity.  As such, contemporary developmental programs are mainly organized around behavioral models and building business acumen; and, supporting program modules are not aligned to preparing candidates to successfully function in a different and more complex leadership landscape.  Contemporary development programs have continued to flourish as flaws and deficiencies are veiled by excessive over layering, murky and redundant decision authorities and accountabilities, constrained decision runways and disjointed performance metrics and targets.   Connect & Transform’s consulting services considers the capability and thinking complexity required in a lean and high performing organization, where every leadership role has clear accountability, runway to make decisions, and adds both current and future value.  It ensures a cohesive approach among the varied solutions provided to successive development challenges (workshops, post-university programs, training, and so on).  The framework decreases the number of leadership potentials which do not meet targeted expectations, and improves the effectiveness of the prescribed developmental initiatives and investments. 

(Re-) Design of Performance. Fundamental to Talent Management is the relevance, alignment to business strategy and mission, and integrity of the Performance Management system.  Internal and external stakeholders consider the credibility and transparency of aspects of this system in critical decision making, analysis and strategic risk. Connect & Transform provides a robust assessment as to the strengths and weaknesses of the current performance management system. Our diagnostic tools help to identify the essential activities through which desired organizational intended outcomes are to be achieved (value drivers). They also highlight strategy implementation risks by identifying gaps and overlaps in the performance objectives along both the vertical and horizontal reporting relationships. A clear blueprint and architecture is developed which clarifies where the key accountabilities lay for each of the value drivers, and their optimal impact for redesign of the performance objectives in critical roles. Building this bespoke value driver tree is essentially a mapping process based on a combination of interviews, relevant industry/sector scans, stakeholder analysis, and analysis of metrics-in-use.

Developing Leadership Laboratories (or Leadership Lab for short). Many senior managers today are facing leadership roles and responsibilities without the luxury of natural progression and growth into that role. They are expected to step into leadership positions and transform the role contribution, from managing processes to creating breakthrough innovation, or from creating breakthrough innovation to transforming the business model. The theories and models that guided their past decision making successes no longer seem to provide them with much needed insight and answers.  The financial and market pressures for companies to become increasingly more productive and lean demands that leaders rely on their own judgment and management runway to make decisions. Leaders must develop the ability to optimally navigate both paradox and surprise, uncertain risks, black swan events and their associated ambiguities. Facing increasing complexity, global competition and viral / virtual social media, leaders need to be able to re-conceptualize situations in terms of their own particular challenges – this is perhaps the most important thinking skill to develop. Connect & Transform builds Leadership Labs on the insight that efficient leaders not only master the What (technical/analytical components) and the How (behavioral components) of their activity in a specific role. An essential element of Leadership Labs in the integrative notion that leaders must also master a broad range of dialectical thinking tools -- tools that are fundamental to examining problems and opportunitites through multidisciplinary lenses rather than through the blinders of a single approach or discipline. The Leadership Lab process takes the participant through a challenging and transformational multimonth leadership and personal development journey. The process to develop a Leadership Lab can take multiple forms, building on current leadership development initiatives and how the impact of these programs can be strenghtened and  improved, or by building a new program based on recent insights in what makes a significant difference at higher Work Levels.