From the front line of Covid induced transformation: An impetus for change and rejecting dogma
Matthew Eccles
Providing everyday, practical tools and techniques for leaders and teams to be more effective and more successful. I champion challenging, supportive leadership.
For OPDC, necessity really has been the mother of invention. The COVID-19 crisis has provided the impetus we needed to move the business forward. It’s forced us to shake off the inertia that comes from having a successful business and being respected by clients for the impact our programmes have on leadership performance.
Over the years, our face-to-face leadership skills development programmes, our coaching and our leadership team workshops have proved tremendously effective and popular. They’ve been the cornerstone of our success and have helped countless participants become more effective leaders and find solutions to troublesome challenges. But it was this success that distracted us from thinking about how we could continue to support existing and new clients if faced with a truly disruptive environment. We were passively wedded to the way we did things. COVID-19 gave us the stimulus we needed to work out how we can do things differently and even better. Over the past twelve weeks or so, we’ve been working with clients to create virtual programmes and events that build the skills and effectiveness of managers, and support leaders in planning and activating better decisions for the future.
The feedback from clients so far has been tremendous. It’s told us that we’ve succeeded in retaining the learning experience from our leadership development programmes and the effectiveness of our workshop facilitation and coaching. And in some ways, we’ve managed to use the various video, digital and other channels available to us to deepen the value.
The critical realisation for us was that, just like many other highly skilled groups, the learning and development community is prone to let dogma limit its openness to doing things differently; and is struggling to accept that different can be better – or at least as good. So we decided to change our mindset from ‘can it work?’ to ‘what will work?’ This was the game changer for us. We consulted widely, we respectfully pushed back on those that told us “what you do can only work face to face”. We then tested all our development ideas against a simple challenge. Will this deliver the same or better outcomes than the face to face experience? If the answer wasn’t a resounding ‘Yes’ we went back to the drawing board.
We can now say that although virtual and digital based delivery and facilitation isn’t the same as a face to face, that doesn’t mean it can’t be as effective in the round. Some learning can be harder to embed; other learning can be more powerfully embedded. Getting it right takes some determination, some creative thinking and a rejection of dogma.
As a result of these early successes, we are confident that we can continue to deliver on our core purpose of helping managers and leaders to grow their core skills, become more effective and find better solutions to the challenges they are wrestling with. What’s more, we now have the flexibility to do that face-to-face, virtually or through a blended approach – so we can support a wider range of clients.
For us, not only was necessity the mother is invention, the invention has been transformative.
Although I provide Executive Coaching, each year I undertake receiving a period of Executive Coaching. For many years this was done face-to-face between me and my trusted coach. Six years ago, I tried out receiving the executive coaching with the same trusted coach. At the start I was very sceptical. However, it proved to be a powerful channel and allowed some conversations to take place which would have been difficult face to face. Over the last years, together we have tried telephone again, video conferencing and of course face-to-face. Telephone coaching continues to offer a private and deeper self-reflective space to self-challenge. This personal experience of receiving virtual coaching parallels the deep learning that comes for virtual leadership groups who engage to work on the current issues and dilemmas they face. Value indeed.