David Jarrett - MD

In the corporate world, the key needs we are seeing are often expressed as:

How can we “shift” our leaders, so that we can “shift” our culture(s) so that our strategy can succeed?

Whether in banking, hi tech, retail or professional services, global organisations are adopting new strategies that demand new behaviour and often new mindsets of their leaders across the whole business. The existing “cultures” in the organisation are also known to have a critical effect.

Across all this, the issues being talked about are:

• Renewing values and leaders as role models
• Employee engagement through change
• Leaders maintaining personal balance and resilience
• Encouraging accountability at all levels and cutting through consensus cultures
• Emerging markets in China and Asia

In the public sector, at the UK central government level, the Capability Review process is identifying the need to work as a corporate leadership team, particularly for the larger government departments and to strengthen collective leadership capacity. In our experience you cannot work on developing leadership without addressing the culture at a systemic level. Revelations about the over dependence on external consultants shows the need for investing in the development of your internal consultants so capability can be developed to support changes in the future, when funding may reduce.

In other public sector areas joined up learning about leadership across services and even across countries are key themes such as the leadership inquiry study tour between Wales and Denmark we are involved with, described in Beyond Boundaries by Sue Pritchard.

Last but not least, a strong focus for this year is the growing awareness of climate change as a key strategic issue which affects us all, and how we need to address this issue as organisations. Our new associate Simon Cooper is helping us address corporate social responsibility as part of our work with clients.