Leadership Lab
How we work
The first step with our clients is listening.
Understanding their values, business, industry, clients, and organization. Some data, but mostly meeting people: sharing goals, understanding what performance they want to improve. Deciding what changes to implement.
From the initial ideas, the project comes. An initial measure of performance and skills to be developed is often made; then, it is defined what goal to achieve at the end of the project.
The phases and modules of the intervention are chosen or designed. If formative, you decide what experiences to give to accelerate learning and which tools and technologies to use.
Over the years, we have developed or adopted many innovative technologies: from ad hoc portals to establish learning communities and provide continuity in skills development, to the use of techniques translated from other worlds such as theater or sports.
Intermediate measurements and the final measurement allow the client and us to check the result and to modify the intervention or plan new activities, if necessary.
We often give continuity to the people involved by keeping communication open.
WE CHARACTERIZE OURSELVES
FOR A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
Leadership Lab – Performance
We work on people, starting with business.
We share with clients the performance to be improved and identify people and skills to work on.
The starting point is business in its economic, organizational, marketing and strategic components.
The end point is the person.
What performance needs to be improved? This is the first question we ask to our clients.
They can be the most diverse: service level, customer experience, margins, market share, costs, etc.
Some examples:
- for a major international banking client: reducing significantly the cost of risk training aimed at new agency managers while improving the “traceability” of activities carried out and people’s involvement;
- for a leading medium-sized Italian customer in a niche market: increasing the level of service;
- for an Italian giant: reducing project time and improve the usability of services;
- for a multinational company in the IT world: increasing the share in customers served.
The next step is to identify the skills on which to intervene. Decide which skills to acquire or improve and which people to work on.
Our interventions are always organizational in nature; we work on people to improve skills – individual and organizational – that have a specific goal decided by the company.
Leadership Lab – Measure
We measure the initial state of the skills we will be working on and the end point, checking progress over the course of the projects.
We have developed proprietary technologies that enable objective measurement of competence.
We use activities for our Devopment Centers that provide objective feedback on the assessed competencies. All activities are included in a platform we call AMS (Assessment Management System) and are tracked. Some are automatic – or partly automatic – that is, they provide numerical feedback of the skills to be assessed.
Others require observers, whose assessment is as objective as possible because it is guided by methods and standards that facilitate the task. We also use remote technologies for activities that require simulations so as to reduce costs and inconvenience, especially for distributed enterprises.
The activities we use are in many cases assisted by softwares that simplify participation, speed up time, track all the activities performed (by participants and observers) and make evaluations more objective.
Leadership Lab – Technology
Over the years we have developed proprietary technologies that can be used in the different phases of our projects.
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- ASSO Business Simulation – It is a family of Business Simulation products for the assessment and development of management skills. More information.
- Corporate Academy – We developed “Stra-Le Academy”: an online platform available to our clients which contains modules for assessment, interactive training, in-depth study, sharing and social activities.
More information. - Magister Portals – Real “portals” for scheduling activities agreed upon with people participating in our competence development projects. More information.
- Blog and App – Blog and App developed for various projects. More information.
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Leadership Lab – Experience
Management skills need time and practice.
Our interventions are all based on letting people try, on simulated or direct experimentation.
Experience is therefore understood as activities in which to engage people for inductive learning processes – starting from experience to get to concepts, to try out new behaviors.
The development of our ASSO business simulations follow this logic, and over the years we have realized a set of collaborations with other companies or entities.
E.g., the experience of acting through theater and applying the method used by the greatest actors trained by the Actors Studio.
- Or sports, with days spent on the “fields” making Rugby values their own.
E.g., for an important “change management” project of the Italian subsidiary of a multinational company in the industrial sector, we staged a real musical and theatrical performance to share the values of change.
- Or acting – for some insurance managers – to assert their Leadership. The making of a corporate film – for managers of a multinational company in the horeca world – as an experience to strengthen communication skills.
- Or even “laughter yoga” as a bonding moment for an international luxury brand.
We also “danced” with our clients to bring down barriers and prejudices and begin to build a team with people who had relationship difficulties due to past negative experiences.
Leadership Lab – Continuity
We create development projects that work over time to consolidate the improvements gained.
We use tools that ensure continuity for the people involved in our projects.
For example, for an international bank, we worked on a group of young talents destined to be consultants to major companies. A long program, with intermediate stages and face-to-face and virtual meetings, with “online” lecturers stimulating learning throughout the project. The use of different technologies to stimulate, deepen, test.
We do not abandon our clients. We don’t say what to do, but we do it with them, we try with them. We use “digital” technologies that facilitate an ongoing journey and have the important spin-off of passing on “digital” skills that are increasingly important for managers.
