Leading at a Higher Level THE PROGRAMME FOR LEADERS OF FAST GROWING BUSINESSES
PROGRAMME BENEFITS H ANDS - ON LE A RNING
S U P P O RTED LEAR N IN G
T I ME TO T H I NK
The practical toolkit and proven practices enable you to work on your business in the workshops, and test out your commercial leadership impact.
You will be supported by an experienced team of mentors, who have helped hundreds of companies to successfully grow.
You will learn from the experiences of like-minded, successful peers and leave with a strong bond and a network you can count on.
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Contents PROGRAMME INTRODUCTION
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W H AT YO U C A N E X P E C T
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YO U R J O U R N E Y
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P R O G R A M M E D E TA I L S
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# 1 S T R AT EG I C F O C U S F O R S C A L E
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# 2 E N G AG E TO P TA L E N T
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# 3 G E N E R AT E G R O W T H R E V E N U E
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#4 MOBILISE FOR GROWTH
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#5 DELIVERING GROWTH
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COACH CONNECTION
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CONFIDENTIALITY 16 MAKING THE LEARNING STICK
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M E E T YO U R W O R K S H O P COAC H E S
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ABOUT DURHAMLANE
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Programme Introduction ‘Building leadership capability’ is one of the UK Scale-Up Institute’s top five priorities to enable greater global competitiveness. Does your business have the growth strategy, compelling marketing, sales pipeline, finance, talented people and innovation needed to build a competitive advantage and grow fast? Whether it’s hitting the next multi-million milestone, staffing up by tens or hundreds, pushing for first-mover advantage, or entering new geographies, leading a fast-growing business needs deep thinking and quick action in equal measure.
For those at the helm of a tech business, delivering sustainable growth can be one of the most thrilling career accomplishments, and also one of the biggest personal challenges. durhamlane’s experience of enabling ambitious sales growth for clients in the tech arena means we understand the big questions that keep these leaders awake at night: 1. How do we scale-up this business and focus on rapid growth? 2. How do we innovate like a challenger business? 3. How do we attract and keep the best talent? 4. How do we win the business we really want? 5. How do we deliver like a blue-chip and stay as agile as a start-up? 6. How do we stay healthy and focused when there is so much to do? During the six-month blended programme of one-day workshops, 1:1 coaching, specialist mentoring and peer-networking, you will apply proven commercial leadership practices to your own business goals. 5
What You Can Expect Our Leading at a Higher Level programme gives you the headspace and practical toolkit needed to stay on top of rapid growth. We help you ride the wave, rather than be swamped by it. Participating in this specialist programme means that you can commit to the Leading at a Higher Level core principles, which are to: 1. Reflect deeply on your own personal motivators and blockers, so that you can maximise your leadership impact at each key stage; 2. Test out how new proven-practices and perspectives can energise you, your team and your business strategy; 3. Challenge your thinking about what’s possible and how ambitious growth plans can be achieved; 4. Be disciplined in transforming your business, knowing when and how to entrust others to take their own lead; 5. Learn by mentoring others, sharing your insights, wisdom, and experiences; 6. Receive structured feedback about the impact you make, and give developmental feedback to others.
Your Journey durhamlane’s Leading at a Higher Level methodology underpins the programme and is the basis for each themed workshop.
Strategise Innovate
Engage
Generate Mobilise
Deliver
Bespoke coaching sessions in between each workshop give you protected time with one of our coaching team to deep dive into specific aspects of your high-growth journey. Our Coach Connection network is made up of experienced leadership, sales, marketing, and growth specialists and you can call on different coaches throughout the programme. All coaching conversations are confidential between you and your coach.
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Strategic Focus for Scale PURPOSE According to the Economist Intelligence Unit “Complexity is the new normal”, with three to five major change initiatives launching per year in a typical scale-up business. Often it’s out with the 5-year plan and in with the 3-month sprint. As the pace of business change accelerates ‘Impossible and Now’ is one phrase being used to describe the state of high-growth leadership. In the first workshop of the series, you will examine scale-up business strategies, and the leadership tools and techniques you can apply to shape your own scale-up model.
TOPIC S • Exploring Growth Strategies: -- Crossing the chasm, where are you? Start-up, high-growth, scale-up, scaler, able to trade with sustainable corporates? -- Learning from scale-up successes (and failures). -- Defining your scale-up strategy and focus. • Productivity as you Scale: -- Productivity factors (digitisation, commercial excellence, talent management, planning for the future, leadership, and operational efficiency) – strengths and gap analysis of your business. -- Success measures (and undertaking a ‘pre-mortem’ to assess the risk factors) • Scale-up Leadership Analytics: -- Learning from scale-up leadership profiles. -- Scale-up leadership models mapped to you and your business; -- Personal analytics: strengths, gaps, comfort zones and stretch zones. • What successful Scale-Up leaders do: -- Planning toolkit for scale-up leaders. -- Agree next 30-day positive actions and success measures and agree agenda for Coaching Session 1.
OUTPUTS The first workshop is where you gain clarity about how effective your scale-up plans are, and how you will grow personally, to successfully lead the growth of your business.
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Engage Top Talent PURPOSE Successful innovation in fast-moving tech sectors requires leaders and their teams to be fleet of foot, nimble and agile. Successful innovation goes way beyond the art of invention. True innovation occurs when ideas are widely and profitably applied.
TOPIC S • Innovation Drivers: -- Not all innovation needs to be like the iPad. -- Sources of everyday innovation, as well as disruption. -- Innovation enablers and blockers. • Idea Management: -- Harnessing the ideas generated by teams of bright busy people; -- Thinking with your hands and working out loud – creative, lean and teamfriendly toolkits. -- The importance of ‘sharing the air’ in an increasingly virtual world. -- Innovation as a service, digital platforms for diverse teams. • Prototyping for the next scale-up: -- What prototyping really means and how to evaluate new ideas worthy of investment. -- Minimum viable products and clarity of compelling messages to the market. • Building Innovation Capability: -- Analysing your team’s innovation capability; -- Making innovation part of your core business processes. -- Open Innovation, the opportunities, benefits and risks of strategic collaboration, partnerships or joint ventures. -- Plan agenda for coaching session 2.
OUTPUTS Discover neat and simple innovation practices that you can engage your teams in right now. Learn about how the most successful innovators make it business as usual and put your own stamp on innovation strategy.
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Generate Growth Revenue PURPOSE Sales is the life-blood of every company. Founders and senior leaders in any business are key to ensuring that the wheels of new business keep turning, and that the entire team mindset is customer and commercially focused. Hungry for a new way of making sales work in high growth business? This workshop will provide insight into the world of professional sales and will give you the ideas you need to accelerate scale-up revenues and new business pipelines. You will commit to working in a better, more productive way with a focus on business fit, business value & the development of long-term relationships.
TOPIC S • Selling at a Higher Level – a philosophy: -- Debunking the myths about sales and selling. -- Introduction to the Selling at a Higher Level Methodology. -- The most destructive sales behaviours. -- Introducing and testing out the durhamlane Sales Mantras. • Marketing – an art and a science: -- Marketing to maximise your digital footprint. -- SMART Data, the rise of personalisation and gamification. -- Generating pre-qualified inbound leads. -- Making the customer journey ‘human’ in an automated world. • Spending time where you can be most successful: -- Qualifying customer enquiries, leads and opportunities. -- Applying the durhamlane Magic 35 qualification tool. • The qualities of top sales people: -- Understanding sales motivators, drivers and your preferred approach. -- Developing a consultative sales approach. -- Becoming a challenger sales business, shaping your customers’ future, not just your own. -- Assessing the scale-up Sales capability of your business. -- Plan agenda for Coaching session 4.
OUTPUTS By the end of this workshop you will have a clear understanding of where and how best to focus your energy, and your team’s, to build a sustainable and profitable sales cycle.
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Mobilise for Growth PURPOSE If everything’s a priority, then nothing is. In the era of rapid new product development, time-to-market (TTM) is often a more critical predictor for future scale-up success, than ROI alone. The most successful scale-ups attend to both, and in this workshop, you will apply some proven planning frameworks to determine how you and your team manage multiple scale-up initiatives in the same year.
TOPIC S • Strategy and Change Matrix: -- Learn how to assess the strategic value of your key scale-up projects using the Strategy and Change matrix to distinguish strategic priorities from the potential distractions of wish list ventures. -- Use stakeholder mapping techniques to identify different types of buyers, players and stakeholders so that you can evaluate the relative benefits for each, both in your customer markets and within your teams. -- Test out the assumed priorities with a benefits plan for each key initiative. • Mobilising Teams: -- Learn about the factors that separate a high-performing team from a ‘pseudo-team’. -- Develop high level project plans and undertake initial team skills audit for each. -- Plan for change reactions, the human and psychological factors of living through rapid growth and managing multiple projects. • Successful Project Initiation: -- Proven practices for mobilising teams in a high-growth environment – ensuring you have the appropriate programme and project leadership capability. -- Making use of the best bits of Agile, Lean and Sprint practices. -- Virtual Teams and how best to lead them. -- Benefits and pitfalls of digital workplace tools for project teams. • Personal Productivity for Leaders: -- Setting goals (not dreams) and making time to think; -- Devising a plan full of marginal gains to maximise your own personal productivity during intense scale-up activity. -- Plan agenda for Coaching session 5.
OUTPUTS Impactful leaders are highly, personally productive. They have a continuous personal improvement plan that is embedded across all aspects of their lives. At this workshop, you will pinpoint simple, practical steps you can take to fine-tune your own productivity and mobilise your teams’ ability to lead multiple growth projects.
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Delivering Growth L E A D E R S ’ D I N N E R A N D OV E R N I G H T R E T R E AT IN THE LAKE DISTRICT
PURPOSE The inconvenient truth about life in a scale-up is that business still needs to be delivered whilst you grow. When potential scale-ups come off the tracks, it’s often because they didn’t keep their feet on the ground and deliver business already won. Too much head-in-the-clouds can distract from the delivery commitments in the here and now. In this workshop, you will look at the measures of operational effectiveness and productivity in your business, that enable you to track progress and build on quality.
TOPIC S • Operational Excellence: -- Learn from the operation models of successful scale-ups and the characteristics of sustainable scaler businesses. -- Re-assess your business productivity and operational effectiveness. -- Digital Transformation and optimal digital workplace strategy. • Embedding a culture of excellence: -- Leadership and culture lessons from scale-ups who have crossed the chasm from high-growth to exponential growth. -- 70:20:10 principle and the continuously learning organisation. -- Coaching culture for sustainable growth. • Overcoming Overload: -- De-railers, stressors and conflict. -- Personality types and traits under pressure. Spotting the warning signs in yourself and others. -- Interventions, diagnostics and when to call in the right expertise. -- Resilience, wellbeing and balance -- Personal productivity and the essentialist practices of scale-up leaders. • Wellbeing: -- The evidence for taking care of wellbeing. -- Sleep, rest and cognitive ability. -- How to improve your wellbeing score and the benefits of wellbeing in business performance. -- Plan agenda for final coaching session .
OUTPUTS Fine tune the overall health of your business, you and your team. Identify many marginal gains that, taken together, will deliver an overall step-change in competitive advantage through operational effectiveness.
After the workshop, you will have time to relax with colleagues in a unique and stimulating setting in the Lake District. Over dinner you will hear from a highly successful scale-up leader who will share their own personal, and business experiences of a life of high growth. The following morning, we will take a walk out in the Lakeland countryside so that you can reflect informally, with colleagues and coaches, on the progress you have made, and the scale-up journey ahead.
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Coach Connection INCLUSIVE SUPPORT In between workshops you will benefit from a series of six 1:1 coaching sessions with one of our coaching team. Your coaches will help you clear the headspace you need to gain clarity of understanding and sharp focus on pursuit of the essentials of commercial and business leadership. Coaching sessions enable to you to stay on track with what’s important and helping you focus your energy on activities that enable you and your business to be most successful.
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PERFORMANCE
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POTENTIAL
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INTERFERENCE
Our coaches work with you to identify: 1. Performance - What performing at a higher level means to your, your colleagues or customers. In doing so we explore the qualitative and quantitative metrics that might apply, in terms of leadership impact; (which equals…) 2. Potential – Exploring the talents, skills, knowledge and experiences that feed into your future leadership potential. We challenge you to stretch your vision of what ‘being your best’ could mean; (minus…) 3. Interference – Clearly articulating the external factors, self-limiting beliefs and counter-productive thinking styles that may be holding you back, and then working out strategies to deal with them.
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Confidentiality S H A R E C O N F I D E N T LY We are always mindful that for workshops to be truly beneficial, you need to feel that you can entrust us with hopes, thoughts, ideas and challenges. We adhere to key coaching best practices, which are that we will: • Be clear from the outset about the fact that the details of all 1:1 coaching conversations are held in confidence by the coach. • Ensure that handwritten coaching or electronic notes taken during coaching sessions are stored securely. • Be clear that the details of disclosures made in private to a coach, will not be shared nor divulged to anyone else without permission from the individual. • Ensure our own continuous service improvement, by requesting structured feedback.
Making the Learning Stick KNOWLEDGE RETENTION You will get open access throughout the 6 month programme. A protected online space for you to share thoughts and ideas, gain feedback from peers and durhamlane coaches and access all the learning materials, tools techniques and recommended reading.
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Meet your Workshop Coaches ALISON FREER
We coach leaders to keep their “Feet on the ground, eyes on the horizon and head in the clouds.�
Alison combines innovation, business psychology and human-centred design thinking in her work with leaders in many tech businesses and has a key interest in the impact of digital innovation on society and business teams. As Director of Consulting, Learning & Digital Transformation at durhamlane, Alison works widely with leaders of business transformation and innovation. As an active contributor to the UK Digital Leaders Network, Alison also explores how big challenges of our time can be tackled through commercially viable digital innovation. An Association for Coaching accredited executive coach, Alison specialises in delivering 1:1 leadership coaching with senior executives, as well as devising bespoke commercial leadership development programmes. Alison has worked widely with many corporate sector clients, as well as with teams in the IT, Digital and Tech sectors. Alison has collaborated with business transformation academics at Durham and Newcastle university Business Schools, and brings executive education experience to this programme.
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RICHARD LANE
Think positive, be positive. Write ‘will’ rather than ‘would’. Say ‘can’ rather than ‘could’.
Richard co-founded durhamlane in 2011 following a highly accomplished career leading sales growth for corporate eLearning and software providers. It was this experience that inspired his in-depth research that led to him devising the Selling at a Higher Level methodology. Selling at a Higher Level is the blueprint for durhamlane’s success in enabling growth for client businesses, and in our own approach to building a sustainable, scale-up business model. Richard is a recognised keynote speaker, sales trainer and business-growth thought leader. He specialises in advising businesses with complex B2B solutions, especially in the software, technology and services sectors. Richard has built up an enviable reputation by helping the likes of Sage, Xero, HP, British Gas, Aviva, NatWest, Symantec (and durhamlane) become more profitable and transition towards developing highperformance cultures. All this experience is combined in his leadership of a high-growth culture in durhamlane, where he instils his talent development principles throughout his own team and client base. As well as his main role as durhamlane managing partner, Richard is a board member for businesses in the technology, training and talent management sectors. Richard is an active member of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management (ISMM) and an associate lecturer for executive education and business programmes at Anglia Ruskin University. 19
Meet your Workshop Coaches LEE DURHAM
My goal is to raise the bar of the sales profession in Europe and make it a profession to be pride of, as it is in the USA
Lee, co-founder of durhamlane and business ventures in software and professional services, has experienced first-hand the scale-up leadership journey. Lee is first and foremost an entrepreneur, with a drive for ambitious growth, both in his own businesses and on behalf of clients. Lee brings lessons from the frontline of leadership and how to manage multiple elements of life in a fast-growing company. Lee is a chartered marketer (MCIM) with over 20 years’ commercial sales and marketing experience, delivering solutions to ambitious organisations and their investors throughout the UK and worldwide. Lee has helped to enable high growth programmes for businesses of all sizes from SMEs to blue-chip clients, primarily in the technology, software and manufacturing sectors. Lee is heavily involved in championing the importance of SME scaleup success to deliver long term economic prosperity for all. Having also founded skills development business DevAcademy, Lee is passionate about harnessing the potential of young business and tech talent by creating successful career and business opportunities for others. A keen and active sportsman, Lee is a sports coach for young people and draws lessons from sport and business together to build healthy futures for all.
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C O N T.
At durhamlane we are privileged to work with successful people in many walks of life, business and society. We are regularly engaged as coaches, advisors and consultants by leaders and teams as they navigate the way ahead in pursuit of business and personal goals. Our programmes unleash the leadership potential of people who want to stay close to their teams, customers and competitors (keeping their feet on the ground); embrace new opportunities and head off emerging challenges (keeping their eyes on the horizon); and innovate by enabling new and creative ways to adapt their business and keep it fresh (making space for head-in-the-clouds thinking).
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© 2017 - The durhamlane logos, the ‘glasses’ device, related brand patterns and iconography are property of durhamlane Ltd. Topics, location and dates may be subject to change.