Programs for High Potential Leaders

The High-Potential Leaders within your organization are easy to spot—but not always easy to retain. Whether new to your organization or experienced contributors, this group of dynamic professionals represents your company’s best and most profitable future. By taking the time to develop your high-potential leaders and giving them the tools they need to excel, you are making an investment in your long-term success.

At Xavier Leadership Center, we recognize the value of High-Potential Leaders, and have worked with a wide range of companies to help identify and develop these high-value professionals, so that they can contribute to their organizations at ever more meaningful levels.

While each program we develop for a company is unique, the following descriptions provide just a few examples of programs chosen for High-Potential Leaders by leading organizations:

Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Exploring Dimensions of Leadership
Thinking and Acting Strategically

To learn more about how Xavier Leadership Center can help you design a customized training program unique to your organization, contact us.

Decision Making Under Uncertainty: The Columbia Disaster Simulation

Often we are faced with situations where we are compelled to make a decision, though we have only inadequate or imperfect information and where the level of uncertainty is high, but deadlines and external pressures dictate that a decision must be made.

In other situations, we experience events whose importance is ambiguous at first, but ultimately have significant impact on future events. Organizations often respond inadequately to such ambiguous threats, especially when other goals predominate – like staying on budget or staying on schedule.

But what about situations where the available time, information, or resources do not allow a methodical analysis?

This phenomenon is explored using an interactive simulation based on the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia mission. In this computer-based simulation experience, participants play the roles of various members of the actual mission control team, seeing the emails and screen displays and information that was actually visible to team members during the Columbia mission. What decisions would you have made if you had access to only the same facts as did the actual mission controllers, engineers and managers?

Upon completing this program, you’ll know how:

• To understand the challenges of certain kinds of decision making
• To choose among key methodologies for analyzing these situations that are filled with uncertainty
• To elevate the discussions in such situations to a more objective plane, enabling groups to better understand and challenge each other’s underlying assumptions
• Organizational culture, mission, and values can positively or negatively impact the way decisions are made.
• Managers can operate to create more open environments where the quality of discussion, analysis, and decision making can be enhanced

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Exploring Dimensions of Leadership

Enhancing the way people are managed and led is the key to unleashing human potential in any organization. Yet, sadly, two of three Europeans (67%) say they distrust the leaders of organizations and only 50% of US workers say they trust their leadership. We can do better.

This program is broken into four modules:

• What Leaders do
• How Leaders are
• How You are
• What You do

These modules explore both organizational leadership (the part that is directly related to your position within an organization), as well as personal leadership (which is related only to how you behave in ways that can influence thinking, feeling, and actions of those around you – regardless
of your organizational position.)

By examining a diverse array of leaders from education, business, sports, and the military, participants explore all aspects of these different leadership approaches to see which elements seem to be universal, and which are different. Participants are challenged to examine their own personal values and world view to help them understand how these translate into their leadership roles at work and in private life.

Upon completing this program, you will:

• Understand the role of executive leadership, as you craft your personal vision and execute your day-to-day initiatives
• Identify the style of leadership that works best for you and your organization
• Craft your own personal leadership statement
• Learn how to change and refine your leadership style

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Thinking and Acting Strategically

In this program, participants explore ways to create strategic conversations at all levels of the organization. The program introduces and describe strategy in a clear and accessible way. Building on this foundation, participants describe tested approaches for using measures to communicate strategy throughout the organization and assess performance against long-term goals.

Finally, participants outline a process to cascade strategy to all levels of the organization to influence daily decisions that contribute to (or erode) the long-term value of the organization.

Upon completing this program, you’ll know:

• What defines a “Strategy”
• How “Strategic Decision Making” differs from “Tactical Decision Making”
• Why “Strategy” is important
• What forces affect “Strategic Decisions”
• How to develop a “Strategic Plan”
• How to develop the execution phase of a “Strategic Plan”
• The consequences of not thinking “Strategically”

Note: During this program, participants review two companies and perform a case analysis on each

These are only a few of hundreds of completely customized programs we’ve delivered to leading organizations. To learn more about how Xavier Leadership Center can help you design a high-impact training program unique to your organization, contact us.

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