Chemical Company Leadership Workshop

A multi-billion-dollar global chemical company located in Michigan approached Innovative Learning Group (ILG) to help create a workshop for its new leaders to execute its corporate vision. The company’s diversified portfolio of specialty chemical, advanced materials, agrosciences, and plastics businesses delivers a broad range of technology-based products and solutions to customers in approximately 160 countries.

Situation

The company was transforming, and wanted to realign its leadership and employee development effort. It already had a clearly defined development strategy to identify and groom high-potential talent and wanted to shift its focus to an equally critical population, individuals new to a leadership role.

These leaders would be part of a new leadership program. The objectives of this program are to:

• Set company expectations in leading people,
• Develop new skills,
• Provide feedback, and
• Create alignment to the strategy and culture.

The catalyst for the program was linked to the company’s recent redrafting of its corporate strategy, including the mission, vision, values, and leadership competencies .

Solution

The company asked ILG to design and develop a face-to-face, three-day workshop to be part of its blended approach to the program, which included a virtual course, team assimilation, and meetings with human resources and leadership.

The workshop provides new leaders with a leadership skills foundation, including greater self- and team-awareness, networking capabilities, and strategies for handling the ambiguous and challenging aspects of leading in a changing world.

ILG designed the workshop experience with a focus on allowing participants to reflect on what it means to be a leader in a personal way, and to discover how best to apply new strategies and insights in ways that uniquely suit them and their teams.

Each day of the workshop has a distinct focus:

• Day One: self-awareness and the development of a personal vision for leadership
• Day Two: turn outward and focus on relationship building and team development
• Day Three: build to some of the tougher challenges of leadership, with integrity and courage as underlying themes

The learning experience includes:

• An emphasis on dialogue and self-discovery
• Opportunities for participants to create their own overarching vision of leadership that leverages their best strengths, all in the context of the company’s mission, vision, values, and goals
• A learning development plan as the culmination of the three days

The workshop’s learning experience is straightforward in its design. Presentations, scripting, and memorization of facts are minimized. Participants are offered principles and best practices and challenged to apply them based on their individual strengths and values. Emphasis is also placed on exploring issues that develop leadership integrity and courage in the context of an ever-changing and demanding marketplace.

To stimulate participants thoughts and encourage them to move into new mental territory, ILG adopted a creative approach to the learning experience not about telling them how to be leaders but about them using all the resources around them to create their own learning.

Some of the ways ILG did this was to build the following into the workshop:

• Working in table teams and discussing concepts
• Trying out ideas through role play and case study scenarios
• Exercising the right brain by supplying butcher paper, markers, and brainstorming tools on every table
• A discovery and activity-based approach instead of lecture
• Journals used for several purposes, including as a:
  • Participant workbook during the workshop to complete activities and take notes
  • Tool to draft key ideas and strategies on what it means to be a leader
  • Means to capture thoughts and ideas that can be applied upon return to the office

The workshop also includes pre- and post-work components.

• Pre-work includes self-assessments, reading, and a health screening
• Post-work follows up on the learning development plan that each participant created as the culmination of the workshop

To learn more about how Innovative Learning Group can create custom learning solutions to help improve business results, contact us at info@innovativeLG.com.