Exec Education
Exec Education
Paul has benefited from attending many high-quality professional development programmes. He has completed the Experienced Deans’ and New Deans’ Seminar Series, Association to Advance Collegiate School of Business (AACSB), International. He completed the International Deans’ Programme, Association of Business Schools/European Foundation for Management Development, and the Leading Change and Organisational Renewal Programme, Harvard Business School.
One of his current themes of workshops and speaking engagements help profit, non-profit, and governments challenge the status quo by innovatively using new approaches. Paul seeks to bring about change through agile strategic management, innovation, design-thinking and technology to help (re)shape and drive digital transformation across universities, businesses, governments, processes and people. During the recent pandemic, he was invited to deliver strategy and crisis management workshops in India, Africa, USA, UK and Mainland Europe, which enabled organisations to rapidly adapt to changing Covid-19 market conditions by introducing novel value and growth through new products and services. He has managed and delivered MBA programmes across the globe.
Paul delivers executive sessions that inspire action. Because of his experiences applying renewal strategies in profits, not-for-profits, military, and Governments, he can tailor each session to the audience and situation. The mental balancing act executives perform in today’s environment is one of the toughest of all leadership challenges.
These experiences position him well to understand the complexities of the rapidly changing global executive education marketplace and the value of long-term collaborations. He now seeks to build a thriving network of like-minded, dynamic partners who energetically add value. By demystifying the complex internal and external environments, Paul can help you convert your threats into opportunities and weaknesses into strengths.
Paul has been a full Professor for more than 20 years
and has combined his academic knowledge with practical experiences, which has taken him worldwide and enables Boards, senior management, managers, workshop and conference participants to benefit from fresh insights into overcoming pain points, organisational trauma, strategy, growth, and people-related bottlenecks.
Paul delivers executive sessions that inspire action. Because of his experiences applying renewal strategies in profits, not-for-profits, military, and Governments, he can tailor each session to the audience and situation. The mental balancing act executives perform in today’s VUCA environment is one of the toughest of all leadership challenges- Paul can assist you on your journey.
He has created six short courses that will help you overcome some of your organisation's chronic challenges. By demystifying the complex internal and external environments, Paul can help you convert your threats into opportunities and weaknesses into strengths.
Book Paul for your next event.
Paul looks forward to hearing from you. Please click below and complete the brief form of your area of interest. We’ll get back to you soon and explore how we can partner.
Examples of Available Courses
Democratisation of leadership
Meaningful leadership through strategic sensing
Using serendipitous inspiration to enable space for happy accidents
Leveraging your corporate DNA to create a better future
Is it now time for your organisation's HR detox?
Aligning your strategic engagement with complexity
Democratisation of Leadership
The Problem
Organisations compete in challenging markets in today's business environment, with knowledge being the key driver of success in the digital age. Success must influence not only business but also human life and communities. Consequently, every employee must act like a leader and be self-sufficient in problem-solving in discharging duties.
-
A recent study by Amazon finds that almost three-quarters of Millennial and Gen Z workers are planning to quit their jobs in 2023 due to a lack of skills-building opportunities.
So, can your organisation afford to be left behind?
Solution
In today’s climate, the Democratisation of leadership presents the opportunity to take charge of your firm's destiny by accessing the L&D resources to develop your leaders. Remember, businesses have turned full circle, and one of the enduring manifestations of the pandemic is the time for new forms of leadership to emerge to overcome the paradox of organisational change.
This session will help you reimagine your organisation’s leadership learning and development programmes.
Key presentation outcomes:
Gain a new way of thinking about existing challenges and identify new ways to take charge of your organisation's destiny.
Discover new insights into how to lead staff, so they are self-sufficient in problem-solving in discharging duties.
Leave inspired to tackle the cognitive balancing act to explore new opportunities and develop organisational leaders.
Meaningful leadership through strategic sensing
The future isn’t what it used to be!
Let us be honest; sometimes, you feel you have yet to learn what will happen to your industry and its effects on your firm. It's time to build your organisation into an engine of possibility.
-
Technology is chaotic; it affects every industry, often in ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate and requires an evolving portfolio of strategic experiments. You can't afford to “bet the farm”. Emergent strategy can help; it is an organic approach to growth that lets you learn and continually develop new strategies based on an ongoing culture of hypothesis and experimentation. An evolving portfolio of strategic experiments gives the management team more choices, which means better odds that some options will be suitable.
Sensing can objectively reveal what is happening within and external to your organisation, its pain points, or why things are being experienced differently. The ability to anticipate the impact of divergent scenarios can help navigate whatever is thrown at the organisation. Sensing is now becoming a competence in leadership development, as the ability to make timely decisions will advance organisational performance. Making sense of the external environment and anticipating the drivers of salient changes can help you to revisit your growth assumptions and take corrective action.
This session aims to illustrate and provide the benefits of meaningful leadership through strategic sensing, which will boost knowledge acquisition throughout all levels within the firm.
Key presentation outcomes:
• Gain a new way of thinking about the future and how to lead your organisation into becoming an engine of possibilities.
• Uncover the benefits of emergent strategy and how to adapt to the complex external environment.
• Leave with an understanding of the benefits of meaningful leadership through strategic sensing.
Using serendipitous inspiration to enable space for happy accidents
A cognitive dilemma exists whereby leadership teams need to lead with vision, manage resources and provide inspiration for their teams. However, Dow (2009) states that serendipitous inspiration can allow room for happy accidents.
-
We see such happy accidents as points of differentiation for the firm. This helps in standing out from the crowd. But, unfortunately, price-based strategies in today's work of AI and automation can lead to harmful long-term consequences.
So, why is the business world littered with examples of bad strategies? Core reasons can be excessive ambition, misunderstanding core target markets, and flawed analysis in strategy formulation. We contend that such missives tend to be based on faulty assumptions in this VUCA world, and existing planning processes need more serendipitous inspiration to enable space for happy accidents. By creating space for happy incidents, such innovative behaviour can propel your firm to a better and more sustainable future.
We have seen this occur several times in sports. The Liverpool team, under the leadership of Klopp, see him deploy Henderson as captain, who is not one of his best players. But on the pitch, Henderson deployed the serendipitous inspiration for the team to have frequent happy accidents. England cricket is currently having a renaissance under a new leadership team of Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes, the captain. The attacking brand of the England cricket team has enabled it to attain new heights. At the time of writing, England lost to New Zealand by a single run, but Stokes maintained that sometimes they would lose as they move forward.
This session aims to illustrate the benefits and how serendipitous inspiration can allow room for happy accidents in the business world by recalibrating your firm.
Key presentation outcomes:
• Gain a new way of tackling the cognitive dilemma of how to lead teams and, at the same time, provide serendipitous inspiration.
• Uncover the benefits of planning for happy accidents and incorporating them into your differentiation strategies.
• Leave with an understanding of the causes of bad strategies and overcoming your blindspots.
Leveraging your corporate DNA to create a better future
Changing an organisation’s corporate DNA requires much more than sweeping statements about new directions or CEO philosophies; it means getting objective insights into strategy and culture. The corporate DNA is the organism through which all actions and decisions are made.
-
The media is full of newsworthy challenges and updates every 60 minutes of what’s happening in the world NOW. These challenges appearing in the media daily will impact your firm and future. Organisations can't ignore it, so they need to find a path to create a better future, as stakeholders demand. Unfortunately, such paradigm shifts are intermittent, broken or interrupt the status quo, causing frustrations, not progress. Leveraging your corporate DNA can help your business transformation projects.
This situation can be likened to living organisations and the need to understand your corporate DNA. Such immune systems are a network of policies and cultures within the firm that prevent nasty external shocks from entering and harming the firm. Adopting an organic model with leaders treating their organisations like living things can help overcome bureaucracy and trauma. Corporate DNA can be at the centre of significant change initiatives, which can mean changing the DNA that has made your firm successful. This can help overcome the reticent behaviour around old values. We have seen this occur in football, in which teams can succeed for long periods but must change their DNA to recapture success. This can take decades to recover for some teams, like Liverpool and Man Utd.
Adopting a business and people perspective, the purpose of this session is to consider how to assess and enhance the corporate DNA of your firm to overcome challenging objectives and achieve a new future within a time scale.
This session explores how the firm can create effective immune systems by handling groups of related tasks and employees.
Key presentation outcomes:
• Gain a new way of viewing your corporate DNA and recognising the implications for the Learning and Development pipeline.
• Uncover the DNA of your organisation and align the immune systems to prevent nasty external shocks from entering and harming the firm.
• Leave with an understanding of new ways to align the components of corporate DNA with the complex and ever-changing business environments.
Is it now time for your organisation's HR detox?
Employee well-being is paramount, but toxicity levels in businesses in the workplace are increasing. Evidence of blame games, higher levels of deteriorating relations, poor customer service and quiet quitting harms employee well-being and the bottom line. HR managers need to work on engagement, impact and results achieved.
-
However, organisations don’t need the ill effects of toxicity reducing productivity. Research has shown that avoiding a toxic worker (or removal) is more beneficial than replacing an average worker with a superstar worker (Housman and Minor 2015) .
At the institutional level, external pressures can create a risk-averse culture that drives strategic behaviour. This can lead to a lack of thought and practice diversity, culminating in a paucity of effective strategising within the organisation.
Our HR detox and modernisation approach is a de-cluttering exercise, throwing out all the unnecessary, harmful HR practices/processes. This will contribute to a healthy HR learning and development capability recovery. The responsibility approach will move beyond making employees cognitively aware and help manifests this learning in the workplace.
More specifically, our approach consists of three elements: culture driven and will improve engaged employees’ opportunity-spotting, collaboration-building, and strategic planning and thinking.
This session explores the phenomenon of toxicity and outlines an HR detox framework and programme.
Key presentation outcomes:
• Gain a new way of viewing your organisation's toxicity levels and recognising the implications for the Learning and Development pipeline.
• Uncover the DNA of your organisation and align the immune systems to prevent nasty external shocks from entering and harming the firm.
• Leave with an understanding of new ways of assessing bureaucracy and trauma in the digital environment.
Aligning your strategic engagement with complexity
Since the advent of Covid-19, organisations have experienced heightened levels of complexity. To overcome this, investment in human resources and digital technology is justified as a necessary strategy for coping. But individual personal values influence levels of strategic engagement throughout the organisation, which can be positive and negative.
-
The human-environment sustainability relationship plays a crucial role in organisational alignment. However, shattered (and even shaken) business models need new practices, and workforce strategies must be redefined in ways that could not have been predicted pre covid.
Today's environment requires strategic engagement to create adaptive processes in people and organisations. There is a balancing act between people and systems engaged in pressure for change and stability. Such conflict must align with adaptative outcomes at the individual and organisational levels.
Strategic engagement depends on many factors, including overcoming individual and firm proclivity, social capital and structural issues. But the key is the ability to interact with the complex external environment. Therefore, the firm needs to develop simple-to-use frameworks to engage strategically with the internal and external environments in which uncertainty is accepted. This presents learning and development opportunities in the firm to reduce the surprises (what you don’t know, what you don’t know).
This session explores how your firm can deal with complexity and uses a strategic engagement matrix to show how to create a winning environment.
Key presentation outcomes:
• Gain a new way of thinking about alignment and recognition of the importance of the human-environment sustainability relationship.
• Uncover the personal values that are acting as barriers to developing winning new strategies.
• Leave with new heuristics for leading the organisation's strategic engagement -complexity-related initiatives.
Follow-up Executive bespoke programmes for the organisation
To assist organisations in maximising the benefits of key messages from these presentations, Paul offers follow-up programmes for participating organisations who recognise that the Learning and Development Paradox is real and that generating measurable outcomes is critical in future-proofing the business. Each programme is bespoke, and Paul’s interdisciplinary strategy design framework incorporates agile, design thinking principles and leadership thinking.
Paul can help with Keynotes, Masterclasses, Workshops, Retreats, Virtual Speaking, and Conferences;
Flexible Delivery Styles
Keynotes – Paul can customise a talk for specific challenges or a particular occasion.
Masterclasses – Paul can provide access to guidance, feedback, and advice, on specific organisational pain points.
Workshops – Paul can customise packages for Boards, investors, customers, teams, and individuals.
Retreats – Paul can provide the environment and space to help leaders make high-quality and sustainable decisions and bring their teams together on the same page.
Virtual Speaking & Speaker Forums – Paul can involve a community of specialist academics and practitioners who can strengthen a key internal message.
Conferences – Paul can provide inspiring and thought-provoking content to energise participants and delegates.
Talk to Paul about your next event, or organisational developmental programme – he looks forward to hearing from you.
Please click below and complete the brief form of your area of interest. He’ll get back to you and explore how he can help.
The Leadership Series 2022
The Learning and Development Leadership Paradox
Mini Case Study, 2022
Paul has observed in his research, delivering presentations and workshops, the learning and development paradox in which the increasing expenditure on L&D does not achieve the desired results. This series of presentations extend our thinking on Contemporary Issues in Strategic Management by reflecting, identifying and discussing some of the current and future strategy disrupters and examples to reinforce key organisation strategic messages.
The Challenge
According to 2020 Govt figures - UK employers invested around £42bn, approximately - £1530 per annum per employee.
Yet there is growing evidence from Gallup, Government, and McKinsey’s and many others towards a greater focus on L&D for organisations of all sizes. But unfortunately, data suggest that investment in leadership development rarely generates the expected results.
But HR managers need to work on engagement, impact and results achieved. L&D can be a roadblock to growth and is now a board-level challenge.
Practitioners have encouraged Paul to pursue this paradox challenge of nurturing continuous improvement using today's technology platforms and modern practices.
He leads an initiative comprising a community of high-quality academics sharing their academic knowledge, business experience and frameworks, analytical tools and solutions to help organisations build capacity to deliver strategic objectives. In addition, support is available to HR functions through speaking engagements, workshops and innovative bespoke training services, which can be provided in a hybrid format.
Business leaders must consider new, more ambitious strategies and tactics to build resilience and protect its people from the adverse impacts of the external environments.
Suggested next Action
A brief conversation with Paul now will cover further details and give Paul a chance to understand your issues.
Email pap@drpaulphillips.com or complete a few details on the enquiry form. Paul looks forward to hearing from you.
