Do you grapple with leadership challenges like making time for leadership skill building, improving the way your managers work as a team, recruiting new leaders, and developing emerging leaders? CG Strategy has the tools to help you grow your leaders, strengthen your leadership team, cultivate emerging leaders, and hire exceptional new ones.

Today, many individuals in government management and leadership roles are senior technical program experts with little or no training or experience in managing people. This means that many government leaders must parallel process, building their own skills while participating in a leadership team, developing the skills of their teams, and cultivating the organization’s future leaders. This requires a commitment of time and resources, as well as, a clear set of expectations for what it means to lead. It also means ensuring that performance management goals and objectives are aligned with leadership expectations, and that recruitment and hiring processes are evaluated to facilitate the successful recruitment and hiring of the next wave of leaders.

At CG Strategy, we work with leaders to create a vision for leadership that is intentional, attainable, and forward-leaning. We ensure that leadership expectations are clearly defined and that leaders are incentivized to exceed the expectations through performance management and recognition. We provide individual and group coaching to help develop leaders, and we improve recruitment, hiring and onboarding processes. Our work helps our clients build a strong foundation of organizational leadership.

• Leaders have the skills and ability to manage and lead people, organizations, and programs.
• Leaders hire managers who have the skills and ability to manage and lead people, organizations, and programs.
• There are clearly defined expectations for managers, and managers take shared responsibility for meeting the expectations.
• Leadership teams are cohesive with leaders functioning as role models for the next generation.
• New managers successfully transition from the role of technical expert to the role of manager and leader.

• Leaders may struggle to develop a plan or vision, creating confusion and reduced morale for staff.
• Managers hired by the organization aren’t equipped to lead people, organizations, and programs.
• Managers might not understand what it means to act as a leader nor what is expected of them, creating inconsistency and confusion across organizational units.
• Leadership teams may not work as a team to achieve the organization’s strategic goals.
• New managers often do not have the skills they need to manage their staff and delegate the technical role.

Doubling the size of an office, establishing new branches, and onboarding new staff and leadership may seem like a lot for any leader to handle, but these tasks were just part of a CG Strategy client’s job description. In the midst of all of this foundational work, she also needed to unify her leadership team around a shared vision for the future. We were asked to help our client achieve her goal of building a united, sustainable, and thriving organization.

Working with the client, CG Strategy developed a unified set of interventions to support this change effort. We facilitated the development of an organizational growth strategy, a change management strategy and a leadership development strategy. The leadership development strategy contained four components.

1. Coaching: We provided executive coaching for new leaders and group coaching for the newly established leadership team in order to directly educate and cultivate the Office’s leadership skills.
2. Emerging Leaders: We identified new and emerging leaders who could be developed for positions in the future and who could deepen the Office’s leadership bench.
3. Growth Opportunities: We identified opportunities for growth and development so that everyone in the organization had a chance to learn and master new leadership skills and abilities.
4. Expectations & Accountability: We facilitated the development of a set of leadership expectations that were integrated into the performance management, recruiting, and hiring processes.

The Office now has a strong leadership team with clearly defined expectations. Every leader understands his or her role within the organization and is growing in his or her capacity to deliver on that role. The Office measures success across the organization according to its strategic objectives, and continues to cultivate new and emerging leaders.