Program Overview

As business landscapes transform and evolve, efficiency strategies and the ability to smartly manage effective organizations also advance. Creating and sustaining a culture of high performance, and leading organizational effectiveness across the enterprise, are a few of the most complex challenges facing leaders.

Through the program Leading Organizational Effectiveness, managers will:

• Understand the systems thinking necessary to integrate disciplines of performance improvement, customer focus, learning and change.
• Enhance their capabilities and be prepared to develop and successfully lead a highly effective organization.
• Return to work with a clear vision and an actionable plan for implementing high-performance and effectiveness structures.

Testimonials

“This course gave me the knowledge and skills to reflect on the power within people to lead and change the culture, values, experience and thinking that we have most of the time, but don’t know it. This program sparked the energy within.”
Essam Saeed Alghamdi
Director, Field Operations Planning and Development
Saudi Telecom Company

“This course has given me a quantum leap in my managerial and leadership capabilities.”
Sharon Houy
Chief of Staff
Defense Intelligence Agency

“The course is titled ‘Leading Organizational Effectiveness,’ but it could as easily be titled ‘Developing Personal Effectiveness.’ This course was simply outstanding!”
Lewis Raden
Senior Manager
Lockheed Martin Corporation

Audience

Primary Audience

• All levels of leaders and managers who seek the tools and knowledge to help shift their organizations to extraordinary performance and high effectiveness
• Executives committed to dramatically improving value, improving processes and reducing overuse, underuse, and misuse of services and resources
• Managers responsible for unit or enterprise performance
• Executives in a mix of roles, spanning a diverse range of product and service organizations

Participant Profile

Participants have come from a wide range of roles, industries and organizations.

Titles of Recent Participants:

• C-Suite Executives, including CEO, CFO, COO and Chief Marketing Officer
• General Manager
• Merger/Acquisition Executives
• Health Care Executives, including COO and Chief Medical Officer
• Chief of Staff
• Operations Manager
• Program Management Engineers
• President, Senior Vice President and Vice President
• Human Resources Executives responsible for contributing to their firms’ strategic initiatives
• Directors/Managers in all functions

Recent Industry Representation:

Organizations Recently Attending:

Faculty

Alexander B. Horniman - Faculty Co-Leader Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Business Administration and Senior Fellow at the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics Horniman has been training ethical, mindful leaders for more than 45 years. He has inspired thousands to think differently about how they lead and influence others. A behavioral psychology and leadership specialist, he is the founding director of Darden’s Olsson Center for Applied Ethics and has prior experience in the military and aviation industry. Faculty Bio Page
	Robert D. Landel - Faculty Co-Leader Henry E. McWane Professor of Business Administration Landel brings realism to the “Four Ps” framework — Purpose, People, Processes, Performance — and provides an integrated, systems-thinking approach to business. He teaches courses in innovation and operations strategy, systems thinking and operational effectiveness. Landel consults with companies to develop high-performance work systems and coaches mid- and top-level executives in operations. Prior to coming to Darden in 1969, he worked in design engineering, manufacturing process engineering and procurement for Westinghouse and Chicago Bridge and Iron Company. Faculty Bio Page
	Gregory B. Fairchild E. Thayer Bigelow Associate Professor of Business Administration Named a Top 10 Business Professor in the World by CNN/Fortune in 2012, Fairchild is a world-renowned researcher and teacher in strategic management, entrepreneurship and ethics. Previously in marketing positions with Kraft General Foods, Procter & Gamble and Saks Fifth Avenue, he consults for corporations, nonprofits and government agencies. At Darden, he is also academic director of the Institute for Business in Society. Faculty Bio Page
	Melissa Thomas-Hunt Associate Professor of Business Administration Thomas-Hunt has spent more than 15 years teaching executives to become more effective members and leaders of high-performing teams. She focuses on conflict management and negotiations, and drives students considering multiple perspectives and harnessing the full expertise of diverse, global teams and organizations. She was an account marketing representative at IBM Corporation for more than a decade and previously taught at Stanford University, Cornell University and Washington University. Faculty Bio Page

Key Takeaways

• Enhance your capabilities to develop and successfully lead a highly effective organization.
• Learn a proven best practice for making a workforce a success — a participative design process that includes a strategic, intertwined focus on people, process and perspective.
• Create specific, relevant action plans for raising and maintaining high performance and effectiveness across your business.
• Cultivate your leadership style and behavior to shape innovation, learning and effectiveness across the enterprise.
• Develop ways of thinking and acting that enable personal and team excellence.
• Explore the key relationships among quality, customer focus, personal engagement and learning, and how concentration in these areas helps to create and maintain highly effective, high-performing environments.
• Gain skills to outperform competitors in customer service and satisfaction, product quality, innovation and productivity.

Topics

• Aligning Processes and Leadership Practices 
• Creativity and Innovation — Managing a “Performance Environment” 
• Developing a Performance Improvement Process 
• Frameworks and Concepts Supporting Highly Effective Organizations 
• Leading Strategic Change 
• Lean/“Effectiveness” Thinking and Enterprise Implementation 
• Linking Employee and Customer Development 
• Strategy and High Performance

Features

Program activities include:

• Classroom teaching and discussion focused on case studies, including peer cases based on participants’ real-life challenges and opportunities 
• Time spent in and outside the classroom with Darden’s top-ranked faculty, whose real-world experience spans the globe
• Development of a Personal Action Plan
  Prior to arriving, participants will identify and submit a company-specific performance/effectiveness opportunity. The faculty team will review each opportunity, customizing potential areas of focus on relevant industries and case examples. Participants will actively assess the needs of their work environments on several dimensions and return to their organizations with new approaches and frameworks. 

Schedule: