Connected Leaders
How does cognitive engineering enable leadership development of Managers of managers in a company undergoing transformation?
The contexte
AXA Partners, the result of a recent merger of two AXA subsidiaries, is undergoing a profound transformation to address the digital and service revolution in the insurance and assistance industry.
Against this backdrop, the global community of Managers of managers must rethink its role in order to drive the transformation among the company’s 9,000 employees.
The Learning & Development (L&D) department therefore wanted to design a leadership development program that takes into account the specificities, challenges and strategy of AXA Partners, a global, matrix-based organization.
The idea
By crossing the cognitive leadership model developed by SBT Human(s) Matter with the context of AXA Partners’ transformation, we co-design an original program responding to the operational issues of Managers of managers. We rely on cognitive engineering to create thematic cycles allowing a progressive acquisition of practical knowledge within communities of leaders.
The solution
Following some 15 interviews with Leaders from around the world, we gathered some of them in a “Co-Design Workshop” to define the identity of the Programme and 5 development priorities to be addressed. These 5 priorities correspond today to the 5 “Topics” of the “Connected Leaders” Programme.
The program targets a population of 250 leaders from diverse backgrounds (professions and geographies), split into communities of 10. It orchestrates some 50 “touchpoints” over 12 months, inviting leaders to switch between experimentation, experience sharing and taking a step back from their learning.
« I have already improved my team by using the techniques that I am learning here. My pulse results were 30% improvement. »
A participant from Connected Leaders
There are multiple formats of “touchpoints” to maintain attention and facilitate the anchoring of learnings: videos, articles, autonomous Learning Expeditions, Business Cases, workshops within the community, workshops with the teams of each participant, reflexivity questionnaire…
Short loops between peer experimentation and transmission to the teams. Rapid and systematic alternation between field experimentation and experience sharing among peers encourages almost immediate effects on operational performance and acceleration of transformation.
