12 years successfully connecting over 8,000 leaders to a better future
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Welcome to our
Critical Shift: Leadership Promotion Programme
Placing your relational leadership at the heart of change.
We’ll help you step-up and shift mindsets at critical points on your leadership journey.
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Choice Not Chance®
Shifting levels of responsibility require managers and leaders to consciously adjust for success. Letting go of old mindsets, improving relationship influence, embracing systemic and enhanced commercial thinking are vital areas for progression.
Our innovative online programme holds you, your business situation and your critical leadership shift in focus throughout. We use compounded development coaching to accelerate your learning as you go through the staggered 3 day programme. You will actively learn through discussion about critical promotion challenges and take key issues into small group and individual coaching sessions to crystallize your leadership shift. Here we offer high quality support and insightful challenge. Between each input day you will be taking action to accelerate your real life learning and at the end of the programme will have an anchored success plan for your next 100 days.
Don’t leave things to chance. Escape the 50% failure rate of new-to-role leaders and accelerate your leadership development with our world-class coaches who can help your best self emerge.
Join The Critical Shift Programme
This comprehensive Leadership Promotion Programme actively maps each manager & leaders context to accelerate their impact as they navigate their internal promotion.
Teams also go through critical shifts whether awaiting a new manager or as they reform; we offer development support during these transitions to build self and team awareness, capability and accelerate performance through high quality team coaching. This creates a strong platform for new managers and the team. Where you go from here is up to you! Contact us for more information.
Programme Director
Peter Fennah, founder of Career Synergy, is renowned for coaching managers and leaders through tough role and organisational transitions. Managing complex stakeholder groups whilst leading organisations engaged in rapid change is even more challenging in our COVID era, requiring more agility and emotional intelligence than ever before.
Peter has spent 23 years refining his transition knowledge and pragmatic experience of role change across sectors, countries and seniority levels. An experienced executive education lecturer he teaches across 8 top global business schools where he supports MBAs in their journey; in addition to coaching divisional managers, three star military and CEOs across public and private sectors.
Testimonials
Reach The Next Level
“Peter has an exceptional ability to challenge, focus and enthuse thereby enabling you to reach the next level of your chosen career...he has deep listening skills and will take the time and the effort to understand what success actually means for you. Prepare for the ride of your life, perhaps to an entirely new destination, that was not what you expected at the start, but was in fact where you actually needed to get to.”
Unleash Your Potential
"The reasons I value Peter's insights are simple - he is pragmatic and balanced, yet quick to encourage new perspectives and challenge assumptions; he maintains his currency with the latest trends and tools, so his advice is always proactive and refreshing; most of all he is an expert in the art of coaching, with an uncanny knack of getting you to articulate your own solutions."
Insights To Accelerate Your Career
"As a Chartered Occupational Psychologist with substantial career development and OD expertise, I have found Peter’s coaching to be deeply insightful around perspective taking, leadership & performance, team transitions and change, challenging me to think more broadly & act with clearer purpose. For me and my employers this resulted in lightbulb moments of new opportunities for growth, with practical support on next steps."
Realise Your Vision
"Peter has an exceptional track record in developing the capabilities of individuals. He is an accomplished active listener adept at helping individuals to identify clear targets. Peter then helps them to develop a road map to reaching these goals, when necessary bringing structured processes to support the challenges of converting vision to realisation. Working with Peter through challenging times, I value and respect his judgement, perception and the strength of character that enables him to deliver the difficult messages when they need to be heard."
Cross Sector Commercial Insight
"Peter’s candour, honesty and insight is refreshing. He understands the challenges in today’s business world and quickly uses his experience and insight from across numerous industries to recommend options to consider to enable you to reappraise ones own behaviour and outlook in a positive constructive, confidential and safe manner. Having had benefit of numerous management coaches over my career previously, I’ve now realised there are coaches and coaches, not all are the same!"
The Missing Ingredient For Corporate Programmes
"Peter joined us 2 years into a well-established career development programme: he turned out to be the missing piece in our jigsaw. His depth of knowledge has added an extra dimension to what we’re able to achieve and his willingness to listen and understand has led me to have total confidence in his contribution to the programme."
Thought Provoking Workshops
"Peter's workshops were content rich and very thought provoking. His calm, supportive facilitation style allowed time for ideas and conversation to flow, making the workshops feel tailored to our interests. Peter’s deep content expertise and extensive experience of coaching concepts and tools means he is very comfortable exploring issues which go beyond the immediate agenda and he is very open and generous with his knowledge."
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Who Should Attend?
This programme offers a reset opportunity for busy leaders and managers seeking to accelerate their impact in a challenging role.
- You are either ready for promotion, recently promoted or may have been in role for around a year but recognise that you haven’t fully adjusted.
- If you are up against high expectations, time is limited and performance is critical then this programme is certainly for you.
- You will be streamed with other executives, leaders and managers going through similar challenges to enrich your learning experience.
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Aligning Behavioural Change
Our 3 day intensive will help shift your leadership impact. We will go beyond the horizontal skills and knowledge necessary to do the day job. We will focus on how you will manage expectations, build effective relationships to sustainably deliver change and transform your area of the business through enhancing your leadership impact.
The critical shifts in the promotion process revolve around what you take ownership of and how you behave. Longevity of leadership relies upon embracing change for ourselves and helping others to do the same. How we relate to change determines the ease of the transition.
There is always an emotional/energy cost required to withstand the constant shifts in expectations, market conditions, etc. that come with new levels of leadership responsibility. Our programmes help you and your organisation reframe leadership for the future and direct energy where it will have the best outcome.
We will help you anticipate challenges, embrace the required shifts in behaviour and design strategies resilient to rapid change. By working from the inside out, we enable leaders to connect purpose to strategy to meaningful outcomes.
Compounded Coaching: Where The Magic Happens
You will learn through best practice input, sharing your own experiences and receiving attention to your learning goals within small groups. You will have the highest levels of support and challenge from your group and 1:1 coach.
The programme design revolves around deep conversations with you to support and challenge you to best align to the needs of your real life context. Moving between multiple learning formats, from plenary to small group to 1:1 and then self-reflection, facilitates deeper transformations. This innovative programme design enables what typically is left unspoken and unheard to be consciously engaged with.
Our coaches are handpicked to partner with you. As Chartered Occupational Psychologists and seasoned accredited executive coaches offering the highest quality interventions, we understand how aligned purpose and mindset drive exceptional behaviours. We also understand the mental strain of the emotional journey attached to learning and success.
The three days are separated to allow you to research stakeholder needs, experiment and adapt. We actively support your transition, helping you to navigate your leadership shift step-by-step.
Evolve your leadership style, strategic thinking, social integration and influence whilst also learning how to avoid the pitfalls for the unwary.
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What Will I Learn?
- Personally: How to better respond to change; connect more to yourself and create better relationships with others deepening trust
- Impact agility: Be smarter in your allocation of time, energy via better diagnosis of business and relational needs
- SQ & PQ: Be more skillful in your use of social and political intelligence to embed change and address ruptures
- Learning network: Build resilience to cope with unrelenting expectations and foster learning networks for ongoing adaptation
- Success synergy: Align your unique leadership ‘core’ and conditions to thrive in uncertain times
- Leadership shift: Prioritise and focus on the critical shift to move from reactive to independent thinking
- Executive outlook: Go beyond conventional siloed leadership thinking and add value as a collaborative systemic leader
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Programme Content
The Daily Itinerary
We run three, day long, webinars that are delivered over a staged timeframe aligned to your personal and organisational needs.
These can be consecutive days but are commonly over a number of weeks allowing you to take action, collect data and plan for your next set of interventions.
You have dedicated time through the compounded coaching model to deepen your understanding of what meaningfully needs to change. We support your learning potential and necessary leadership shift.
Day 1 – Let Go To Grow Into Your Future
Promotion is rarely universally welcomed. Performance expectations shift and relationship boundaries are redrawn. We will chart the hidden shifts in power and influence as you move beyond the rules of the game for your old role. Getting clear on your new beginning requires letting go of old ways of thinking or behaving. Without this acknowledgement you, and others around you, won’t learn to adapt. Resulting in mediocre, at best, results.
We will explore in both small group coaching and 1:1 coaching a range of questions to help you better connect to your role; redefine your new first impressions, set the right tone and build a new level of interconnection for systemic change. For example, what personal motivations and expectations do you have of your promotion? What shifts in expectations from others are likely as a result of your predecessor, and of what they have been told you bring to the role? What cost might be imposed upon you to meet these expectations with your current resources? How will success now be measured? What is now central to your role and what does this push aside that you may be reluctant to let go?
You will work with your coach on defining and mapping the critical shifts that will need behavioural consistency if you are to succeed. This recalibration and internal rebranding may draw upon learning insights from 360 feedback, line management questionnaires, stakeholder informational interviews, psychometrics and reflection exercises.
Day 2 – Diagnose Value: What Needs & Worthy Goals Are Compelling?
Having said ‘yes’ to the promotion you need to quickly work out what, and who, will make it a success. This doesn’t mean falling into the trap of working 24/7, or of swallowing prevailing views of how to do the job. It does mean mapping who else was interested in the role and ensuring that you have their buy-in to work together. It also requires commercial and strategic insight into what, and who, is driving the business? How is the operating model and structure best aligned to the strengths of the organisation?
We always need to remember that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ so how is the pace, manner and speed of decisions taken at this level? Discriminate between the background noise of activity versus real added value to bring into focus the core value chain.
We will help you to:
- Gain commercial insight
- Increase influence and stand out in meetings for the right reasons
- Map stakeholders and prioritise your ‘to do list’ to create capacity and capability for change
- Evaluate, build and resource your team
- Create a compelling communication campaign
- Recognise and engage with your own pattern of likely resistance to new ways of working
Day 3 – Build Trust, Gain Results & Lead Across Boundaries
Trust doesn’t come easily as you promote and isn’t based upon passively pleasing others. You need to build compelling reasons for collaboration and crossing silos. This starts with your character and energy, moving to how you relate and respect others and where you would take them if they placed their trust in you. How will great results consistently follow-on from your aligned plan?
Your small group coaching and one to one coaching sessions will focus upon embedding successful results at a strategic level. Working in the business and working on the business. Helping you to create new platforms of mutual success that will generate sustainable value for the business. With these result platforms and upward stakeholder management you can build an exit strategy to go beyond your recent promotion. We will help you to aim higher and deliver on the here-and-now.
Plus – Promotion Action Plan – Free Coaching Review
You will have built up a trusting relationship with your executive coach over the three days. We invite you to complete your Promotion Action Plan and submit it to your coach to receive feedback before you share it more widely with key sponsors for your success. We offer this free follow-up video call to help you continually improve as you make sense of your evolving situation.
For those who are interested, we also offer discounted leadership development coaching for programme members.
Invest and take conscious control of your promotion and accelerate the opportunity.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.”
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How Will I Learn? Coaches Make The Difference
- You will learn through shared experiences in plenary, being with a small group going through similar transition challenges and receiving 1:1 executive coaching
- We will help you evolve your leadership style, challenge you to enhance your strategic thinking and proactively spot traps when transitioning into role
- Our coaches are handpicked to partner with you. We are Chartered Occupational Psychologists, seasoned executive coaches and change consultants
- We will partner with you every step of the way to help clarify your goals, create an action plan and deliver on it
- You have access to our LinkedIn alumni support group, Whatsapp small group dedicated coaching resources and our Insights newsletter where additional leadership webinars are highlighted
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Benefits
Programme benefits include:
- Collaborative focus: Increased alignment, expectation clarity and mutual motivation for shared success
- Sponsor synergy: Increased and shared focus of what/who/how added value in the business can be created
- Relational leadership: Putting relationships at the heart of change creating a collaborative mindset
- Culture: Increased appreciation of leading rapid change across the business for mutual benefit
- Personal: Accelerated learning; prioritisation and adaptation to the role
- Performance: 50% faster than average onboarding performers and significantly improved sponsor/stakeholder relationships
Join The Critical Shift Programme NOW
The comprehensive Leadership Promotion Programme for managers & leaders who want to accelerate and leverage internal opportunities.
Take conscious control of your promotion and accelerate the opportunity. Don’t leave things to chance.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.”
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Our Expert Coaches
Our world-class executive coaches have been hand-picked for their ability to connect with people and their unique perspective on leadership development. Allowing you to feel safe, heard and vulnerable at critical times of change whilst also having clear input from them based on their rigorous professional background.
