SSC works with leaders in large organisations who keep having the same conversation and getting the same result.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE
The executive who has done every programme.
The leaders 360 says what it said three years ago. They have had the coach, the offsite and the leadership programme, and they can describe their pattern better than anyone, which has not stopped them repeating it.
The restructure that changed the chart and nothing else.
The boxes moved and new people sat in them, and within a year the same arguments were back between the same functions.
The engagement survey that comes back the same every year.
The same questions score lowest, an action plan gets written, and next year's results look like last year's.
The executive people rehearse for.
Meetings with them are prepared like pitches, bad news gets softened on the way up, and by the time a problem reaches them it is months old.
The team that keeps losing its best people.
Every exit interview is polite and every reason is different, and the vacancy keeps coming back to the same team.
The two halves that never merged.
The acquisition closed years ago and people still say "us" and "them". Every joint initiative starts with goodwill and ends back in two camps.
SO YOU GET
→ Immediate impact.
→ The repetition stops.
→ The business gets simpler.
→ You get your capacity back.
AND YOUR ORGANISATION GETS
→ People stop managing around them.
→ Bad news arrives earlier.
→ Mistakes get raised quicker.
WHY NINTY MINUTES IS ENOUGH
Leadership development works on what a leader knows, and the pattern is not stored there. Under pressure an older reflex takes over (Schwabe and Wolf, 2009), and people rarely see what drives their own behaviour (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977), so training, feedback and diagnostics rarely reach it. That is why the pattern can survive a good programme.
We work on the reflex itself.
THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH
The traditional approach: the 360, executive coaching, the offsite, a leadership programme.
It is a global industry estimated at more than $50 billion, and only 11% of more than 500 executives surveyed strongly agreed that their leadership-development interventions achieve and sustain the results they wanted (McKinsey, 2017).
McKinsey has written up why it fails →
SSC adds ninety minutes, between the diagnostic and the coaching or inside the programme, so what you have already paid for lands and holds.
One. Done. What's Next?
PROOF
I wasn't burned out. I was blank. Like pedalling hard against a glass wall. In one SSC session, the wall cracked.
Luke Edwards, Founder
We uncovered patterns I hadn't even realised were influencing how I was showing up…I walked back into the business lighter, clearer, and far more effective.
MarComms Director, Technology Scale-Up
The biggest surprise has been the ripple effects that just keep happening. When something changes, I keep relating it back to that one session… I've put my prices up, I've got fewer and better clients, and I'm more available to my family.
Kath Clarke, Founder
THE INTERVENTION
One session. Ninety minutes. Online.
Surface. The pattern becomes visible, often for the first time.
Decode. We identify what it's protecting, and why it has outlasted everything else you've tried.
Resolve. We de trigger the pattern so it stops running you.
First off, let’s have call and see if this is emoting we can work on together.
WHY SCALE-UPS FIRST
Larger organisations ask about our work too.
We are currently focussed on scale-ups because there the distance between one leader and the result is short, so the value shows quickly and we can demonstrate it clearly.
The work itself is for any organisation, from 2 to 200,000 people, that wants to change how its leaders behave, individually and collectively. For a larger organisation, the pilot is how you find out whether it works in yours.
HOW ORGANISATIONS START
A pilot of three leaders, three sessions, €7,500.
You nominate leaders who want to take part, we hold an intake conversation with each, and every session runs online. We measure before the session and at three points afterwards. If you already run a 360, re-running it after the session is the fairest test we know, because it shows what the team noticed. The pilot commits you to nothing further.