Combining Leadership Development and CSR Programmes to create a Leadership, Learning, “Conscious” Culture

How would you like to maximise your return on both leadership development and CSR investment through life-changing programmes? The first Extraordinary Leadership Journey to India has proven a new methodology for achieving this through intensive, small-group, in-country leadership performance coaching.

Our work over the past five years through the Extraordinary Leadership Journey to Kenya has proven the value of delivering intensive leadership development programmes in environments that strongly challenge the leader’s deeply-held beliefs and values. These low-resource, high-performance environments can be deeply unsettling at the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels. These environments also host leadership of the highest ethical and performance levels, as well as a spectrum of contrasting styles and capabilities as examples and role modelling.

Participants are able to access dimensions of themselves that are literally inaccessible in their day-to-day, year-to-year lives, as the new environment strips them of their given status, their power, the hierarchical deference of those in their organisations, their cultural reference points, their emotional shields and physical home comforts, and all the environmentally-driven, internal and external supports for who they think they are (or who they think they should be). As a result, they learn how to connect with themselves and others with a depth, an openness and an authenticity otherwise unavailable to them. This enables behavioural change of a power and sustainability beyond that achievable in locally-based coaching and leadership development programmes.

Thanks to the pioneering attitude of Venquis (www.venquis.com) and the belief and support of the life-style support charity Shivia (www.shivia.org), this concept has now been taken to a new level of value generation. Here is how it works:

The Current CSR Model

The New Leadership Development CSR Model

In addition to the ongoing support of the charity/NGO through the CSR Budget, combining leadership development through the Extraordinary Leadership Journey provides multifold additional benefits for all stakeholders:

1. The leadership population of the sponsoring organisation travel to the supported communities. They interact with the community leaders and the community members, e.g. children, teachers, parents, village councils, youth groups. They gain awareness and understanding of the community’s life style, challenges and needs, whilst the local community benefits from the committed involvement of the journeyers
2. Extraordinary Leadership provides ongoing group and individual leadership performance coaching to ensure:
   1. Maintaining openness – emotional and psychological – to the impacts of the experience
   2. Exploring, understanding and processing experiences, reactions and responses to maximise individual and group learnings
   3. Clarification of consequent goals and actions from those learnings
   4. Clarification of how these learnings will be used on return to the individual’s/group’s normal environment
   5. Maximum benefit for all involved
3. Extraordinary Leadership liaises between the Journeyers and the host organisation to ensure the growth of direct, positive and open relationships at the earliest possible time; it also provides coaching and advice for the host organisation as required
4. The sponsoring organisation pays the fees for the leadership development programme to Extraordinary Leadership
5. Extraordinary Leadership transfers all profit to the supported charity or NGO
6. The charity/NGO uses these additional funds to further develop their beneficial work

1. Stronger ties are developed between the sponsoring organisation, the work of the charity and the host community, resulting in the development of additional benefits through greater awareness and connection for all involved

A growing number of companies are involving employees in their CSR activities through sabbaticals, charity days and incentive schemes. The lack of coaching support in most of these programmes means that a whole dimension of value is missed – for the individual, the company, the CSR partner organisations and the communities they support. This new model ensures that all dimensions of both human and commercial value are developed for all involved stakeholders in a dynamic and sustainable way.

If you are interested, come to lunch in the City of London on July 9th: