Advisory Services

As the challenges facing leaders continue to change, organizations need to update and align their leadership models, development strategies and suite of offerings. We work with organizations to create and refresh their leadership frameworks and align their offerings to ensure the greatest impact and efficiency.

Leadership Strategy

Crafting a leadership framework requires a collective agreement of how we define “great leadership” in service of the organization’s strategy and a data-based analysis of what enables and inhibits great leadership from happening today – the beliefs, behaviors, actions, processes, and ways of working that lead to strategically-relevant, values-consistent high performance. 

Duke CE helps organizations define the leadership skills and behaviors of the future, not backwards-looking, fixed capabilities. Although often not explicitly defined, every organization has an approach to leadership that creates the culture and outcomes the organization sees today. We work with clients to uncover root causes and underlying trends in behavior so we can create circumstances in the future that ensure success, or discover where there is leverage for change.

While most leaders instinctively know what “great” leadership looks like in their organization, not everyone shares the same idea. Exploring these ideas and creating a shared understanding of great leadership is critical to building consistent leadership for the future. In working collaboratively to combine these insights with best-practice research, the result is a clear, shared leadership framework of desired behaviors and skills that can serve as a basis for a leadership development strategy.

Leadership and Learning Architecture Review

Many leadership development architectures are disjointed, suffer from siloed design and roll out, and fail to achieve a true talent pipeline through leadership development levels. We engage with clients to review and construct a learning architecture – an interlinked system of developmental activities and interventions designed to close the gap between where the organization is today and where it needs to be with respect to its critical leadership capabilities. A robust, integrated learning architecture can inform the process of talent management and help with filling the leadership pipeline.

The architecture answers these questions:

• Who is to be developed? 
• What do they need to know, do and believe differently?
• How will it be accomplished? 

We deliver a future-facing, integrated learning architecture which helps eliminate overlaps and close critical gaps in capabilities. It can optimize spending of time and money, and ensure that development is directly tied to business outcomes.

Reskilling Strategy and Rapid Remote Reskilling Implementation

Many organizations are facing unprecedented disruption and need to prepare their people more quickly than ever before for the future. The need has never been greater for senior leaders to understand digital disruption, sociopolitical change, AI and robotics, and the power of data-driven insights. Yet, numerous new learning needs can be overwhelming for an organisation to identify and deliver on. Often, reskilling programmes are plagued by light treatment of complex topics which create awareness, but not fluency. 

Given current disruptions to normal learning programs, we help clients use learner time in purposeful ways to reskill, remotely if required. We undertake a comprehensive assessment of reskilling needs across key leadership and management roles to define future skills needs, design our Duke CE signature and customised ‘Rapid Remote Reskilling’ (RRR) package tailored to your roles and needs, and support your roll out efforts. We offer comprehensive mobile and bite-sized formats for your leaders operating remotely.

Future of Work Strategy

The way we work is inherently changing. The expansion of the gig economy, the increase in flexible working, the pervasiveness of AI and robotics, and shifts in the meaning of work mean that work will be different for next-generation leaders. 

Duke CE prepares organizations for what’s next in the future of work. We work with internal HR and business experts to understand how these trends will affect ways of working in the client organization, and what it means for leadership roles and leadership of teams and functions. We then support the HR leaders and their internal clients to understand and adapt organizational designs, learning and talent strategies and recruitment for the future of work. We deliver a detailed six-week diagnostic or shorter format workshops as required. 

How can Duke CE help?

The exact process for developing a new learning architecture or revising an existing one will vary depending on client needs, but six steps are typically involved.

1. Understand the Context – What business pressures does the organization face? What is its strategy? What organizational capabilities are needed to execute the strategy? What are its values?
2. Clarify Scope and Priorities– What are the guiding principles, mandate, scope, and team for this Learning Architecture project?
3. Inform and Align on Destination– What will the learning architecture look like for this organization? What will each of us (client and Duke CE) bring to the table in a thought partnership to reach that destination? Are we aligned around the work to be done?
4. Evaluate What Exists– Which current offerings and approaches are strategic and important now? Which are focused on the desired destination? What is working and what isn’t? What is right for this culture? What are the areas of leverage?
5. Recommend Solution– What needs to be changed? What needs to be added or bolstered? What needs to be cut or replaced? Craft a learning architecture and, as desired, a phased approach to implementing it.
6. Measure Results– What specific measures can gauge the impact of the recommendations once implemented? What business and behavioral changes are expected?

In addition to crafting a plan for building the leadership capabilities critical to an organization’s success, creating a leadership architecture can also help develop the capabilities of internal learning and development teams. While Duke CE can do all the work, our preferred model is to create a project team where we work side-by-side in partnership with our clients so that once the initial architecture is created, internal staff know the process and can keep the architecture up-to-date as strategic priorities change. Thus a one-time investment has a long-lasting impact in creating a sustainable learning culture within your organization.