Emerging from the most difficult recession in memory, successful HR professionals are discovering “What got you here won’t get you there.” They are finding significant shifts in what it takes to be an effective leader:
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Pre-Recession HR Leadership
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Emerging HR Leadership
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Achieve compliance
Counsel employees
Support managers
Respond to corporate initiatives
Meet senior management demands
Implement Strategy
Execute their job requirements
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Achieve improvement
Build profitable organization culture
Support and challenge managers
Formulate corporate initiatives
Partner fully with senior management
Participate fully in formulating strategy
Design their job for maximum value
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The HR Leadership Gap
HR professionals have fully arrived. Recognizing their increasing responsibilities and influence, many companies expect their HR professionals to make a larger contribution to corporate success. Companies know HR professionals hold the knowledge and insight in key areas of compliance, managing talent and building a profitable culture.
The traditional HR skills --- counseling troubled employees, managing compensation and benefits, providing informal guidance --- are still necessary but not sufficient to perform at the highest levels. Now, HR professionals also need to think strategically, participate fully in strategic planning, partner with and challenge both their own managers and senior executives. They need to partner with other departments --- finance, marketing, quality. And they need to be able to design their job to let put their strengths to work.
Can Leadership Be Learned / Who Should Attend
No matter how hard they practice, few golfers will grow into a Tiger Woods. Yet any golfer improves performance if they learn some skills practice. And of course, Tiger practices relentlessly, consistently, intensely. It’s the same with learning leadership. Any leader who builds skills and practices will improve his or her performance.
Thus the most important factors determining who should attend the Strategic Leadership are candidates’ interest in improving their performance, and their willingness to work hard at practice and applying skills. Beyond that, participants who get the most from the program typically want/ need to:
- Take their leadership performance to higher levels
- Develop new skills and apply new methods
- Make a real difference in their company
- More clearly demonstrate the value of HR in the organization
- Perform at real senior executive levels, truly partner with senior management
- Have 5+ years real-world experience
Monthly Program Design Maximizes Lasting Results
The Strategic Leadership Institute features monthly half-day seminars spread over four months. This program design enables participants to not only learn program concepts but to apply and practice program skills between sessions.
Most leadership training uses one-time seminars: two, three, four, even five-day retreats. This approach is intense and efficient, but ineffective in the long run. In one-time programs, participants focus on fresh insights and ideas but neglect the more difficult issue of how to apply what they learn.
Program Specifics
Four Monthly Seminars. Four sessions provides a critical mass of time to enable participants to work with four very different kinds of learning essential to leadership performance: self-assessment, goals and vision, communications skills and essential processes and methods.
Start-Up. To ensure maximum productivity of program sessions, we ask participants to complete several hours of self-guided pre-work before the first program group seminar. This enables our discussions to be more thoughtful and worthwhile for all.
Homework. After the first session there is little “homework” in the traditional sense of reading or writing assignments. However, we do ask participants to apply what we covered in the everyday work and to prepare brief case material enabling them to link program content with their own specific issues and opportunities.
About The Program Leader
Dr. William Ronco planned, designed and leads the program. Dr. Ronco works extensively with corporate executives, senior managers and HR professionals on leadership development, strategic planning and partnering. He regularly consults with Fortune 500 corporations, biotechnology companies, colleges and universities, health care, design and construction.
Dr. Ronco has provided custom leadership development programs for clients including Pfizer Corporation, Harvard University, Raytheon, and the Federal Reserve Bank. He teaches leadership seminars for the Massachusetts Biotech Council, CORENET Global (corporate real estate), the Associated General Contractors as well as colleges and universities. He designed and has led year-long small group Leaders Circle leadership development programs for 150+ senior management participants over the past ten years.
Dr. Ronco's work in partnering, teambuilding and change management has earned him an international reputation as an outstanding management and organization consultant. A global expert on partnering, Dr. Ronco has led 200+ successful partnering projects in strategic alliances, mergers, outsourcing and between departments in biotech, science, IT, health care, design and construction. He is author, The Partnering Solution (Career Press, 2005) and numerous articles on partnering best practices.
Dr. Ronco earned his B.A. at Rutgers University, his Ed.M. at the Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Session Schedule, Core Topics
This outline describes the program sequence. As participation in the SLI is limited, we vary program focus and content to reflect specific group priorities and interests.
1. Responding To The HR Leadership Challenge, Increasing Self-Awareness
- Understanding, responding to the HR leadership challenge; Issues and opportunities
- The new HR leadership competencies: What do you have? What do you need?
- Why effective leadership demands accurate awareness of how others perceive you
- How do key others really perceive you? Increasing your awareness accuracy
- 360 survey uses, misuses, limitations, best practices*
2. Assessing Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Improving One-On-One Skills
- Using your 360 data to assess your position and develop a meaningful action plan
- Identifying the key one-on-one situations that shape your effectiveness
- Breaking destructive, predictable communications patterns
- Improving your ability to influence, assert, deliver bad news, provide feedback
- Increasing your skills for listening actively, positively, in full collaboration
Seminar 3. Increasing HR Value, Becoming More Strategic
- Demonstrating HR value and input in strategic planning
- Developing strategic thinking strategies and skills
- Refining the HR role to include more strategic responsibilities
- Increasing HR’s visibility, impact, strategic role
- Developing the HR role for full partnership at executive levels
Seminar 4. Building Strategic Partnerships, Planning Ongoing Development
- Supporting your managers: understanding, meeting current needs
- Increasing partnering effectiveness throughout your organization
- Tuning up performance management and compliance with emerging best practices
- Managing change: HR responsibilities, opportunities
- Learning to learn, planning your next steps for development and growth
Special Program Feature 1: Using 360 Degree Survey Data
*We are pleased to make our proprietary, online 360-Degree Leadership Communications Survey available at no additional charge to SLI participants. You are not required to work with the survey, the choice is up to you. Thousands of corporate executives and HR professionals have found that these surveys provide valuable data and insight, and have used their survey results to improve their leadership effectiveness. We explain the survey in detail in the first program session. If you choose to work with it, you are in complete control of who completes it and what you do with the results. Responses are anonymous and confidential. We help you interpret the results and develop a viable action plan.
Special Program Feature 2: Senior C-Level and HR Guests Participate
How do successful HR professionals do it? What do C-level executives really want from their HR professionals? Each program session features a different successful senior C-level or HR professional guest. Their experiences, stories and participation in the program add external perspective and valuable real-world insight.
Program Fee, ROI, Business Case
Fee for the 4 session Strategic Leadership Institute is $1,200 for HRACC members, $1,600 for non-members. This fee is lower than most generic one-time leadership retreats and seminars. Further, other programs typically do not include personalized 360 degree individual participant surveys or C-level and HR executive involvement.
The program pays for itself many times over in improved participant and company performance. Key program benefits / outcomes for participants’ companies include:
· Access to emerging employee and talent management best practices
· Increased value added from HR professionals
· Reduced turnover, increased retention of key staff
· Improved compliance, reduced exposure and legal vulnerability
· Stronger, more productive, more profitable organization culture
Key program benefits/ outcomes for participants include:
· Improved performance in key strategic roles
· Increased value added to the company
· Stronger performance in strategic partnerships with managers
· Improved core skills
· Meaningful in-depth relationship building, peer coaching with other participants
To Register
Program Fees:
HRACC Member - $1,200
All Others - $1,600
Four seminars, 2-6 pm, March 25, April 27, May 18, June 17, 2010.
March 25 session at J. Morrissey & Co., Windsor. Subsequent sessions at participants’ offices.
Questions? Feel free to contact William Ronco at (781) 275-2424 or by email at
Shortly after you register we will contact you to learn more about your background, current situation and future plans. We do this in order to build productive professional peer groups.
To provide a sense of what we will be asking, you can get started thinking about the questions listed on the registration form.
. You may submit your thoughts in writing, and/or discuss them by phone with us. If you’d like to submit your written responses, email them to program director William Ronco at wronco@gatheringpace.com