We offer three management development arenas.
In all arenas the focus is on two things: personal growth and enhanced outcome achievement. The growth of the individual must have a triggering force and impact. Growth is meaningless if it does not improve performance.
The management programme brings together managers with different fields of responsibility and from different disciplines. This could be an in-house management program for a single organization or a management programme involving a range of industries and companies. KEIRON has extensive experience with management programmes and has run some of the best-known programmes in Norway. We customize and innovate management programmes for companies. We also offer management programmes that are open for registration.
The advantage of such programmes is that you have the chance to try your hand at experiences outside the realm of your operative field. You meet skilled professionals who will ask you new questions and offer you different answers. A liberating freedom often arises in discussions of own management practice with strangers. You don’t work with these people on a daily basis. There are none of the usual expectations. This gives you a golden opportunity to talk about important things at another level.
You form bonds with such people. You build a network that will be useful to you in the future. Some relationships of this kind last for a long time. If the management programme takes place in-house, one often sees that such relationships improve inter-departmental teamwork and performance. A strong relationship with participants from other departments is a form of capital which will help you implement measures down the road.
Working with a management team is completely different from working with a management programme. The management team is a long-term, established group, with own resources, opinions and objectives. For this reason, fixed patterns of behaviour are also in place, for better or for worse.
We don’t have much faith in measures targeting solely teamwork and team development. Such measures seldom have a strong enough effect to bring about enduring change. The power of habit pulls the management team back into familiar patterns. On the other hand, we believe that all measures, also those related to teamwork, must be focused on some strategic, central targets. The focus must be on carrying out uniquely significant endeavours. This drives essential work, interaction, and management development into a whole. People learn best through action. The transfer of learning then follows the shortest route. A management team development programme must see people in action.
KEIRON has a unique combination of strategic competence and implementation competence. We have exceptionally skilled professionals in these fields with whom few can compete. Management teams are alfa and omega for an organization’s strategy. This is their most important mandate. But this requires the ability to think strategy, innovation, and really work as a team. Castles in the sky are not enough. They must be brought down to earth.
Sometimes you may want management development that has a precise and intense focus exclusively on yourself and your own challenges. Executive coaching has two objectives: To serve as an arena for learning where managers have the chance to discuss and receive hands-on assistance with issues of relevance to their own management practice and to be an open space for personal growth and guidance in own manager role. The coaching is therefore designed to strengthen managers’ applied management expertise and to produce performance outcomes for the organization, while also promoting the level of insight and reflection of the individual manager.
Executive coaching takes place in the form of one-on-one conversations between the manager and adviser. The coaching will always have a needs-based orientation. The manager must have clear objectives for the coaching sessions. The coaching can be short-term or long-term, time-intensive or sporadic. Above all, it is a meeting place for sparring, exploration, problem-solving and self-understanding. Coaching is a mixture of expert counselling and process consulting.
Our people have extensive experience as coaches and consultants for managers. We have individuals with a solid therapeutic background, but also people with specific expertise on strategic issues, teamwork challenges, and information/communication.
The collaboration with them has been a critical factor in our work to build an effective and flexible organization that seizes opportunities.
Svein Ivar Førland, former CEO of Sandnes Sparebank
