Define

Is everyone on the same page about what it means to be a leader in your organisation?

If not, start here.

Leadership frameworks

A leadership framework defines the mindsets, capabilities, and behaviours crucial to success in your organisation.

It serves as a vital blueprint for shaping and sustaining effective leadership by informing how you identify, select, manage, develop, promote, reward, and exit leaders.

With each decision that is made aligned with your framework, you strengthen your leadership culture.

This in turn creates an environment where these behaviours are naturally encouraged and reinforced.

Make behaviour change stick

A leadership framework helps leaders change and maintain new behaviours in several ways:

Clarity

A leadership framework provides a clear definition of what great leadership looks like, giving leaders direction and a concrete understanding of what is expected of them.

Consistency

By establishing a common set of leadership standards, your framework ensures leaders are aligned in their approach, which helps in maintaining consistent behaviour across the organisation.

Feedback

Leaders can be assessed against your framework, receiving feedback that is directly tied to the defined expectations. This helps in identifying areas for improvement and tracking progress.

Development

A framework provides the foundation to design tailored programs, tools, and resources to develop specified leadership mindsets, capabilities and behaviours. This targeted approach is more effective than generic training, leading to more meaningful behaviour change.

Recognition

By linking rewards and recognition to the behaviours outlined in your framework, leaders are incentivised to adopt and maintain these.

Justine La Roche

Inspiring or holding someone to a leadership standard that’s never been articulated is hard. Define one instead.

How to define your leadership framework

Below are the steps to define the leadership mindsets, capabilities, and behaviours that matter most within your specific context:

  • The work kicks off with a desktop review of documents that provide insight into your organisation’s DNA and current state of play. Examples of these documents include:

    • Purpose and mission statement

    • Organisational values

    • Business strategy

    • Brand positioning statement and style guide

    • People strategy

    • Employee value proposition

    • Engagement survey data

    • Position descriptions for leadership roles

    • Current leadership development program material.

  • Next, stakeholders are engaged in co-design through 1:1 interviews with senior leaders and 1:4 listening sessions with a diverse cross-section of leaders (i.e., a mix by gender, tenure, location, business area, and role level).

    This consultation not only informs an optimal solution but helps to secure buy-in and ownership of the final product, which greatly assists with implementation.

    Furthermore, inviting leaders to contribute their perspectives is a great way to recognise top-performing leadership talent within your business.

  • On completion of the discovery phase, outputs are themed and analysed to identify the critical leadership mindsets, behaviours, and skills to include in your framework.

    The nature and number of these leadership capabilities are tested with you before writing a more detailed draft that weaves through best practice suggestions, external insights, and a good dose of creativity.

    To ensure the framework resonates, emphasis is placed on using language from your leaders to describe what great leadership at your organisation looks like.

    The draft also includes a visual ‘look and feel’ concept to test with you.

  • Your draft leadership framework is then presented back to stakeholders in validation workshops for further testing and feedback, and to identify risks, enablers, and ideas for implementation.

    Workshop outcomes are then used to finalise the leadership framework ready for handover and sign-off, along with a summary of implementation suggestions and recommended next steps. 

    Your co-design group can then be invited to launch and champion your leadership framework and contribute to future leadership development initiatives.

Case study

Dan Murphy’s Leadership 6-Pack

As Australia’s largest liquor retailer and earliest wine club, Dan Murphy’s was keen to further embrace their unique identity by defining what it means to lead the “Dan’s Way” in store. 

The goal was to provide the national network of 900+ Store Managers with a common way to talk about leadership and to inform how effective leadership development offerings are shaped moving forward.

Through co-design with Store Managers, Area Managers, State Managers, and national executive leaders, the resulting Leadership 6-Pack is well-regarded for its simplicity and the way it captures the best of the culture and brand.

It was successfully launched to boost the percentage of Store Managers with active development plans by 25%.

The ongoing focus of the Leadership 6-Pack is underpinning quarterly National Leadership Forums and a portal that provides Store Managers with a one-stop-shop for leadership microlearning, tools, and resources.

The Leadership 6-Pack offering was a finalist in the Australian Institute of Training & Development (AITD) Excellence Awards for Best Leadership Development Program.

“The Leadership 6-Pack launched the same time I was appointed as Store Manager. Having this tool available was unbelievably helpful to continue to work on my own leadership style as well as help shape our team culture within the store.”

Store Manager - Victoria, Dan Murphy’s

Already have a leadership framework in place and working well?

That's great. I can leverage it to deliver a leadership development solution just for you.

Find out how here.