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Workshop — Leadership Alignment (half day)
Purpose: get the leadership team genuinely aligned, and get their own behaviours on the table. Who: the sponsor and their direct reports. No deputies — a leader who sends a deputy has told you something. Length: 3.5 hours.
⚠️ This is the highest-risk and highest-value session in the toolkit. Run it well and everything downstream gets easier. Run it as a presentation and you’ve spent the top team’s morning confirming a false consensus.
Before
- One-to-one with the sponsor. Agree the session may surface disagreement, and that surfacing it is the point. Get explicit permission to run the diagnostic that follows. ⭐ Without this, don’t run it.
- Short private survey to each leader, results anonymised:
- In your own words, why are we doing this? (one sentence)
- How confident are you it will succeed? 1–10
- What’s the biggest risk nobody is saying out loud?
- What will you personally have to do differently?
- Bring the frontline evidence and quotes
Run sheet
0:00 — The mirror (30 min)
Show the anonymised survey answers to Q1, verbatim, on one slide.
The room will see that they are not saying the same thing. They almost never are. Six leaders will have produced four different rationales and one blank.
“This is what your organisation is hearing — six versions. Which one is it?”
Then Q2 confidence spread, and Q3 unsaid risks.
Facilitator note: be matter-of-fact, not dramatic. The data does the work; any editorialising from you turns it into an accusation and the room closes. Sit down after you put it up.
0:30 — Agree the one sentence (30 min)
Do not leave until there is a single sentence every person in the room will use. Write it on the wall. Everyone reads it aloud in turn — awkward, and it works.
The sentence
_______________________________________________
This becomes the stock paragraph in Comms and Narrative Plan.
1:00 — The evidence (30 min)
Frontline barrier data and quotes. Let it be uncomfortable. Then:
“None of this is about people being resistant. Most of it is things this organisation has done to itself. Which of these can only be fixed by someone in this room?”
Capture that list. It is your sponsor ask, and they generated it themselves — which is worth ten times you presenting it.
1:30 — Break (15 min)
1:45 — Their behaviours (45 min) ⭐
The core of the session.
Present the table from Target Behaviour Definition — frontline behaviours alongside the leadership behaviour each one requires.
“Every one of these needs something from you. Not support in principle — a specific thing you do or stop doing.”
Work through Leader Behaviour Contract live. Each leader writes their own three, then reads them out.
Facilitator moves:
- Reject vagueness. “Champion the change” → “What would I see you doing on a Tuesday?”
- Ask the stop question. Every leader must name one thing they will stop doing. This is harder and more valuable than the start list.
- The say–do question: “What do you currently ask for that would undermine this?” Reporting formats, exception requests, side-channel escalations. Get them named in the room.
2:30 — The dip (20 min)
Draw the curve from Bridges Transition Model.
“Performance will dip for roughly six weeks. It is not a sign of failure. The question I need answered today is: when it dips, what will you do? And what will you say to your peers who panic?”
Get a verbal commitment from each person. Write it down where they can see you writing it.
2:50 — Decisions (25 min)
Not a discussion — a decision list. Each one: decided, or a named owner and a date.
| Decision | Decided? | Owner | By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legacy switch-off date | |||
| What comes off people’s plates | |||
| Sequencing vs other live initiatives | |||
| Resource for sustain phase | |||
3:15 — Close (15 min)
Read back: the sentence, each person’s three behaviours, the decisions, the dip commitment.
“I’ll send this within 24 hours. I’ll also send it to your teams — which means they’ll know what you’ve committed to.”
⚠️ Say that last part in the room and mean it. Visible commitment is what makes it real. If the sponsor won’t allow it, that’s important information about how much of this session was genuine.
Afterwards
- Write-up within 24 hours
- Behaviour contracts published to their teams
- Diarise a 30-day check on the contracts — Drift Check — 30 60 90
- Private note to the sponsor on anything you saw that the room didn’t say
If it goes wrong
The room refuses to engage with their own behaviours. Don’t push in public. Close on the decisions instead, and take it to the sponsor privately — Challenging Upward — Scripts. A leadership team that won’t discuss its own behaviour has given you a clear read on the likely outcome, and that’s worth knowing early.
Open conflict between two leaders. Good — it was there anyway, just invisible. Name it neutrally: “There’s a real disagreement here about X. It won’t resolve itself, and the organisation will feel it. How does it get decided, and by when?”
The sponsor undermines their own session. Stop, break early, talk to them alone. Continuing after that costs you more credibility than ending the session does.
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