“Chris and the team from Quest Leadership have been true strategic partners for us. They have helped the me and board team to change our culture in ways that have led to both improved employee engagement and business results. Perhaps more importantly, we have continued to be adaptive without them.”

Steve Clark, CEO, Circularity Business

Change is not a process. It is a culture.

By developing the mindset and abilities of people in the organisation to be constantly seeking and delivering optimum performance … constantly learning and changing for the better,  becomes the way people behave in all aspects of your business. We call it  ‘Adaptive Capability’. We believe it is the only sustainable advantage an organisation can have. We help you develop it by focussing on three primary abilities within your organisation:

 

Awareness

This is the ability to develop the organisation’s appetite for being innovative. John Kotter describes this as ‘creating a sense of urgency‘.  Awareness is developed not by pumping rational strategic change arguments into the organisation or training people in change process skills but by acting on the knowledge that people will only promote, rather than subvert, change when the proposed future feels more appealing than the current status quo. Building a strong appetite for adaptation is the first critical step and it is primarily the responsibility of the senior leadership team.

 

Leadership

This is the ability of leaders at all levels to inspire their people to want to deliver change … to be adaptive. However comprehensive the corporate change strategy is, the disquieting reality is that the success of any corporate adaptation relies on the discretionary contribution of its employees. Unless people trust their leaders, feel inspired, rewarded and developed by them, they will withhold the ‘non-compulsory’ effort that is so essential to the successful implementation of strategy.

 

Learning

 We are often amazed (actually horrified) how little corporate time is dedicated to learning. To clarify, learning is very different to training. In a stable, predictable environments,‘expertise’ (ie knowledge of what has worked well in the past) is highly valuable. In organisations experiencing high amounts of disruption  too much value is often placed on the ‘expertise’ of consultants / managers / supervisors and consequently far too little time is spent at all levels, learning – asking ‘What actually happened?’, ‘What can we learn? and crucially  ‘How down do it better next time?’  

“I've engaged Quest Leadership regularly over 14 years because they always deliver results. Regardless of the prevailing business and market conditions or cultural environment, they are exceptional at being able to understand what needs to be done and the interventions required to make a difference. ”

Guy Munnoch, CEO, Financial Services