Over the past two years, over 500 Department of Family Protective Services (DFPS) leaders have experienced the impact of The Leadership Challenge® message. The majority of these five hundred leaders have had multiple exposures to the content through what has become known at DFPS as The Leadership Challenge experience. This experience includes four days of training as described below:
- Two-day The Leadership Challenge® Workshop
- One hour of one-to-one coaching delivered 3-4 weeks after the workshop
- One-day Progress & Commitment Workshop, held 3-4 months after the workshop
- One-day graduation, skill-building and LPI® Reassessment session, 6-9 months after the initial workshop
Leaders often walked away from their two-day workshop experience feeling inspired, enlightened, energized and, at times, overwhelmed. Nevertheless, most were reflective of their personal journeys and were eager to put identified behaviors into action to further their leadership growth.
Although these four days of training have proven to be quite powerful on their own, we learned that it is the combination of this in-class training and the internal follow-up work that creates true culture change.
The DFPS Leadership and Management (LAM) Team, along with iLead Consulting and Harness Leadership, designed the following eight strategies to support the leadership language of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership® model and the 30 behaviors of the LPI® within DFPS.
- Create cohorts to establish an identity for the complete nine-month experience
- Recruit internal Ambassadors
- Build follow-up coaching into your model
- Collect stories, quotes, and anecdotes
- Provide a Progress and Commitment Workshop
- Take intentional steps to keep the language alive
- Provide a Graduation and Skill-building Workshop
- Pause occasionally to refocus efforts
Using the collective experience within DFPS over the past two years, this case study shares the lessons learned about driving culture change by using these eight proven methods to ensure the full impact of The Leadership Challenge. Increases in both the LPI®-Self scores and in the overall scores of the 224 leaders who took the LPI®360 (twice) show just how powerful this approach has been—and will continue to be—in advancing the development of leaders within DFPS.