How can managers best develop the leadership skills they need for the future? And how can companies help managers to manage themselves? The HR development team at BOS GmbH & Co. KG, a medium-sized automotive supplier, is examining these and other strategic questions with the support of the Steinbeis Consulting Center Competences, Communication, Cultures.
To this end, Dr. Sabine Horst, director of the Steinbeis Consulting Center, worked with BOS to initiate a leadership development series. In seminars and follow-up transfer coaching sessions, participants received feedback from colleagues on actual situations at the workplace. They employed professional processes and communication techniques to help each other find solutions. This allowed managers on the seminars to benefit from a broader perspective and led them to an important conclusion: We can solve our problems as a team, without an external coach.
Having completed the series of seminars, in the future the managers will organize management circles to meet up and continue to apply the methods they have learned. This will not only facilitate the discussion of project-related topics, but also the active, ongoing development of the company’s management culture. And it boosts use of existing in-house resources, which so often go untapped within companies. Managers now have an formal forum that allows them to continue working to develop their leadership skills, giving them an active role in shaping management culture. The methods taught in the seminars also foster a goal- and results- oriented mindset. After all, in a strongly competitive environment, success increasingly depends on optimizing existing competencies and leveraging synergies.
Dr. Sabine Horst
Steinbeis Consulting Center Competences, Communication, Cultures (Stuttgart)
su1550@stw.de
Anke Mackowiack
BOS GmbH & Co. KG (Ostfildern)
The Steinbeis Company Competence Check© (UKC) has moved into the next stage of development. In October 2014, two Steinbeis Consulting Groups met up to discuss the dimensions of personnel and strategy. Here Steinbeis experts and external experts will work together to develop additional methods of analysis, applications and implementation strategies, as well as ways to use the UKC to shape business models.
The groups are aiming to establish the UKC as an instrument of competence analysis within the Steinbeis Network and beyond and prepare it for live application. They also plan to develop training programs for consultants who wish to use the UKC.
Short-term milestones for the groups include completion of the “Master Check,” preparations for programming the software and development of the database. The groups expect to present preliminary results in early 2015. Plans are also in place to launch additional consulting groups in 2015 to address the remaining dimensions of the UKC. All interested Steinbeis employees are invited to contribute to the work of the groups.
Dr. Michael Ortiz
Steinbeis Consulting Centers (Stuttgart)
michael.ortiz@stw.de