You’ve fought your way to the C-suite, now you’re a leader!  But leaders don’t just exist inside the C-Suite. They are everywhere in an organisation.  They are the people who Get Stuff Done.  Think supervisors on the factory floor, project managers inside offices and even newly qualified apprentices struggling to manage an older, more experienced, team.

Businesses struggling to achieve operational excellence have to upend the way they think about leadership. To turn strategy into execution, leaders must be coached at all levels to create a golden thread of leadership through the business.

Present reality is very different. A survey of 4,500 workers and managers by the Chartered Institute of Management revealed that 82% of individuals promoted into management positions in the UK receive no formal training on how to manage and lead. These are often referred to as ‘accidental managers’ whose lack of leadership skills can create a culture of high attrition and retention costs. The end result is that even the most well thought out strategies get stuck in bottlenecks and aren’t converted into action and results.

It’s a problem that drove the founding of Defy Expectations. The leadership development company was founded by Vicky Hampson and Helen Honisett, using their real-world experience running businesses and managing teams all over the world. “Experience has taught us to defy conventional wisdom and train leaders at every level using methods that work best for training hard working adults” says Helen Honisett.  Defy focuses on developing six essential leadership capabilities vital to developing successful leaders and successful businesses: transformational leadership, , creating a culture of openness, maintaining a customer focus, risk management, optimising productivity and managing wellbeing.

Developing and maintaining excellence in these six key areas is underpinned by a passionate belief that learning to lead is a continuous, lifelong journey starting in your first job.  Training adult leaders needs a new approach because adults learn differently to children, so the “classroom” does not work but learning in the flow of work does.

“Leadership doesn’t just happen when you reach the C-Suite,” says the company’s co-Founder, Vicky Hampson. “C-Suite leaders need support to focus on strategy, risk and big picture thinking, but you have to train leaders at all levels of the business. Those are the leaders who keep the day-to-day business running and Get Stuff Done to serve customers.

The market will not forgive you for missing your numbers while you pivot the business.

 It’s an intricate challenge that requires real world, hands-on training to turn theory into practical application. Defy Expectations uses a three-step learning suite to develop leaders:

• Assess the leadership capabilities of the company – Defy has created its own assessment that focuses on skills not personalities
• Use a mix of custom built on-demand learning and coaching to fill the skill gaps
• Coach leaders to use the new skills as they work on day to day problems

Optimising productivity is a key area of development, but it doesn’t involve leaders setting 5am alarms or using pomodoro clocks so they can do more in less time. “It’s not about more hours in the day or more outputs, it’s about real productivity, doing the right things at the right time” says Hampson. “First get the right people in the right roles, then get those people to develop the practical capabilities they need to deliver impact. Then help them to do it.  That’s real-world productivity.”

 Working with customers from global blue chips to fast growing scale-ups. Defy Expectations has three core principles of leadership behaviour. It supports leaders to operate in an open environment that fosters learning, development and performance:

• Engagement ensures people at every level are motivated and understand what they need to do to deliver,
• Enablement guarantees that leaders at all levels have a clear mandate and the capability to act decisively when needed,
• Empowerment involves pushing considered decision making down as far as possible into the execution layer with clear boundaries, expectations and autonomy

If businesses invest in the continuous development of current and future leaders, they’ll create a high-performance culture that identifies and positions talented leaders in the right roles and enables them to turn strategy into action. The results of that action will be an agile, decisive business that delivers for its customers and stakeholders and Defies their Expectations.