Leadership development for senior management at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation
Client: AHF Europe
Client Challenge
The Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) is a global nonprofit organisation, providing cutting-edge medicine and advocacy to over 1.5 million people in 45 countries.
AHF is a complex organisation for the leadership team, spread over many countries all over the world. Leaders collaborate closely with their global colleagues, which requires specific skills around agility and self-awareness. In addition, an organisation like AHF faces a challenging political landscape operating in 45 different countries in four continents, which leaders need to confidently and nimbly navigate as required.
In 2020, AHF’s European Secretariat – based in Amsterdam – was looking for ways to help their European leaders enhance their effectiveness. They specifically wanted to focus on growing leaders’ self-awareness and agility, reflecting the sense of urgency that comes with AHF’s challenging leadership work. In addition, there was a wish to focus on developing their Emotional Intelligence (EI), which ties in not only with the self-awareness development goal, but also leaders’ ability to understand other people’s viewpoints and influence them as required.
AHF – Europe decided to work with Talogy on this project, both because of our market-leading Emotional Intelligence tools, and because we already had a warm and trusting relationship from working together on previous projects.
We asked for the EI program because we needed our leadership team to further strengthen their ability to make good decisions, improve their work as a collaborative team, effectively adjust to increased stress related to COVID and embrace continuous change in a positive and effective way. These were our expectations from the EI programme, and they were fully met – even exceeded in several cases.
Solution
Talogy and AHF-Europe worked together on creating an extensive and complete multi-day development programme, rolled out to 10 leaders over a variety of European countries. The multi-faceted programme consisted of:
- A kick-off webinar for the full cohort, led by a Talogy consultant and aiming to inform the participants and build rapport
- The completion of two tools related to Emotional Intelligence:
- Our EIP3 self-assessment questionnaire as a starting point for growing individual self-awareness
- Our EIP360, a 360-feedback tool that provides essential information about how others view the leaders’ emotional intelligence
- Individual coaching sessions to embed the learnings from the Emotional Intelligence tools and explore learning opportunities around self-awareness, agility and understanding of others
- A working session with the full group of leaders to consolidate insights and analyse the wider team picture.
Emotional wellbeing in the workplace is very important for me and EI training added a lot to my professional development as it taught me to be more mindful about my job tasks and interactions with my colleagues.
Outcomes
The EI-based development programme involved European leaders from six countries : Netherlands, UK, Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, and Georgia.
After concluding the programme, the participants have reported substantial increase in both self-awareness and the ability to learn through others – two strong bases of Emotional Intelligence that hugely influence leadership effectiveness in the long run.
In addition, these changes lead to improved communications within the leadership team and an increased ability to connect with the AHF vision, including inspirational speaking. These improvements supported increased motivation and high productivity on a country level.