Why is it needed?

In an increasingly difficult trading environment, business success depends on the capability of leadership to achieve a distinctive competitive advantage. High Performance Working is more than the just the current wave of management fashion: it is at the heart of sustainable competitiveness for British and European businesses in an increasingly volatile world.

Sustainable competitiveness means the ability to reinvent products and services on an almost continuous basis in response to changing consumer preferences, technical innovation and market opportunity while maintaining high levels of productivity. The High Performance Workplace is one that enables employees at all levels to develop and use their competencies and innovative potential to the full – thereby increasing job satisfaction and motivation as well as competitiveness.

But building the High Performance Workplace is not easy. Successive studies show that only a minority of companies in the UK and Europe have adopted high performance practices on a systematic basis throughout the organisation. The barriers to adoption include uncertainty about ‘what works’ and how this can be applied in practice, lack of opportunity for learning from other organisations, and lack of management skills to implement change. These combine with short-term pressures to hold managers back from the types of change that they know are ultimately required.

This programme is designed to help managers overcome these obstacles by supporting participants in leading and responding to change in their work context.