CASES · LEADERSHIP
Leadership culture at Macromedia University
Macromedia University set out to develop its leadership culture deliberately — with broad participation, and with the ambition of making it noticeable in everyday work.
The engagement
- Client Macromedia University
- Sector Academia · Higher education
- Period 2022
- Service Leadership and culture development
- Format Several workshops at different levels
THE PROCESS
Working on the leadership culture.
1 Origins
The future needs a past.
In the first workshop we developed a shared perspective on the history of the university. Culture is not simply decided — which is why it is worth looking at how it came about, in which experiences it finds expression and which patterns still have an effect today. That also contains the clues to how it can be changed in future.
2 Guiding principles
From values to principles of leadership.
The starting point was the four core values of the university: responsible, creative, entrepreneurial and open minded. From these the managers jointly developed concrete guiding principles for leadership. A guiding principle is the reduced stock of a discussion that went before it — short enough to give orientation, but only useful when it is clear what it means in everyday work. The principles were therefore tied directly to observable anchors in behaviour.
3 MAKING CULTURE EFFECTIVE
Ways into everyday work.
Guiding principles do not change a leadership culture on their own. They become relevant only where they keep reappearing in decisions, conversations and routines. We therefore translated the leadership principles into concrete instruments and occasions: performance management systems and target agreements, employee surveys, 360° feedback, shared reflection in the teams, a best-practice playbook. That way culture does not stay a poster on the wall but regularly becomes the subject of leadership work.
FROM THE WORK
Insights.
Participant feedback
We have had a great many coaches, but that mixture of enjoyment and theoretical altitude suits us very well!
A participant from the leadership group, Macromedia University (translated)
A systemic reading
Culture development is never finished. Culture arises in any case — with or without a workshop, a mission statement or a leadership model. What can be shaped is above all what leadership orients itself by in everyday work: how managers are selected, what is permitted and rewarded, and what is sanctioned. The order matters, though: a good leadership culture is no substitute for a robust strategy or a working business model. But it can be decisive for whether people carry the necessary changes with them.
Dr. Jonas Asendorpf
LET’S TALK