What Does Leadership Mean to ITU Staff? Co-designing the ITU-wide Leadership and Management Program

Geneva, Switzerland – Over 60 senior and mid-level ITU managers participated in the ITU’s International Centre of Digital Innovation (I-CoDI) ideating workshops to design the features of the Organization’s management and leadership training (working title: ITU Leadership Accelerator).

The ITU Leadership Accelerator project is part of ITU’s overall Transformation Program on building the necessary culture and skills to adapt the Organization to the demands of the coming decade. The Transformation program encompasses four tracks for staff improvement and organizational readiness: 1) Strategic Planning, 2) Digital Transformation, 3) Innovation, and 4) People Management.

What was The Challenge?

The first step in the I-CoDI process starts with defining a challenge. Together, I-CoDI alongside the ITU Transformation Team and the Human Resource Management Team decided the workshops would explore: How ITU Staff could effectively support the development of leadership skills across ITU through the new ITU Leadership Accelerator? The focus areas of the ideation sessions sought to:

• Provide a structured One ITU approach to leadership development that supports managers and staff in the development of their personal leadership and managerial capacity. 
• Close the soft skill gaps of ITU leaders and managers, as identified through an impartial and data-driven organizational assessment.

Designing the Ideating Process

With the challenge and focus areas in mind I-CoDI then, through a design thinking driven process, developed a two-day agenda to gather actionable evidence, testimonies, and ideas to support an updated and more relevant career development program.

Design thinking is a human-centered framework for innovation based on viewing problems or needs from the user’s perspective. It is a non-linear approach to innovation, driven by empathizing with users, testing ideas, analyzing feedback, and continuously rethinking and retooling your plans. To create a safe space for the participants, two, two-day hybrid workshops were organized for 34 staff members on enter dates and for 36 senior managers on enter date. 

Overall, the I-CoDI workshops were meant to:

• Engage ITU staff in defining what leadership means. 
• Help understand staff needs and ideas on how leadership development should look like in ITU, and 
• Help prioritize the solution in the short-term, mid-term and long-term horizons.

For each workshop, participants were divided into 6 groups of 5-7 people – small enough to create an intimate, safe space, and big enough to allow for a free exchange of ideas and discussion.

The workshop exercises were designed based on a pre-workshop survey and to build on one another and allow participants to gradually immerse themselves in ideating the final solutions for the ITU staff and managers.  The first day of the workshops focused on defining leadership within ITU while the second day of the workshops ideated leadership training components.

Defining leadership in the ITU

The I-CoDI organized sessions first explored the definition of leadership and then sought to design the main components of an ITU house-wide leadership training program. Over three sessions, participants, on the first day, explored the meaning of leadership, the gaps and opportunities within the current system and ended with the creation of leaderships personas. 

The first session gave the participants an opportunity to express their opinions on the expected values, capabilities, and actions of a leader. The second session mapped the challenges and opportunities of the current leadership structure, while the last session of the day created a set of fictional personas that would support testing ideas the next day.

Designing leadership and management program components

During the second day, which focused on designing the main components of a new leadership program, the participants placed the personas they had created the day before into situational exercises to stress test ideas. 

Participants in the day’s first session shared the ideal skills needed for managers and their staff. They then suggested ways to match learning techniques with the earlier suggested ideal skill sets.  

After developing a broad array of suggestions for learning techniques, the next session was an exercise to prioritize learning techniques to guide the development of the leadership program. 

Finally, the participants stress-tested their ideas by imagining a leadership journey that placed the personas into different situations at different points in their careers with different learning options to gain insights on the viability of an eventual program.

The final recommendations from the workshops and discussions are currently under consideration by ITU leadership. 

What Participants Thought about I-CoDI Workshops 

Over 80% of participants were satisfied with the workshop. Participants appreciated the workshop’s moderation, organization, group discussions, and content design.  Exercises related to understanding the current state of leadership in the ITU, defining leadership persona and prioritizing skills needed, and learning techniques received the highest marks in terms of appreciation. 

Managers appreciated the short talk on leadership given by the Human Resources Director on Day 2 of the workshop. 

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