Macro Leadership Series Course Outline

Mercer’s Leadership Accelerator program uses applied learning experiences, engaging lessons, critical discussion, case studies, and business scenarios to prepare individuals for the future of leadership. Learn more about specific course sessions and program outline.

Strategy Development Program (12.5 hours)
Session Topics
Session One
The Strategic Leader
  • Gain a deep understanding of what strategy is and is not.
  • Build the knowledge needed to pursue a durable competitive advantage.
  • Understand how to make your leadership role crucial to the strategy development process.
  • Enhance your strategic knowledge and insights through group discussion using case studies.
Session Two
Setting the Direction
  • Understand the necessary role an organization’s mission, vision, and core values play in successful business.
  • Learn how to develop a mission and core values for your organization.
  • Assess how well your organization’s values are instilled in the culture’s DNA.
  • Build a framework to develop and choose the top mission-critical goals to pursue.
  • Practice selecting a measurable and compelling vision to aim for.
Session Three
Analyzing the Environment
  • Learn to adapt your strategy to the current environment.
  • Fill your toolbox with methods to understand the current internal and external environment an organization is operating in.
  • Practice using these strategic tools with real-world scenarios and case studies.
Session Four
Determining the Coordinates
  • Build a blueprint with the information gathered during the internal and external environmental scans.
  • Utilize key tools to prioritize information and determine how to best compete.
  • Learn the Art of Strategy Development to build a successful strategy.
  • Test the quality, durability, and relevance of your strategy and others.
  • Practice using your new strategic skills with real-world scenarios, case studies, and discussion.
Session Five
Making it Measurable
  • Build impactful strategic objectives that support the vision of the organization.
  • Develop a crystal-clear map of the organization’s value creation process.
  • Develop an execution framework that will ensure a balanced strategy.
  • Practice your new skills with case studies and group-based discussion.
Strategy Execution Program (12.5 hours)
Session Topics
Session One
The People Side of Strategy
  • Learn how to leverage and instill an understanding of others to ensure your organization’s strategy succeeds.
  • Discover how organizational culture critically impacts your strategy’s success.
  • Identify the day-to-day obstacles that prevent strategy execution.
  • Practice communicating the strategy and persuading stakeholders using case studies and discussion.
Session Two
Aligning Organizational Effort
  • Learn where to laser-focus the organization’s attention to gain the most leverage.
  • Develop goals that are aligned, measurable, and motivational.
  • Build a framework for cascading strategic goals throughout the entire organization.
  • Understand how to identify the actions that can drive the successful achievement of your goals.
Session Three
Making Strategy Execution Happen
  • Understand the characteristics an organizational culture needs to succeed at strategy execution.
  • Develop and implement a system that enhances motivation and ownership of the team’s STRATEGIC goals.
  • Learn how to make your team accountable to each other for strategy execution.
  • Discover how to give employees strategic ownership to enhance engagement and throughput.
  • Practice facilitating goal setting conversations and accurately assessing goal progress
Session Four
Purposeful Iteration
  • Learn why iteration is the key to a future-proof strategy.
  • Build a framework for cultivating a culture of learning in organizations.
  • Learn to apply systems and variation analyses to continually improve processes.
  • Develop a toolkit of techniques and skills to apply to organizational improvement.
  • Discuss implementation challenges and insights with your peers.
Session Five
Strategy Execution in Action
  • Understand the phases of changing a team’s behavior during execution.
  • Build a framework to continually communicate the urgency and importance of your strategy.
  • Practice communicating the strategy and persuading stakeholders using case studies and discussion.
  • Discuss key challenges during strategy execution and how to solve them.
  • Debrief from the strategy development and execution programs to solidify learning and share practical insights.
The Future-Proof Leader Program (12.5 hours)
Session Topics
Session One
The Future Leader’s Mindset
  • Learn the action-biased mindset needed to launch leaders into the future.
  • Cultivate must-have characteristics such as flexible optimism, leadership agility, and lifelong learning.
  • Learn how to take extreme ownership and chart the course of your work, your path, and your future.
  • Develop the skills and methods needed to continually improve your leader mindset.
  • Discuss barriers to behavior change and brainstorm methods to make continual progress.
Session Two
The Intrapreneurial Organization
  • Learn to leverage and develop entrepreneurial skills within yourself, your team, and your organization.
  • Learn to leverage creativity to solve problems with unique perspective.
  • Cultivate the right culture and conditions for creativity in your teams.
  • Build a framework for assessment, experimentation, and innovation.
  • Discuss practical applications for innovating in organizations.
Session Three
Organizational Evolution
  • Learn to embed the culture necessary to embrace the continual need for change into your organization.
  • Develop a deep commitment to lifelong learning that fuels continuous improvement.
  • Learn how to create urgency and enhance agility to capitalize on change.
  • Learn the metamorphoses an organization will go through to build durable long-term success.
  • Build a framework to become an irresistible organization employees want to work hard for.
Session Four
The Leadership Pipeline
  • Assess the leadership potential of your current talent to identify your gaps.
  • Identify the core competencies needed for great leaders to grow at every level of the organization.
  • Build a career lattice to integrate employee’s long-term aspirations with the organization’s growth opportunities.
  • Develop succession plans and learning journeys for your key leaders.
  • Practice your skills with real-life leadership scenarios.
Session Five
Looking into the Future
  • Discuss the top factors impacting the future of work today.
  • Think deeply about the inevitable changes in your industry, how they will impact your organization, and how you can proactively adapt.
  • Identify key challenges and opportunities impacting the future of work.
  • Discover the importance of creativity in the future of organizations.
  • Gain perspective on the future by examining the past through case studies.