Stefano Petti, Partner Organisations collectively spend billions annually to train their current and future executives on leadership, but often the results they get fall short of expectations and do not achieve the desired shifts in behaviours. Many leadership programmes, although stimulating, remain focused on the transactional side of leadership, “which addresses only the part of the iceberg that is above the waterline,” says Stefano Petti, Partner at Asterys. As a result, companies often fail to engage employees and nurture future leaders. Based in Rome, Italy, Asterys believes that in order to achieve sustainable results in leadership development it is necessary to operate under the iceberg waterline and address all the elements that ultimately drive leaders’ behaviours, such as their needs, values, emotions, and thinking habits. The company aims to bring a fresh perspective to how participants interpret themselves, their challenges, and the reality in general. The objective is to bring about an irreversible transformation in how they see their world and themselves and through the newly acquired awareness achieve a whole new level of consciousness and effectiveness as leaders.
Moreover, leaders, like anybody else in the organisation, are constantly influenced in the way they operate by the context they live in. Many leadership development programmes do not achieve the expected results also because after the programme has ended, participants struggle to embed their learnings in their everyday life due to the unfavourable conditions they live in. This is why Asterys’ programmes are often designed to address leadership development needs at a more systemic level.
To deploy the different programmes, Asterys works with a network of more than 100 senior professionals coaches and facilitators, most of whom come from the corporate world and covered leadership positions in business roles, in over 25 countries.
“We partner with our clients to create powerful individual and collective transformations through executive coaching, innovative team development programmes, and cultural transformation initiatives,” says Stefano Petti, Partner of Asterys.
Before implementing any programme, Asterys conducts a preliminary analysis to understand the client’s culture and how the programme itself can contribute to the client’s business needs. Asterys then partners with the client to co-design the initiative so that the proposed programme completely aligns with their objectives.
As an example, Asterys conducted a hugely successful culture transformation programme for one of the world’s leading private equity firms, which transformed the way employees and partners conceived and managed the relationships with their clients. The original objectives were to increase self-awareness, improve communication effectiveness, build greater trust-based relationships internally and with the portfolio companies and, ultimately, generate higher value for the whole organisation. The programme consisted of 360-degree leadership assessments, a four-day transformational workshop on personal awareness, impact, and effectiveness in relationships and then individual coaching for all participants as follow up activities to help participants deepen and apply their learning. The collective feedback was extremely positive, with many participants being affirmative about both the professional and personal benefits from the programme. A few years down the road, this program is still recognised in the organisation as the most powerful leadership development and cultural transformation initiative they ever took.
Asterys is also investing continuously in research and innovation to remain at the forefront of cutting edge development programmes. For those organisations who are bold enough to try a whole new organisational paradigm, in January 2018 Asterys has launched AEquacy, a revolutionary, human-centred organisational design and operating system, which paves the way for greater innovation, collaboration, and performance. AEquacy is based on an equalitarian structure of self-organising, peer-coordinated teams where people work together inspired by a shared purpose.
Asterys promises to upgrade its network of associates consistently, include new geographies, and offer new services. The firm is looking forward to partner with technology firms and leverage their solutions in its transformative programmes. “We expect to be able to share the results of the first implementations of AEquacy towards the end of this year and launch a new and very innovative leadership programme next year, so…stay tuned,” concludes Petti.
