Tacy M. Byham, Ph.D., CEO As businesses are increasingly embracing a flattened organisational structure, the demand is also intensifying for sensible leaders who can curate knowledge and expertise from a broader base and can maintain a balance between the urgent and the necessary. However, if time is considered the principal barrier to great leadership, what can be the solution to strategically utilise time and become a great leader in this competitive market? As an answer to this question, Development Dimensions International (DDI), a Pennsylvania-based leadership consulting firm, has come up with Leadership 480, a strategic framework that helps organisations hire, promote, and develop exceptional leaders. The ultimate aim of this unique framework is to maximise the leaders’ effectiveness in every minute, day, and month of their careers.
“Leadership 480 is designed to change the way you think about time and leadership,” says Tacy M. Byham, CEO of DDI. “As the pace of business increases, time pressure makes it much harder to make good leadership decisions, which is counterproductive to achieving meaningful results. Leadership 480 focuses on achieving higher goals, as individuals and as organisations, by making better decisions in every critical moment of leadership, from small minutes of interaction to daily business decisions to periods of career transformation.” DDI Leadership 480 framework functions effectively in building emotional intelligence among leaders, to help the leaders practice active and authentic listening, have purposeful conversations, adopt a growth mindset, and more.
Although Leadership 480 was launched recently during mid-2019, the history of DDI goes back to 1970 when the company was founded by William C. Byham and Douglas W. Bray. At its inception, the idea was to create and implement assessment centers and provide organisations with behavioural data for hiring, promotion, and employee and management development decisions.
Leadership 480 is designed to change the way you think about time and leadership
As the years passed, the company evolved as a global leadership development consulting company. However, even today, DDI depends on science and research to identify and develop great leaders.
Built on five decades of research and experience in the science of leadership, DDI provides expertise in leadership strategy, leadership selection, leadership development, and succession management. The company’s product base is also varied and comes with solutions for assessment, coaching, leadership training, and more. DDI’s Leadership Mirror is the industry’s most flexible, web-based multi-rater feedback system, and its Targeted Selection comes as the most widely used behavioural interviewing system in the world. While DDI’s C-suite assessments accurately predict the performance of the executive candidates in a specific role, using a simulated environment, the company’s patent product Manager Ready assesses and evaluates the would-be front line leaders. DDI is also known for its products like Leader3 Ready and CoachLink, which entail virtual leadership assessment and virtual coaching service, respectively.
According to The Global Leadership Forecast 2018, published by DDI, organisations with at least 30 percent of women in leadership are 1.4 times more likely to have sustained profitable growth. In an attempt to help organisations leverage the power of gender diversity, DDI has specially designed solutions to build women leaders.
In addition to the smorgasbord of solutions, products, and services, the aspect that makes DDI global is the availability of its programs in 21 languages, including French, Japanese, Spanish, German, simplified and traditional Chinese, and Bahasa Indonesia. Each week, a DDI test is delivered in over 90 countries to clients from different industries such as healthcare, government, manufacturing, energy, financial/insurance, aerospace, among others. With a massive network of 20,000 facilitators/instructors delivering training to clients, DDI is expected to evolve more and make farther strides in the realm of leadership management in the forthcoming years.
