DLR Group Invests in Leadership Development

The Grove is facilitating DLR Group’s third, five-year strategic visioning process this year and adding an exciting new element – the involvement of their emerging leadership in helping facilitate the process. With DLR’s permission, we’d like to share a bit of the design.

In 2000 we helped this growing architectural/engineering firm’s 40 partners envision their goals for 2005 and key initiatives, using a classic Strategic Visioning process. In 2004 the process repeated and involved about 70 leaders, projecting out to 2010. This year the firm is focusing on 2015 and involving the whole organization.

An earlier goal was to develop a leadership culture within the organization, now in 11 offices in North America. The downturn is hitting architecture firms VERY hard, especially the big ones focusing mostly on corporate work, but DLR Group diversified early and is doing relatively well. In the midst of all of this year’s challenges they are making additional investment in leadership development. They think it’s more important now than ever.

Without describing the entire process, the approach DLR is taking is worth noting as a benchmark for other professional organizations in how to use The Grove’s Visual Planning tools.

The process began July 18 with a leadership orientation. Forty promising staff were picked by office leaders to learn about the industry and practice facilitation at their annual DLR University retreat. It was held at Islandwood conference center near Seattle. A veteran architectural consultant named Jim Cramer from The Greenway Group led one day focusing on the industry.  David Sibbet from The Grove provided facilitation training the second day, and orientation to the Strategic Visioning process. This was interleaved with team building activities led by Maketa Wilborn, a former Islandwood facilitator and current Grove associate building his own practice. Here is a picture of one group learning how to use the Context Map Graphic Guide.

DLR University Participants Learning Context Mapping

The teams trained at the offsite were tasked to facilitate office input sessions for a big meeting on Principals of the firm in October and refinement sessions in December and January. David Sibbet will facilitate these parts of the process. Even though The Grove’s work was inspired by the way architects and designers work, today’s emerging professionals and designers are not specifically trained to facilitate. DLR Group leadership thinks that is a missed opportunity. With the increasing complexity of client-facing work, designers need to know how to engage all their stakeholders and have designs closely support organizational goals and strategies. DLR Group this year is conducting the following process to support action learning about facilitative leadership in their office teams:

•    The Grove sends kits with Graphic Guides, instructions, and supplies to each office.

•    Teams produce three Graphic Guides per office as input to the larger 80 person Principal’s University meeting scheduled for October. These will be the Context Map, the SPOT Matrix, and the Cover Story Vision— feeding forward both hindsight and foresight from each office perspective.

•     The teams choose HOW they will generate the information and who will facilitate and record, using The Grove’s Leader Guides as jumping off points. Having the leaders who attended DLRU take responsibility for designing their own processes is a key part of their action learning.

•     Each office team has the option to deliver the information in good clear handwriting and digital photos, or transcription into the Digital Graphic Guides.

•     Copies of this content will go out in advance of the big meeting, and provide the inputs the firm’s Principal’s need to further the VISIONING process.

Supporting this kind of work-place learning is a key goal of The Grove. Seeing clients like DLR Group understanding its benefit is very gratifying.