The client

The central Human Resource team in Deutsche Telekom is organized in different chapters as part of an agile organizational structure. The Chapter Future Leadership Offerings is led by Sabine Weishaupt and encompasses all leading experts responsible for strategic, global and scaled up solutions in leadership development, diversity, equity and inclusion as well as employee well-being.

The challenge

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As HR we have been supporting and educating the organization through the pandemic, we are constantly fostering transformation activities and we are teaching our people and business leaders to stay resilient in a world and market of exponential change and pressures. To be able to uphold the power to keep going and the energy to keep giving, an investment into ourselves via the Resilient Leadership Program was essential.  We cannot give what we do not have, thus resilience became one of the strategic pillars for the chapter in 2023. As we learn and practice new habits, re-charge and stay up to date with the latest trends and insights on the topic of resilience as well as ways to integrate these insights into our products and the flow of work, we aimed at a win-win on all parts.

/ Sabine Weishaupt, Head of Future Leadership Design

Our solution

1 Change and the Chapter co-created a Resilient Leadership Program centered around Resilience Model and its 12 holistic journeys. Initially an in-depths questionnaire was sent out to all 35 HR-leaders to get an overview of their current challenges. Based on the results, the following program was designed, with a focus on Self-Care and building Resilience for the HR-leaders over a period of 5 months:

The journey started with having all the HR leaders signed up to 1 Change Platform, accessing +100 resilience activities covering Body, Heart, Mind and Spirit.

We started a competition dividing the chapter members into 7 different teams where they individually worked on the activities and collectively scored points and shared their progress with pictures, text and likes on their internal Teams Channel.

The first competition was launched in April and lasted till the ½ day in-person resilience training in June. The second started from June and ended in September 2023, where the top 3 team winners were announced.

The impact

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The journey had been transformative for the chapter on many levels. The concept and the guidance throughout the journey have been an exceptional experience. the flow has been state of the art. The start was light and fun, allowing room for discovery and exploration of the abundant opportunities on the 1 change platform, yet ensuring consistency by engaging regularly in our chapter calls. The platform offerings are set for small interventions of high quality and hand-on, easy to try out practices. It caters to individual needs, encouraging for regularity and development of small habits.  Enriching the platform with specific challenges for our team has been fostering team spirit and targeting the most common needs.

 

Highlight of the journey has been the onsite Resilient Leadership Training. 1 Change professionally moderated the workshop with an extraordinary capability of reading the room, offering support and knowledge, yet also leading the team courageously outside of the comfort zone. The workshop had a very special dynamic: heavy and light, serious and funny, with general and very personal insights at the same time. The conversations on the floor yet also in jour fixes have changed, often starting with sharing of new insights or successes in new practices. The team is more aware of the many facets of resilience. Development talks almost always include goals derived out of the program. Product design starts to be influenced by strategies how to implement and integrate insights out of the resilience program in the customer experience. The intervention has been very successful, the collaboration with 1 Change smooth virtually and onsite alike, and the learning experience and impact surpassing the expectations.

/ Sabine Weishaupt, Head of Future Leadership Design