For IAG, the challenge was to create greater coherence around leadership across a group containing strong businesses with their own histories, identities and ways of operating.
A group-level leadership framework could easily have become an exercise in standardisation. The more useful question was what leaders needed in common to operate successfully across the enterprise without diluting the strengths of the individual operating companies.
MJA began with interviews across the businesses, looking for the leadership demands beneath local language and context. Analysis of those conversations produced a small number of recurring themes and, from them, an initial set of group leadership capabilities.
External leadership frameworks provided useful comparison, but they were used as stimulus rather than answers. The emerging IAG model was then taken into the Management Committee for a working session in which senior leaders examined each capability, challenged the wording and behavioural indicators and tested what might be missing.
That co-creation mattered because the framework had practical work to do. It needed to inform succession, organisation development and leadership development — helping IAG recognise and grow leaders capable not only of succeeding within one part of the Group but of thinking and acting with a wider enterprise perspective.
The result was a common leadership language without an assumption of uniformity. Alignment came from creating enough shared understanding for leaders to work across organisational boundaries while leaving space for the operating companies to retain what made them distinctive.