AAK wanted its Accelerated Leadership Programme to do more than develop capable senior leaders within their own functions. The bigger challenge was to help them widen their field of view and lead for the enterprise as a whole — across functions, regions, priorities and organisational boundaries.
MJA worked with AAK and Accelerance to shape a two-module development journey around that transition. Participants arrived at Module One having already begun the work through a virtual launch, Purpose Lab, 360° feedback and one-to-one coaching. The first four-day module, Leading Beyond the Function, then moved from relational leadership and self-awareness into enterprise thinking, influence, constructive challenge and the practical leadership of complex, cross-boundary work.
The programme was deliberately designed as something other than classic executive education. Rather than a sequence of lectures, it created a container in which leaders could reflect, practise, experiment and learn with trusted colleagues. The underlying question was simple but demanding: what does AAK need from me if I am to lead for the whole enterprise, not just my function?
At the heart of the journey sat a live enterprise challenge. AAK had deliberately chosen to operate as a decentralised and aligned company — protecting local accountability, customer proximity and entrepreneurial ownership while also making better use of global capabilities and creating greater clarity about decisions, priorities and accountability. The Executive Committee knew the direction of travel, but there was no finished playbook. The cohort was therefore asked to help create a first version of a set of Operating Principles for AAK.
This was real work, not a case study. Between the two modules, Home Groups investigated where the operating model created friction, spoke with stakeholders, gathered evidence and stories, tested assumptions and explored the tensions between local and enterprise needs. The discipline was to begin with inquiry rather than answers — and to keep asking the enterprise question: what is right for AAK?
A second strand ran between the modules through the Team Effectiveness Diagnostic & Transformation work. Leaders took the development back into their own teams, using a multi-perspective diagnostic to understand patterns across five dimensions: Inspire Purpose, Build Connections, Cultivate Collaboration, Enable Execution and Drive Results. A facilitated Learning Guide helped teams make sense of differences in perception, leadership impact, stakeholder perspectives and areas of consistency, before identifying one or two priorities for action. Targeted Team Boosters then provided short, practical ways of changing everyday team conversations, routines and ways of working.
This team strand was an important part of the programme logic. Enterprise leadership does not scale through personal effort alone; it scales through the teams and relationships through which leaders create impact. The inter-module period therefore connected three levels of development at once: the individual leader, the team they lead, and the wider enterprise challenge they were helping AAK solve.
Module Two brought those strands back together. The emerging Operating Principles were moved from attractive statements into real use cases: consequential situations in which leaders might reasonably disagree because both sides were protecting something legitimate. Participants tested whether the principles actually changed decisions, conversations, escalation, trade-offs and accountability — across issues such as decision authority and guardrails, speed and alignment, customer value and enterprise risk, trust and challenge, and resource choices.
The work then moved from principle to practice. Using the strongest cases, the cohort identified what would need to change in leadership behaviour, routines, decision rights, systems and informal norms for the principles to become normal practice. Rather than producing a long implementation list, they worked backwards from moments that mattered, designed small credible experiments and clarified where Executive Committee sponsorship or system change would be required.
The result is a programme in which leadership development and organisational development are deliberately intertwined. Leaders develop by working on themselves, strengthening their teams and contributing to a live enterprise challenge that matters to AAK’s future. The learning is not separate from the work. The work is the learning.