Strategische Gestaltung 1+2 – WPF Organizational Design - Anwendung

Future of Leadership: Leader as Servant?


Supervision
Dr. Eileen Mandir
Stephan Rein
Christoph Rauscher


Briefing
Briefing

We find ourselves in times of hyper-change, in which many businesses face the constant challenge of matching the speed of the market in form of shorter release cycles, delivery timelines, or product life-cycles. This is why many companies are shifting their workforce to agile product development with self-organized interdisciplinary teams and flat hierarchies. In this operational model, the role and expectations of leaders are shifting from being the decision-taker to being the care-taker. However, the reason number one for employee engagement seems to remain the satisfaction with leadership. How can we better understand the needs of employees and leaders in this new form of collaboration? What are the key tasks and interactions of both? How might we design for better servant leadership?

In this course, students are asked to ideate solutions, services, offers for leaders and their employees in an agile organization. What services might we design to solve the current pain points or unleash untapped potential? What formats or artifacts – workshops, online platforms, apps, card games, role plays, campaigns, interventions, exhibitions etc. – might be the best and sustainable way to enable leadership development?

You are asked to work in teams of 2 or 3 students and to deliver concepts for the insights of your research done during the course WPF Organizational Design - Foundations. Outcomes can be sketches of services, collaboration formats, software tools, platforms, processes, etc. and should be documented online through e.g. text, illustration, infographic, flowchart, or video to transport your main ideas and explain the problem, concept, and use case.

In this course, we had the chance to get very interesting insights from PwC Experience Consulting (formerly known as ixds) into their work in the field of Organizational Design. Big thanks to our external critics Stephan Rein and Christoph Rauscher for challenging our concept and providing insightful feedback!