A new product for executives, growth in the consulting team and cooperation with the Technical University of Braunschweig – Strametz continues to develop at a rapid pace in 2023
In the interview, Mr. Michael Kühner talks about the special highlights of the past year and reveals first details to the upcoming Expansion of the portfolio of services. In particular, the focus is on new formats in the area of experience-oriented leadership simulations, an offer for new executives, a well-founded system to facilitate potential and competence management in companies, as well as targeted support in the implementation and design of hybrid meetings.
In 2022, you invested many months of intensive work in the relaunch of your corporate brand and in October you appeared with a revised word mark, new logo and a restructured website with a fresh design. Why was it so important for you to hone your external image?
Michael Kühner: The last major brand relaunch had taken place in 2012 with the relocation of our site to Warburg and was therefore already 10 years ago. In the meantime, there have been many changes at our company and Strametz is constantly developing. It was time to make this process visible externally as well.
Read the detailed interview with Michael Kühner about the new website here.
In the course of revising your brand identity, you have adopted a central message: “Experience something different”. What does this slogan mean in concrete terms for your customers?
Michael Kühner: This slogan did not originally come from us, but from our customers, who have attested to the way we work. On the one hand, this is due to our solutions and products that can be “experienced” to a special degree. We do not work with classic personnel diagnostics and training in the conventional sense, but always combine these instruments with numerous experience-oriented elements that enable our participants to achieve sustainable learning successes through their own experiences. On the other hand, our team of consultants and employees consists of a special mix of people, some of whom come from very different backgrounds. They are the ones who transport our concerns with a great deal of passion and thus make them tangible.
For Strametz, the past year was also marked by growth. What important milestone have you been able to achieve as part of your expansion plans?
Michael Kühner: We reached an important milestone with our market launch in Canada. With Christine Wendl, we have an experienced entrepreneur and consultant at our side, who has also been supporting us as a shareholder since January 2022 in setting up a Strametz site in Vancouver. As part of this cooperation, we have already carried out a first pilot project with the Leadership Simulation on the West Coast of North America in September.
Get a look behind the scenes in the interview with Christine Wendl.
Two other highlights contributed to a successful end to 2022. What was Strametz awarded for?
Michael Kühner: We received the Employer of the Future award from the German Innovation Institute for Sustainability and Digitalization. We are particularly pleased about this, as this award stands for something we want to achieve with our innovative solutions and our individual consulting approach for our customers: to be a People Company that puts its employees in focus – through good leadership and an attractive corporate culture.
You can read the article on the “Employer of the Future” award here.
We were also on the list of winners of the HR Excellence Awards in the leadership development category. Together with the Boehringer Ingelheim Regional Center Vienna, we have developed a Leadership Learning Landscape designed to empower the company’s leaders to successfully meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Although it was not quite enough for the winner’s podium, we are proud that our project made it to the shortlist and the final four nominated companies in this category.
Learn more about the Leadership Learning Landscape at Boehringer Ingelheim or our new Leadership Journeys at Strametz.
As a result of the pandemic, you have already ensured in 2021 that management training courses, which up to now have mainly been held in person, are also available remotely. How have your customers responded and have you seen increased interest in your online leadership development formats in 2022?
Michael Kühner: The main challenge for us was to prepare the quite complex leadership simulations and offer them remotely in such a way that the experiential and multi-layered interaction character was not lost. This has worked very well for us, and as a result we have some customers who continue to work exclusively with us remotely in the post-Corona period, while others are again making increased use of our presence offerings. However, large companies in particular, some of which have an international reach, continue to value our Remote Leadership Simulation highly because it clearly stands out from classic e-learning formats.
As a management development tool, leadership simulation will certainly remain a central theme of your portfolio of offerings in 2023?
Leadership simulation with new formats
Michael Kühner: Leadership simulation formats remain a central theme in our portfolio of offerings. But we will link it even more with upstream and downstream building blocks. By combining this with larger and smaller Learning Journeys, we want to ensure that the development of participating managers is even more process-oriented and less selective. To this end, we will make some of the individual formats shorter and stretch them out over a longer period of time so that what has been experienced and learned is repeatedly refreshed, deepened and consolidated through simulations and can thus really be applied in everyday work.
Staying with it is ultimately the best way to be successful in the long run. After all, it’s a similar story with pilots. They don’t just get into the flight simulator once, but regularly attend simulator training.
Why a leadership simulation should not be missing in any good leadership development program? Check out our post and video.
Learn more about the new world of Leadership Journeys here.
Now, managers are increasingly faced with the challenges of hybrid leadership due to the rise of home office arrangements. Are there any plans to take more account of this fact in your training formats in the future?
Leading hybrid meetings effectively
Michael Kühner: To this end, we started a cooperation with the TU Braunschweig in October 2022. On the one hand, we want to explore the topic of hybrid leadership and collaboration more fundamentally together. On the other hand, we are naturally concerned with supporting affected managers in companies with practical measures. In particular, we will first focus on how to effectively manage hybrid meetings in order to provide more targeted assistance in this regard.
Are there other topics that you would like to pay even more attention to at Strametz in 2023 than you have in the past? Or can customers even look forward to completely new products?
New Directions in Leadership: The Next Leader Journey
Michael Kühner: We will offer a Next Leader Journey for leaders new to the leadership role in Q2 2023. We will go to the market with more than 20 experts and a completely new approach. With this format, we will accompany executives over a period of 6 months and support them in growing into their new role.
This is a completely new concept, which differs from all those available on the market to date primarily in that it offers significantly more variability and, at the same time, depth and provides participants with more choices to address topics that are relevant to them in a self-determined manner. We deliberately refrain from using a rigid concept that only imparts basic knowledge. Rather, we are concerned with picking up on challenges that new managers actually face on site in the company and being available as a sparring partner with impulses and solutions that can be implemented quickly. Interested parties are of course welcome to contact us already now.
Secure your starting place for the Next Leader Journey now!
Potential and competence management rethought
Michael Kühner: ” We will also be offering a well-founded system on the subject of potential and competence management for all companies that no longer want to wait in vain for ready-made competence bearers in recruiting, but instead decide to start earlier and identify potential bearers, who they can then quickly develop further. This approach has very good prospects of success. However, this requires a precise understanding of potential and competence as well as a mindset that does not reduce human capital to salary expenditure, but rather enables it to recognize and measure the entire potential and competence values of employees. We offer our support and, as experts for potential and competence management, provide companies with a promising strategy for positioning themselves for the future in times of a high shortage of skilled workers and ever scarcer talent.
Manuel Schuchna, Buchautor von “Innovatives Potenzial- und Kompetenzmanagement” und unser Experte für Talentmanagement, kennt das Thema bereits aus Kundensicht und ist bei Strametz seit dem 1. Februar 2023 federführend für das Potenzial- und Kompetenzmanagement unserer Kunden und Interessenten zuständig. Would you like to learn more about Manuel Schuchna as a consultant at Strametz? Check out his consultant profile.
What advice would you give to HR managers and decision-makers in companies who are still unsure whether Strametz is the right partner for them?
Michael Kühner: If there is a need or suffering in your company in the following topics, Strametz is the right partner to effectively support you in your challenges:
- You want to attract talent that has a high probability of success and can be developed into competence leaders.
- You feel strongly about identifying, developing and advancing the effectiveness of good leaders.
- You want to provide regular and meaningful support to managers who are new to their role so that they become more confident and don’t lose the fun of leadership.
And of course, we are exactly the right contact for all companies that want to supplement and enhance their existing further development portfolio with a particularly sophisticated, experience-oriented and interactive format. Please take a look at our solutions for leadership development.
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