Nikola Ilic, Co-Founder and CEOSteered by its mission to empower individuals and organizations, ChangeLab Global (CLG) serves as a worldwide community of experts, educators, and practitioners working to bring the most innovative approaches to organizational and leadership development. A business consulting and services organization, CLG offers a variety of high-quality leadership development, change management, and organizational development services and coaching.
In an interview with Manage HR, Nikola Ilic, Co-Founder and CEO of CLG, discusses how his company combines innovative frameworks from Harvard and MIT with new technology to deliver unique solutions to all its partners.
Created with the Mission to Empower
Growing up in Yugoslavia in the nineties during the civil war drove me to become an activist and shaped my approach to leadership. Raised in a war-torn site, I experienced firsthand how absolute power and authority were abused and how individuals failed to see diversity as an asset. I witnessed what a lack of leadership could do to a society and what would unfold if we didn’t learn to adapt to changing circumstances.
In time, I learned how to grow an adaptable organization and leverage leadership, authority, and diversity as assets. The experience kicked off my quest to better understand leadership and change management.
I founded CLG fueled by a desire to unravel how we develop new leaders and help people grow, collaborate, and work together by leveraging diversity as an asset.
We are focused on enabling organizations and their employees to grow, become better leaders, and face the uncertainties and challenges that always demand adaptation. The primary goal of CLG is to facilitate this adaptation at scale. Fortunately, I was exposed to advanced methodologies, techniques, and frameworks on leadership development early on, having studied and taught at Harvard. At CLG, we aim to scale these high-level leadership development and coaching models to reach millions, enabling multiple organizations and individuals to thrive in the ever-increasing complexity and uncertainty of the 21st century.
Core Frameworks Driving Change Bottomup and Top-Down
At CLG, we are attempting to rethink change management with the help of three major factors. The first is to focus on leadership development. From research and practice, we have observed that change within the organization depends heavily on the leadership capacity that the organization has, and that’s not just at the top of the hierarchy, but throughout the whole organization.
The second aspect revolves around adaptive organization culture. To enable an adaptive culture, it is essential to empower individuals at the lowest level of the organization so that they have access to leadership. It is also important to ensure the same process across different units and departments throughout an organization.
Next, we must address what needs to be preserved as well as what needs to be changed or discarded. Focusing on what needs to be preserved would help organizations go through the change with better clarity and facilitate an easier transition for the people, managing the perceived losses that change might bring.
To help organizations go through this process, CLG emphasizes tacit learning in combination with experience-driven learning, adult development, adaptive leadership, and emotional learning.
We use these core frameworks when delivering training and workshops that are six to nine months long. These workshops help individuals understand that developing an adaptive culture, changing ingrained behaviors, and practicing a leadership culture take time. Our workshops enable participants to develop new habits that equip them to face challenges.
Cutting-Edge Technology Enabling Development and Learning
Technology enables much-needed change and development. However, it also causes panic and anxiety as individuals need to keep pace with the dynamic technological environment.
It is important to incorporate technology as much as possible into learning. We have developed a prototype and tested it, which allows us to use technology to scale leadership development training through microlearning. We are trying to use artificial intelligence and various software to assist people with microlearning, leveraging technology, and fostering a community-building mindset instead of learning in isolation.
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I founded CLG fueled by a desire to unravel how we develop new leaders and help people grow, collaborate, and work together by leveraging diversity as an asset
This led us to develop a new program called LeadUp – a micro-learning platform that currently has three courses around storytelling, building trust and meaningful relationships, andapproaching technology as an enabler of connection and community building. We are also launching new live online course called “Shuhari” this year.
Developing Young Minds into Young Leaders
A United Nations agency approached CLG to help them organize a community of younger staff that would have more say in the organization and support cultural change management.
The first course of action was to listen. We spent a few months conducting interviews, focus groups, and listening tours to understand the challenges they faced. After collecting data from the staff, we crafted the program pilots.
We started the nine-month journey by enabling their staff, especially the younger group, to anchor themselves to the organization’s purpose. In nine months, they went from learning how to articulate their own purpose to learning to redefine leadership – that it is not about position, but action. A group of 70 people went through this intensive leadership program, where we held live online sessions and leadership coaching.
After nine months, we did some research with the supervisors and the young staff. Initially, the supervisors noticed that the people who went to the program spoke up more often in the meetings and had more initiative and confidence. A few months later, at least five people were promoted in their respective teams. A few people were more engaged and created a young staff community. We have designed and delivered similar programs with other partners, achieving similar results.
A Future in the Leadership Development Industry
With the growing complexity of tasks in a workplace, which is now pushed down the hierarchical levels, it has become crucial to develop leadership throughout the whole organization, not just at the top.
Through research, it is observed that soft skills would be required the most in the future. These are the hardest to acquire as they require experiential and emotional learning. This is what we’re focused on at CLG at present––how to enable individuals at every organizational level to develop skills for the future.
