Angela's Thoughts about the Opening Keynote

(May 3)

Session Title: Measurement at Cirque du Soleil – Leadership from engagement to deployment to outcomes

Summary: In this session, France and Sylvie presented the challenges, creative approaches, and promising future of the leadership program implemented at Le Cirque du Soleil. Imagine managing an ever-expanding global decentralized organization with a highly mobile workforce – young, creative, outside-the-box people - where 40 nationalities and over 25 languages are present at any one time. An additional challenge with the implementation of a leadership program into this very creative setting was the resistance to anything that even remotely resembled corporate structure. It was perceived as taboo in this creative culture.

The need was to blend art and business. After comparing themselves to high-performing organizations, Le Cirque fell short on characteristics related to leadership and decision-making. Operating expenses were increasing at a higher rate than revenue. Turn-over was high, and accountability was low.

Three major components were proposed for leadership development – establishing the vision, management process alignment, and behavioural alignment. The preservation of the Le Cirque culture was the primary concern and any threat to that would be a huge barrier to program acceptance. So, after identifying and acknowledging the strengths of the organization through appreciative inquiry rather than focusing on what need to change, a blended learning program was established to develop and sustain leadership development. Where they thought that engagement of resources would take 6 months, they found that it actually took 2 years. Measurement of the program was mostly to capture satisfaction and was performed on a regular and frequent basis through interviews, observations, and feedback from all levels of the organization. Outcomes included a reduced perception of the taboo of management and leadership, more manager focus on talent development and promotion, common management language, and an understanding of expectations. Their continual mantra throughout the session was “Evoke, Invoke, and Provoke.”



Ang’s thoughts: Here are the two big things I came away with – (1) that culture and group identity are forces to contend with and cannot be ignored in times of organizational change, and (2) in some cases (probably more cases), it’s better to bring the mountain to Mohammed.

Culture: Okay – let me just say it out loud – Le Cirque is COOL! I think the real genius of the management/leadership program developers was to fully acknowledge the desire for uniqueness and the unrestrictive creativity that was of prime importance to the Le Cirque employees and managers. Employees did not want to work from a business/management model that represented someone else – they wanted a model that reflected them uniquely. For the launch, program coordinators moved away from working in a typical meeting room setting, and instead staged the environment to reflect the familiar, the uniqueness, and the creativity. The president kicked off the session and there were no desks or tables or chairs, no documents and no PowerPoint. Instead, the setting was theatrical, with projections on the walls of key words, scented air, pillows on the floor. All this was used to evoke the senses. What followed was much story-telling and writing and sharing of leadership stories. BRILLIANT! Walls started to come down and the group moved beyond their initial taboos to focus on content and discussions.

The mountain: I think the other stroke of genius was not to overlay a business model on the organization, but to evolve a model that suited the needs of managers and the organization. Le Cirque did not bring their leaders/managers into an established leadership program (aka the mountain) – of which there are many, but brought the program to the leaders/managers and where they were at. Yes, it took time – it took four times longer than anticipated, but it seems to me that Le Cirque needed this time, as the culture/identity need of the organization was very, very strong. Le Cirque is starting to see the benefits with tremendous growth in show production, expansion to Asia, and a more solid management of operations during all this expansion.

Submitted by: Angela van Barneveld