LIFT identifies and develops top talents within PHOENIX to become suitable candidates for more senior leadership positions internally.

Therefore, we look at  Business Performance, Leadership Behaviour and Growth Potential. Basically, you will scout for suitable candidates locally, based on processes many of you already have in place and guided by the triad mentioned above. During the Corporate Succession Management process, information on candidates is collected and calibrated with your Area HR Director. After that step nominees will be informed, the selection process for the candidates will be kicked off and  we will ask you to submit the nominee’s data via the above form. The candidate will then be invited to prepare several tasks e.g. prepare an ambition statement and have a short interview with corporate HR. 

The result will be a recommendation about confirmation or rejection/postponement for a participation in LIFT.
A joint call with the parties concerned will be initiated by Cop. HR before informing the candidates.

The questions you will be asked in the nomination form are: 

1. Did your nominee exceed performance/expected results on a regular basis (past perspective)? What would you like to share with us about this topic?

2. Did your nominee achieve these results in a way sustainable for WINGS (Creating customer value, Providing direction, Engaging the team, Driving business performance, Fostering business innovation)? In which of these leadership areas can your candidate become an ambassador and why?

    

3. Do you see additional potential to grow for the future? (Indicators for this growth potential are Ability, Agility/ Learning and Aspiration/ Commitment). What would you like to share regarding the candidate’s Growth Potential for a Top Management Position?

    

4. What will you personally commit to support the development of your nominee over the next few years?

    

5. And you will be asked to provide your nominee’s name, email, position, department and location.

If you like supportive documents regarding Leadership Behaviours and Potential, feel free to follow these links. 

For LIFT nominees, we really want to see who you consider a top talent on a senior management level in your organisation. Thus we will be focussing on the triad of Business Performance, Leadership Behaviour and Growth Potential.

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1) Business Performance strongly depends on local criteria and success factors. Possible questions to ask (not meant to be an exhaustive list):

• Did the candidate regularly exceed performance expectation?
• Does the candidate work in a key strategic area of the business?
• Is the candidate a sought after expert for his/her colleagues?

Please feel free to consider any local performance measurement you already might have in place. 

2) The new Leadership Behaviour Model ‘BASE’ has been tailored to WINGS. For a deeper look, feel free to use this information.

3) There are an endless number of definitions for “Potential”. In our opinion, the core discussion should be a future perspective – will the candidate be able, given 1-3 years intensive development, to deal with the challenges of a top management role?
To give this discussion some guidelines, please feel free to have a closer look into Ability, Agility/ Learning and Aspiration/ Commitment in this document.

Please be aware, for LIFT this results in a “multiplied formula” not an additive one, meaning that neither of the areas may be “zero”. 

Further topics to consider: 

• One absolute requirement is a sufficient knowledge of English to both follow and contribute to discussions about PHOENIX’s business, leadership and change management challenges and individual development feedback.

• Intentionally, no minimum tenure with the PHOENIX group has been set as a prerequisite. The decisive factor is the time you need to properly assess the performance of your potential nominee. Relevant questions: Can you reliably judge if your nominee delivers results that have measurable impact? Do you have enough evidence about whether your nominee exceeds performance expectations?

   

• Additional questions to be considered: Will the candidate be able to invest the necessary time for development in an intensive initiative like LIFT? Do you see the candidate moving ahead within the PHOENIX group, also outside your own area? What is their level of mobility?

If you have several candidates meeting your own criteria as well as the ones named above, feel free to nominate more than one. However, please be aware that both approved and for the time being rejected nominees should receive significant support in personal development by you and your organisation. We plan to have 1-2 Talent intakes to LIFT each year, in some cases it might make more sense to wait and observe performance, behaviour and potential another 6 month before a nomination.

The new Leadership Behaviour Model was tailored to the WINGS strategy and will be the core of future leadership culture and performance development: It consists of 5 elements: Create customer value, Provide direction, Drive business performance, 

Foster business innovation and Engage the team. These elements describe how results should be delivered in a WINGs spirit. 

There are an endless number of definitions for “Potential”. In our opinion, the core discussion should be a future perspective – will the candidate be able, given 1-2 years intensive development, to deal with the challenges of a top management role?

The following aspects can be observed now but will still be indicators for future growth potential: Ability, Agility/ Learning and Aspiration/ Commitment. This document will provide both an overview and details about Growth Potential as defined for LIFT.

We would encourage you to nominate LIFT members, however, if you don’t see a suitable candidate in your organisation or encounter capacity issues, later start dates will be possible as well. There are a growing group of participants, from a wide variety of countries and all business areas relevant for the PHOENIX group, so your organisation will also benefit greatly from the knowledge and network your candidate will bring in.

We don’t consider LIFT as a classic program, but rather an agile and highly customisable top talent initiative, which will grow and develop through input from participants and organisations alike. We are therefore relying on and being excited to co-create an approach that can grow with the PHOENIX group’s ever changing demands from both within and outside of the organisation.

We will measure the success of LIFT in different categories and levels of KPIs. They include:

– Financial: e.g. LIFT will support in reducing external hiring costs for top management positions.

– Individual: LIFT will support internal talents in reaching their individual goals set for their participation, prepare them for greater responsibilities and instill a WINGS mindset within them.

– Organisational: LIFT will create actual solutions and outcomes for the PHOENIX group from working on real business challenges that will be implemented and used by the challenge givers. LIFT members will become ambassadors for a collaborative approach to leadership and bring that to their organisations.

We will mostly use the Speakap LIFT Group “EU LIFT Updates”. For significant events we will also send an email.

We would also be delighted to invite you to calls and virtual events a few times throughout the year for a chance to connect with LIFT participants and to celebrate solutions and milestones that are coming out of the initiative.

In addition, we encourage you to implement LIFT formats that your candidate is working on into reporting structures in your organisation. We will be happy to share more specific ideas and best practices as the initiative progresses.

Of course, we are happy to also talk to you directly, so please do not hesitate to drop us a line or give us a call – Kerstin Sachers and Robin Würfel are at your service.

As the participants will be able to customise their journey with LIFT, they will be able to tailor the intensity of participation to current operational requirements.

Roughly, LIFT members are expected to spend around 10 business days a year involved with LIFT.  There are short (90-120 min) medium (~1 day) and high intensity formats “LIFT Peaks”.

The most time intensive format (the Business Challenge) should be completed once within the 2 years and will require about 15 business days of time investment in a 3-6 month timeframe.

Depending on the overall travel situation, we hope to be able to bring the LIFT members together in person for selected formats (mostly LIFT Peaks). However, experience so far shows that virtual formats work great as well, so we will retain an efficient mixture of presence and virtual formats.

 The program cost will be covered by PHOENIX Corporate HR, your contribution would mainly include travel expenses where needed (see question above). Depending on the individual’s development plan, “LIFT Yourself” might result in some local development formats, but this will be initiated by the participants themselves.

A key objective for LIFT is the connection and visibility of top talents across organisations. However, there is no set trajectory for LIFT members to join a different organisation after completing two years with LIFT. 

The Business Challenges that LIFT members will be working on during the initiative most importantly need to be actual issues that the challenge giver wants to address and solve. Therefore, challenges can come from local boards, MDs, Competency Centres or other functions. We would be delighted if you became a challenge giver, please contact us if you have an idea.

However, due to the time capacity of LIFT participants and a limited number of participants in each challenge, there will only be a few challenges addressed each year, which is why we can’t guarantee the inclusion of your Business Challenge into LIFT.

Our goal for LIFT is to create an experience from which participants benefit through the skills and mindsets they adapt and by being exposed to different organisations, talents and challenges across the PHOENIX group. 

While LIFT does prepare them for a top leadership position, there is no mandatory time at which this will be the case for participants, depending very much on their individual situation and that of their organisations. 

What we will make sure is that LIFT doesn’t simply end after two years, but that participants will stay connected amongst themselves and to new LIFT participants, for example in a mentoring capacity. And most importantly, they will be equipped to bring their experiences and WINGS mindset into their organisation.