Strategic Leadership Development
Some leaders are naturally gifted and require little or no development. However, today’s organisations are so complex and the business environment so demanding that such leaders are rare. Most leaders will benefit from ongoing development.
The Career Navigation perspective takes as its starting point the position that leadership is normally more effective when distributed than concentrated in just one person or a small elite. An organisation requires a system of leadership with leaders of different skill and with different critical tasks located in different parts and levels.
The Career Navigation suite of leadership workshops is designed for the executive board level, functional and divisional directors, general managers and senior managers. The workshops are a blend of diagnosis and action planning, research-grounded theory and practical application. There are four modules that can be delivered separately, in combination, or integrated with other in-company development programmes. The delivery time for each module is normally one and a half days.
The Workshop Modules
Leadership and You: This concentrates on individual aspects of leadership, the personal meaning of being a leader, and issues of power. Participants will acquire deeper understanding of their self-expectations, leadership styles, and preferred versus required competencies. Action planning will focus on expanding one’s repertoire and making adjustments to the leadership needs of the situation.
Building relationships and influencing others: Participants will learn powerful insights and behaviours for relating to and influencing others. They will identify barriers to their influence and how to overcome them. And they will learn how to analyse conflict dynamics and how to manage conflict constructively. Action planning will cover behavioural skills for assertion, and mending and managing existing relationships.
Leading in Groups: This module focuses on effective groups and how to develop high-quality teams. Participants will learn to recognise individual behaviour and group dynamics, how to structure the work of a group and enable it to accomplish its task, how to develop a team’s culture, how to engage individual members, and how to help the group resolve its issues. Action planning will focus on selecting and applying group facilitation tools.
Leading the Organisation: Influencing people en masse is a different kettle of fish from influencing individuals. It entails setting an agenda and getting people behind it by creating a robust and flexible organisation. This module explores the key environmental elements of organisational structure, culture, power politics and the corporate leadership style and system. The advantages of distributed leadership and the means of achieving it are presented and discussed. Action planning will mainly concern strengthening organisational leadership.
Other mix-and-match elements that can be built into the workshops include the Brooklands 360 degree feedback service, and action learning projects.
The Leadership Workshop Process
- We aim to be in your office within 48 hours of your call to take the brief.
- At that meeting we take your brief on the situation and advise on suitable action. We write the proposal and send it to you for approval and agree the dates and venue for the coaching sessions.
- We write up the brief and send it to you for approval and confirm the programme, dates and venue(s) for the workshops.
- We contact the participants and give them a briefing on the workshop as well as questionnaires to be completed in electronic format and returned prior to the date set for the workshop.
- We deliver the workshop according to plan.
- Participants complete course evaluation forms. We analyse these and send a summary report to the client within seven working days. To encourage openness and full participation in the workshop we undertake not to report back on individual participants.
- Should participants make any recommendations for corporate action as a result of the workshop we shall communicate these to the client in writing.
