Customisable in-company course, to equip your people, whatever their levels or roles, with the skills, mindsets and tools to demonstrate effective, high impact leadership for advancing desired change in challenging situations.

Bringing leadership skills into balance with professional knowhow

Chances are your managers and professionals are mostly very good at the technical and specialised aspects of their work. Yet do they show the same expertise and skill in the human and change sides of their roles?  This course will enable your managers and professionals to grow their people and change skills to be more in balance with their specialist knowhow.

Developing Your Leadership Practice enables your people to exercise leadership today, whatever their roles or levels, to make better progress with challenges they currently face. They will learn how to tap more of their own potential and that of others around them.

Developing Your Leadership Practice

Contact us to find out more about Change Conversations: Safer, Clearer, More Authentic and how it can benefit your managers and professionals – and the organisation.

Benefits can flow in all directions:

  • for participants in growing their self-confidence, impact and satisfaction
  • for colleagues, valuing being part of a more emotionally healthy workplace
  • for the business, with gains in higher workplace performance and productively through issues being handled better and sooner.

Building Capabilities in Four Key Areas

Developing Your Leadership Practice will assist participants in four key areas:

  • Understanding leadership as work they need to do: recognising how leadership is different from management and technical work and what this means to them – and now to navigate and choose what kinds of actions are required and when.
  • Becoming more personally effective: leadership requires ‘mindset skills’ including recognising issues as complex and multifaceted and being aware of one’s own contribution. Participants learn to work more mindfully; to be present, less reactive and less judgmental.
  • Engaging more safely and productively with others: research at Google and elsewhere has emphasised the importance of psychological safety in fostering team success and a healthy culture. Participants learn how to engage others effectively while minimising defensiveness.
  • ‘Getting underneath’ issues to enable change: whatever the issues, for example, stalled change efforts or misfiring partnerships, participants will learn how to inquire more deeply, to get to the fundamentals and build shared understandings for change and improvement.

Different Lengths and Configurations

The course can be run in different lengths and configurations. At a minimum, there might be a single, interactive web meeting on a topic such as “Understanding leadership as practice”. A fuller version could involve four half-day workshops (virtual or face-to-face) possibly supported by such elements as e-learning sessions, individual coaching and/or 360-degree feedback.

Ordinarily, workshop sessions are conducted two or more weeks apart to enable practice and reflection in actual business settings between meetings.

Developing Your Leadership Practice can be run either as a standalone course or as integrated components within your own leadership program.

Whatever the length and format that suits you, you can be confident that some course features will remain constant. Developing Your Leadership Practice is always:

  • Tailored to your organisation’s business context and needs
  • Designed to help your participants do real work in advancing the challenges they face
  • Highly interactive and engaging for participants.

Course Impacts

These will vary to a degree depending on your organisation’s context and the agreed course length and format. Generally, however, you can expect that your participants will gain:

  • Knowledge and understanding about leadership as a practice – adaptive (enabling change with thorny, messy issues), relational (exercised in relationship with others) and different from management (as another form of action)
  • Personal growth in areas such as becoming more mindful and aware of their own assumptions, feelings and interests (what matters to them); being able to better imagine others’ perspectives; and being able to express themselves with greater openness and authenticity
  • Skills for enacting leadership particularly in being able to engage with others in safe and productive conversations on contentious issues – including inquiring into implicit aspects such as unspoken assumptions – to build shared meaning to support further action.
  • Practice in trying out leadership interventions between sessions and reflecting on the results to support additional action.

Indicative Content

Below are possible topics in a course designed to have two half-day (face-to-face or online) workshops (whereas a fuller course would involve four such workshops).

Workshop 1

  • Leadership as a practice different from management – and what this means for you
  • Building your personal leadership practice
  • Working mindfully
  • Practical empathy – shifting perspectives to better understand others possible realities
  • From the heart – tapping into and expressing more of what is true for you

Workshop 2

  • Common default behaviours that get in the way of effective conversations
  • A toolkit for engaging others on uncomfortable issues
  • Applying the toolkit in people-development and change situations
  • The practice of inquiring to open up issues and bring forward new possibilities
  • Building more open and emotionally healthy teams

The workshops are supported by a set of punchy and engaging e-learning modules and reflection activities.

A model used throughout the course is OBREAU, for observation, reasonableness and authenticity. The e-learning modules introduce participants to the model and demonstrate its use in a range of settings for aiding leadership practice and conversation. In this way, the workshop discussions can focus particularly on practical applications relevant to participants. The e-learning modules are short and sharp, averaging 6 minutes each. Accompanying reflection questions are designed to help learners apply the learnings to their own challenges.

With the development orientation in this course, the capabilities participants learn are practices that they will need to keep working at, to build their effectiveness. This course will give participants solid foundations on which to further develop their practice.

Participants

This course can be adapted for any cohort where you see a need for the development of leadership practice to better deal with current and emerging issues, to foster the personal development of participants, to encourage safer and more effective conversations, and to build healthy and more open team cultures.

Find Out More

To find out more contact Don Dunoon and book in a free, no-obligation 30-minute consultation to discuss your needs.