Leadership & Management Development
‘The Leadership Journey - Catalysing Tomorrows Leaders Today’
Our Leadership development is built around eight focus areas and has been developed for people who want to evolve in their own unique style of leadership, whether for themselves or within a business/public sector environment. It is always based on active and practical exploration drawing on cutting edge theoretical underpinning. It is available for people of all ages in business, in organisations, in communities – wherever collective endeavours are necessary.
The eight focus areas are:
1. What is Leadership? Exploration of some models of practice. How do we develop ‘Intentional Leadership’ skills and qualities? What makes a leader a leader? The importance of Core Values and Vision for the Leader.
2. ‘Integral Thinking’ – an approach for leaders in organisations and communities. A practical introduction to a model that enhances individual and organisational awareness of leadership and accelerates people’s ability to generate results with other individuals and groups they are working with. This focus area normally provides the opportunity to undertake the PeopleScan™ suite of assessments, exploring values, change states and cultural alignment for individuals.
3. Creativity and Innovation for the Leader – Challenging the Paradigm. An introduction to creativity for leaders. This focus area provides practical experience of techniques managers and leaders can use to generate new ideas, new ways of working coupled with the opportunity to look at their own paradigms and the way they put them into practice in their work.
4. A new approach to Communication – a leader needs to be able to communicate effectively and build relationships with a variety of diverse ‘communities’ both within and external to their organisation. This part of the development process looks at effective models for communication from an understanding that people have different preferred ways to communicate and relate to others.
5. Effective Leadership of Change –this focus area supports leaders & managers to ensure the best chances for success in their change initiatives. Activity options in this area cover things such as: an Integral Review of the business or organisation, re-aligning business change with a value-based model, looking at the customer relationships, Scenario Planning, innovative approaches to Training Needs Analysis as well as structuring the change processes themselves and building in performance evaluation. This focus area is about creating successful outcomes beyond the SMART target trap!
6. The Leader as Coach – this focus area is built upon a) a practical introduction to the coaching models leaders can use to create effective, learning teams in their business, organisation or community and b) coaching the leaders and managers themselves to accelerate their own learning and performance. If appropriate we also run Institute of Leadership Management coach training programmes to provide qualifications at Level 3 or 5. This section is most often linked with the activity in focus area 5 above.
7. ‘Open Space’ – this focus area offers clients the opportunity to access the various strategies to open up conversations for change in their teams or organisations. We facilitate these events for the client using ‘Open Space’, ‘World Café’ our ‘Accelerate!’ event and a variety of Action Learning approaches or group coaching days. These are often half-day or one day events, either in our own Centre or in the client’s chosen venue. These can be small group up to large groups of around one hundred participants.
8. The Yorkshire Leadership Programme – an annual programme of workshops, ‘Conversations round the Pond’ and a conference all focussing on delivering new approaches to leadership development in the 21st Century. In their sixth year, these constitute our public programme of events. This year we have joined with the Northern Leadership Academy to further develop this kind of activity in the Yorkshire region.
These focus areas can be accessed as separate strands of activity focussed on specific client need or be woven together to provide an integral leadership journey for the client organisation or for an individual client. We always spend time with our clients to identify their particular vision for their success and then tailor our programme accordingly.
We also have the facility to go deeper into the organisation or business to work with specific groups or teams and build capacity through specific development programmes on individual themes. These include:
• Project Management
• Communication and team-building
• Motivation
• Assertiveness
• Managing Change
• Positive Thinking
• Creativity | 
Coaching, mentoring and leadership are becoming buzz words in the development of staff. Our executive development training looks at the personal progress of members of staff, considering development strategies. Much of this can be tailored to the specific needs of our clients.
