Overview of individual sessions

Weekend 1

Leadership and Teams
Teams are increasingly common at work. Understanding more and less effective team behaviours, and understanding your effective and less effective tendencies, as an individual within a team, are crucial for you to be as successful as you can be in this setting. Rather than being in the realm of the theoretical, you’ll generate this understanding from practical, specific experience in a safe, risk-free environment.

This session is about working in a team, completing a series of group tasks. You will spend time reflecting as a group on how you performed: what your group did effectively and where it was less effective; how and at what, your team improved; how and at what, it didn’t; and how you as an individual contributed to your team’s performance.

Leveraging Strengths in a Team – Gallup StrengthsFinder
Teams are most effective when members are playing to their strengths. This session will use your results from the Gallup StrengthsFinder instrument to deepen your understanding of your natural strengths and explore how you, and your teammates, can be most effective working together over the next 3 months in LSDP.

Giving and Receiving Feedback
This session explores the importance of feedback within leadership, what the components are of effective feedback, as well as building the skill of active listening and introducing a model for receiving feedback. 

Engagement
This session links the specific leadership behaviours to be developed during this course with superior organisational performance and profitability. Key questions addressed include what is engagement, why is it important, and how does it get built within individuals, teams and organisations?

Managing Difference
This session focuses on the importance of noticing, appreciating and managing diversity and difference as key to effective people management. The central concepts and evidence concerning diversity management and its role in leadership, motivation and team and organizational performance are introduced. 

The session includes the administration of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as a vehicle for the practical exploration of difference. Each student undertakes the MBTI assessment. Students participate in a series of activities designed to demonstrate each of the 4 dimensions of the MBTI. Teams discuss their experiences in each of the activities and the results of the MBTI are returned for further analysis. 

The session is designed to demonstrate the importance of understanding your own preferences and blind-spots and the importance of understanding others’ preferences and blind-spots as key to  understanding and managing difference at work.

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Weekend 2

Leadership Communication Skills
Leadership effectiveness is about what you do, not just what you know. In this session, students build their effectiveness at essential leadership skills. Through practice, and with individual coaching, students leave the weekend with manifestly greater effectiveness at key interpersonal behaviours, enabling them to be
significantly more influential in their daily interactions.

Primarily, this program builds participants’ effectiveness at 5 key leadership skills:

• Motivating others to deliver excellent performance

• Coaching others to increase their effectiveness using motivating feedback

• Confronting unacceptable behaviour without undermining the underlying relationship that currently exists

• Listening effectively to uncover problems and reduce emotion

• Resolving conflicts to produce win/win solutions

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Other topics covered include:

• Setting expectations

• Effective delegation

• Authentic leadership

• Using power wisely

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Through the use of course material, faculty and peer coaching, their 360° feedback and insights noted during the program, each student emerges with a customised plan of both short and long term actions to undertake in order to build their ongoing leadership skill and influencing effectiveness.

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Weekend 3

Effective Career Management
Engaging in work that you love increases your ability to handle stress, feel confident, be genuine, see the bright side, work more productively, achieve goals and give more effort. This session seeks to use the tools within the Effective Career Management section of the workbook to increase all of the following:

• your understanding of yourself and the world of work

• your knowledge of potential ‘good fit’ careers

• your ability to uncover other potential ‘good fit’ careers

• your ability to network effectively

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Questions
This session builds students’ cognitive understanding of the types of questions they tend to use, and their meta skill at using appropriately structured questions at the appropriate time for the appropriate purpose.

Putting It All Together
Activities on the final Sunday seek to leverage students’ skills at all of the following:

• managing teams

• questions

• verbal feedback

• difficult conversations

​The topic of engagement is revisited and the final session ties together the themes explored and the skills built during this course.