The Alchemy Leadership Development Programme
Objective and expectations
The primary objective of the Alchemy Leadership Development programme is to provide a mixture of theory and practice so that participants can improve how they lead and manage; and to provide useful ideas and tools to further their development. This is achieved via inputs, discussions, exercises and group work. By sharing their experiences and completing exercises with other managers participants will broaden their range of skills, ideas, tools and opportunities.
There is an expectation that participants will be willing to share their experiences, to learn with others and to contribute to the workshops. It is an explicit expectation of the tutors that all participants will ensure they are able to attend each workshop and to complete any pre and inter workshop work.
Outcomes and benefits
Results for participants
- Gain a range of key management skills
- Put new skills into practice in your own role
- Build your leadership capabilities
- Motivate and engage teams, manage relationships confidently
- Develop your leadership skills using your own knowledge, values and motivations
- The four individual coaching sessions – which take place between workshops will help to embed learning and enable greater stretch, and challenge targets to be reached.
Impact for your employer
- Effective and confident managers
- Better relationships and communication in teams
- Measurable results: workplace-based assessment ensures new skills are effectively transferred to your business.
Who it is for?
This programme is ideal if you are have management responsibilities but no or little formal training, and are serious about developing your abilities. It is also appropriate for managers with experience who want to learn more formal leadership and management ideas, so that they have make a step change in their capability.
Design criteria
Each workshop will last a full day and will have the following elements;
- Inputs on the topics illustrated below. Materials to take away, pre and follow-up reading
- A session (s) to practice key aspects of the workshop material together with exercises for participants to continue after the workshop
- A session on “Applying material and practice” to each individual’s situation, together with how will they (and their own manager) measure progress and success
- Exploring and agreeing next steps.
Over the complete set of workshops the following are seen as key areas for development;
- Building confidence and competence, especially leadership and management
- Assessing current skills and setting personal targets for improvement and growth
- Acknowledging differences and finding ways to more effectively manage difference
- Learning from each other and valuing the experiences of others in ‘apparently’ very different departments
- Explore personal behaviours and patterns of behaviour possibly with the use of an instrument like MBTI or Strengthfinder.
The workshops
Day 1. Personal Leadership
Objective. To set the scene for the series of workshops and then focus on individual aspects of leading and managing.
- Managing self and Leadership styles
- Managing time
- The difference between Strategy and Tactics
- Managing upwards
- Giving and receiving feedback
- “letting go of control” and Delegation
- Setting performance standards for self and others
- Judging [recognising] Performance – good and not good
Day 2. Effective communications
Objective. To understand the how, what and why of effective communication. To begin learning about ‘the leader as coach’
- Different types of communication
- Managing the communications with clients, customers and other stakeholders
- Use of language and the impact of language on relationships
- Meetings – running them and being effective in meetings
- Delivering effective presentations
- Being effective when people have different communication preferences
- Exploring the consequences of poor communication
- The Leader as coach
Day 3. Building teams
Objective. Understanding what makes a team and how to begin the journey towards being a high performing team.
- What is my team and what teams am I in as a member? Being an effective player
- Where does what I do impact others in my team?
- How does my team impact other teams
- The benefits of working more effectively together
- Making the team more than the sum of the parts
- Producing a vision for my team
- Setting goals to become a High Performing team
Day 4. Developing people
Objective. Understanding what is needed for the leader/manager to develop their staff and to create initial action plans for their own people’s development
- Everyone is different – how to respond effectively to differing styles and needs
- Setting development targets for me and members of my team
- How to manage the development of members of my team
- Sharing ideas for development that have worked for me or people I know
- Giving feedback as a means to aid personal development
- Appraisal processes
- Induction
Day 5. Handling difficult conversations
Objective. How to manage difficult conversations with team members e.g. poor performance, lack of motivation, failure to deliver what has been agreed, inappropriate behaviours.
- What are the challenges of difficult conversations?
- How to prepare for a difficult conversation
- What are the common difficult conversations?
- Giving bad or challenging news to clients, customers and stakeholders as well as team members
- Practicing difficult conversations
Day 6. Pulling it all together and action plans for the future
Objective. To consolidate learning from days 1-5 and create action plans to continue their learning and development.
- What have I learned
- What next for my personal development
- What happens when I go back to the workplace? How do I update my boss/team on the programme?
- How do I monitor myself and measure my own growth and performance?
- Keeping the relationships formed during the programme going
Fees
The programme will cost £4,000 per person + VAT with an early-bird special price of £3,500 + VAT for places booked and paid for by 30 November 2019. The price includes the 6 one day workshops, 4 x 1-to-1 coaching sessions with highly qualified coaches between modules to help embed the learning, and all programme handouts and materials. All refreshments during workshops are also included.
Location
It is planned that the workshops will be run at Egrove Park, the residential centre for the Säid Business School located on the outskirts of Oxford. This is a wonderful learning environment, the facilities and support are excellent and the food is fabulous; early morning pastries, 3 course lunch and afternoon cakes! We have used Egrove for all our recent programmes and know the team there well.
Timing & programme size
It is planned to run the workshops once a month from January to June 2020. the dates for the first three workshops are indicated below. The final three in April, May and June, will be agreed with the early-bird confirmed participants. To provide for the right balance of teaching and participation, the maximum size of the group will be 12.
Tutors
There will be three tutors on the programme, lead by Dr Paul Hedley who has been an Associate Fellow at Said Business School since 2013, with a particular specialism in leadership development. Paul is an experienced coach, a Director of Alchemy of Coaching and Managing Director of Leadership & Performance Development Ltd. Claire Saunders is an experienced coach, information specialist and researcher. She has over a decade of experience working in the public sector in both development and coaching, as well as experience in the commercial and charity sector. Penny Tunnell is an experienced Business Development Advisor and Executive Coach, particularly with high growth SMEs. Penny has helped the senior teams of more than 50 businesses in the past few years achieve their goals, and has a broad corporate background across public, charity and commercial sectors.
The benefits of including coaching in the programme
We believe that adding 1to1 coaching to the programme and making it an integral element has a number of significant benefits
- It helps to embed learning
- It enables the setting of higher stretch goals as these can be followed up in the 1to1 sessions
- It provides the opportunity to work on issues inappropriate to a ‘classroom’
- It creates opportunities to link learning more directly to their work place as the coaching could take place at their place of work (given the a suitable confidential space is available.
- There will be an opportunity for participants to extend their coaching beyond the 4 sessions included in the programme and this will be quoted on an individual basis
Dates
Programme dates for the first 3 months are confirmed. The final 3 workshop dates will be confirmed
before the start of the programme and in discussion with participants.
Workshop 1 Monday 27 th January 2020
Workshop 2 Thursday 27 th February 2020
Workshop 3 Thursday 26 th March 2020
Contact and Booking
To book a place or to hear more about the programme please contact Penny Tunnell at;
Penny Tunnell Tel. 07921 744121 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.