A Master Class for Executives – Making Your Contribution: Leading the Change
Course Outline & Aims:
Change is afoot and the transfer of technology is likely to play a crucial role in achieving the UK’s ambitions contributing to steady growth, adding value to the economy and job creation.
Currently, Leadership and Management programmes are often bolt-on soft skills courses but there is an urgent strategic need for this approach to be modified given today’s challenges and the need for a sharper edge and greater sophistication in these capabilities.
These challenges require an appropriate strategic management model to be implemented and the capabilities of people aligned to it. This is a very stretching ambition and creating agile leaders and irresistible traction is highly challenging. However, there is little alternative but to accelerate the pace of progress whilst maintaining equilibrium and resilience in the face of change.
To reach this point of change as quickly as possible across the organisation, executive leaders who are technical and scientific experts also need to become competent leaders and managers of people at the very highest level. To get beyond the tipping point for change not only calls for the commitment of hearts, minds, new skills and voluntary effort, but also for a fusion of agility, equilibrium and resilience – personal and organisational – bringing about new orders of thinking from the emerging generation of leaders.
Routine, unsystematic or one-dimensional approaches born of the early 2000s seem unlikely to match or complement the required shift, and just as technology rapidly becomes obsolescent the familiar and comfortable processes of the past are less safe than they appear.
Course Objectives:
To counter legacy risks, innovative and systematic approaches call for learning to provoke and nurture growth amongst new managers and leaders. Equally, all investments in learning must be justified by outcomes, so learning innovations must catalyse rapid growth with evaluation proving the case. So, for example, new leaders can be enabled by rapid learning to engage fruitfully in competition whilst simultaneously reaping benefits from collaboration. Learning to understand and make use of ‘discordant harmony’ develops and draws on the individual’s strategic foresight but applies it practically, to manage paradoxes emerging from implementation of a company’s strategic model. This would mean network-level subsidiary strategies implemented by these leaders contributing directly to increased commerciality.
All parties in this delegated relationship must interact and have inter-organisational relationships that work. This means that management and leadership training must be capable of flexing to help participants learn to strategize for, and implement, effective external relationships. This learning must focus on how a company’s scientific and technical leadership should influence the pace and direction of technological development and transfer, and the creation of new knowledge for value creation.
The objectives of the Master Class will enable a bespoke programme of learning for participants integrating technical and scientific expertise with leadership and management thinking, sense-making and capability-building.
The Master Class will adapt to a company’s different organisational dynamics, settings and challenges. This integrated approach will build technical expertise and prime practical management and leadership know-how into a new skill-set to underpin the sea-change in technology transfer. It will also add value to a company by creating a networked learning set of executive leaders across its scientific and technical businesses fully consistent with its Mission, HR Strategy and policies on performance management, values and Corporate Social Responsibility.
The programme will widen and deepen the benefits and performance impact conferred by a company’s investment in learning by blending expert scientific and technical knowledge with management and leadership sense-making, thinking skills and know-how of the highest order. A secondary objective is to create a learning culture through the on-going participant learning set and peer coaching network. This approach is not intended to be a substitute for any company’s higher level leadership and management learning programmes, but to be a practical adjunct to it.
Intended for:
Those executive leaders and managers with technical or scientific expertise and the personal dynamism to become Technology Brokers, Change Ambassadors and Thought Leaders key to their company’s mission.
Methods of Instruction:
Master Class participants will be required to demonstrate understanding of knowledge gained during tutored sessions in group discussions and syndicate sessions. Each tutored and linked interactive session will be consistent with a framework of high-impact executive education and ‘real world’ executive development scenarios.
Delivery Methods:
Master Class delivery will be adaptable to different organisational settings and take the form of:
- technical and scientifically driven management and leadership learning workshops using a matrix of content derived from academic research and best UK practice;
- quick-paced interactive delivery to engage participant interest;
- tutored, individual, group and plenary sessions to enable participants to grasp concepts in context and plan for their use in the workplace;
- consolidated by ad-hoc practical advice to participants during the programme;
- on-going validation of learning, evaluation and follow up.
Programme Schedule:
Day 1
Nurturing Innovation
Session 1: Intellectual Property
Session 2: Favouring Secrecy
Session 3: Zero-Sum?
Session 4: Change Ambassadors
Session 5: Generating True Value
Technology Exploitation
Session 6: Technology Brokers
Session 7: A World of Ideas
Session 8: Entrepreneurial Repertoire
Session 9: Carbon Intensivity
Session 10: Solutioneering
Day 2
Non-Linear Transformations
Session 11: Knowledge Refraction
Session 12: Ethical Creativity
Session 13: Aptitude Transfer
Session 14: Constructive Social Activism
Session 15: Creative Destruction
Business Optimisation
Session 16: Catalysts for Growth
Session 17: Environmental Footprints
Session 18: Business in Real-Time
Session 19: Human Capital -v- Financial Capital
Session 20: New-Wealth Creation
Course Tutors: Professor Robert Jackson & Vivienne C Lacey