Setting the course
Senior and Strategic Leader Programme.
A two-day flagship for directors and senior teams: strategy, culture, influence and the leadership of self and others at the top.
- Level
- Flagship
- Learning time
- 19 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Strategy and the future
- Price
- £499
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Directors, heads of service and senior leadership teams
Overview
Setting the course is a two-day flagship for directors and senior teams who carry the strategy, the culture and the people at the top of public service. It starts with the leader: values, character and identity, then the teams and coalitions no leader can work without. From there it builds a strategic toolkit, from Rumelt's kernel and Mintzberg's emergent strategy to Cynefin, the Strategic Choice Approach and decisions under deep uncertainty, before turning to culture through Schein and the Cultural Web, risk appetite, change from Kotter to Heifetz, and the Tavistock view of the system beneath the task. Real cases test it throughout.
Aims
This programme aims to develop directors and senior leadership teams who can set a credible strategic direction and carry it into organisational reality, reading culture, risk and political terrain with judgement, and leading themselves and their top team with the steadiness, influence and integrity that senior public service demands.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Assess whether a strategy contains a genuine diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent action, and match your strategic tools to the kind of problem and uncertainty you face.
- Diagnose your organisation's culture, risk appetite and readiness for change, and plan how significant change will be carried through people, structures and coalitions.
- Lead a senior team with clarity about your own values and influence, using team and systems-psychodynamic insight to strengthen how the top of the organisation works together.
What you'll develop
Through the programme, you will be able to:
- Compare the planning, positioning, emergent and kernel schools of strategy and assess whether a strategy contains a genuine diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent action.
- Distinguish the five Cynefin domains and describe the decision-making approach each one calls for.
- Identify which of the four breakdown points, ownership, translation, competing priorities or review, is undermining a strategy and describe the remedy for each.
- Describe the six elements of the Cultural Web and explain how they reinforce the paradigm at its centre.
- Map stakeholders on a power and interest grid and plan how to engage each quadrant.
- Distinguish risk appetite, risk tolerance and risk capacity and explain why a board needs all three.
- Distinguish planned from emergent elements of a change and decide which parts can be designed and which must be grown.
- Distinguish individual, team, group and systemic coaching and choose where the most useful leverage lies.
Built from 14 parts.
19 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01Setting the directionStrategic leadership for senior leadersBitesize · Leadership1 module
- 02Leading from the inside outValues-based leadership, ethics and identityBitesize · Leadership1 module
- 03Stronger togetherCollective, distributed and team leadershipBitesize · Leadership1 module
- 04Seeing the bigger pictureStrategic thinking and environmental scanningBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules
- 05Choices under uncertaintyStrategic choice models and decisions under riskBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules
- 06Making it stickStrategy implementation and deliveryBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules
- 07How things really get done hereOrganisational culture: positive and toxicBitesize · Culture in Organisations2 modules
- 08Reading the signsCultural web and diagnosing cultureBitesize · Culture in Organisations2 modules
- 09Alliances and corridorsCoalition building and office politicsBitesize · Influence, Persuasion and Negotiation2 modules
- 10Knowing what we are forStrategic management: mission, vision, valuesBitesize · Strategic Management2 modules
- 11How much risk is enough?Risk assessment and board risk appetiteBitesize · Strategic Risk2 modules
- 12Why change is hardLewin, Kotter, Bridges and the change curveBitesize · Leading through Change and Conflict3 modules
- 13At the top tableSenior leadership team developmentBitesize · Team Development2 modules
- 14Seeing the whole systemTavistock psychodynamic and team coachingBitesize · Coaching and Mentoring2 modules