Leading as a politician

Who It's For

Deputy leaders, portfolio holders, group leaders and committee chairs, cross-party

Overview

Leading as a politician is our residential leadership academy for deputy leaders, portfolio holders, group leaders and committee chairs, cross-party. Three two-day residentials over three months move from personal to political to place leadership, with Avanti Academy content, online action learning and coaching in between. It begins inside out, with values, emotional intelligence, profiles and 360 feedback and reading the room. It then turns to the political and officer relationship, why change is hard, Cynefin and leading through uncertainty, with a council leader in conversation. It closes with place: asset-based community development, the Future Generations Act, integrated care and deliberative democracy, with place leaders from Wales and England.

Aims

This programme aims to develop elected members as political leaders who know themselves, work well with officers and across parties, and lead their places with confidence and integrity through change, leaving with a personal leadership commitment, shared and reviewed with their action learning set and followed up through coaching.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Assess your own leadership, values and emotional patterns using profile and 360 insight, and use that self-knowledge to stay steady under political pressure.
2. 2Apply influence, negotiation and change models to lead with officers, colleagues and other parties, choosing your approach according to the kind of problem you face.
3. 3Lead your place with communities and partners, using asset-based, deliberative and systems approaches shaped by the Welsh and English frameworks for place.

What you'll develop

Over the programme, you and your cohort will be able to:

1. 1Distinguish stated from revealed values and use Goleman's five components of emotional intelligence to assess how you show up under pressure.
2. 2Explain what Mehrabian's research actually found, and identify the four sides of a message using Schulz von Thun's model.
3. 3Distinguish adaptability from resilience and explain why neither can substitute for the other.
4. 4Explain why the seventy per cent failure claim lacks valid evidence and define what success means before a change begins.
5. 5Distinguish volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and identify which of the four mainly responds to more information.
6. 6Map stakeholders on a power and interest grid and plan how to engage each quadrant.
7. 7Explain how the five ways of working in the Well-being of Future Generations Act map onto systems ideas such as delays, the fundamental solution and boundary critique.
8. 8Assess what a digital channel adds to an engagement purpose and identify the layers of digital exclusion that a digital-only approach can create.