The view from the top
First 100 days, systems, culture and financial resilience.
A day on the view from the top: sustaining yourself, your first 100 days, strategic thinking, culture and mergers, top teams, complex adaptive systems, systems leadership and financial resilience.
- Level
- Immerse
- Learning time
- 8 hours
- Where
- Strategy and the future
- Price
- £249
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
New and aspiring chief executives and their deputies in councils and public bodies
Overview
Chief executives carry the whole organisation and its place. The second part of the flagship Leading the whole begins with sustaining yourself in the top job, through Heifetz's adaptive leadership and Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan on recovery, then a first 100 days plan built on Michael Watkins' The First Ninety Days. It turns to strategic thinking and Cynefin, then culture: Schein's embedding mechanisms, culture in mergers and psychological safety. Top teams follow, with the Everest disaster and the Manchester Arena response. Organisations as complex adaptive systems come next, through Buurtzorg, Senge and Greater Manchester, closing with financial resilience, Birmingham's equal pay case, and Croydon and Brick by Brick.
Aims
It is designed to help chief executives hold the whole and hold themselves: planning their first months deliberately, reading the organisation as a living system rather than a machine, building a top team that works and testing financial resilience before others do.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Plan your first 100 days as chief executive, using The First Ninety Days and evidence on recovery to sustain yourself.
- Diagnose your organisation as a complex adaptive system, drawing on Buurtzorg, Senge and Greater Manchester's systems leadership.
- Assess your organisation's financial resilience, learning from Birmingham's equal pay case and from Croydon Council and Brick by Brick.
What you'll develop
By the end of this Immerse, you will be able to:
- Explain why recovery rather than endurance sustains performance, and how Heifetz's productive zone of disequilibrium applies to leading change.
- Distinguish strategic thinking from strategic planning, strategic management and strategic leadership, and apply the test of value and real choice to a strategy document.
- Distinguish the five Cynefin domains and describe the decision-making approach each one calls for.
- Explain what psychological safety is and is not, and how it combines with high standards to create a learning zone.
- Distinguish a single-leader unit from real team mode and choose deliberately which an agenda item needs.
- Explain the properties of an organisation as a complex adaptive system and compare the machine and weather models of leadership.
- Describe the core capabilities, dimensions and disciplines of systems leadership set out by Senge, Hamilton and Kania, Ghate, Lewis and Welbourn, and Senge.
- Apply the topic's financial and governance lenses, such as cash, asset value, borrowing, full cost and resilience, to a real case, and identify the warning signs that were visible.
Built from 6 parts.
8 hours of learning.
- 01Lasting the courseSustaining yourself, and your first 100 daysBitesize · Becoming a Chief Executive2 modules
- 02Seeing the bigger pictureStrategic thinking and environmental scanningBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules
- 03Trust at the heartCulture change, mergers and psychological safetyBitesize · Culture in Organisations2 modules
- 04At the top tableSenior leadership team developmentBitesize · Team Development2 modules
- 05Leading what no one controlsComplex adaptive systems and systems leadersBitesize · Systems Leadership2 modules
- 06Built to lastFinancial resilience, with case studiesBitesize · Finance for Non Finance Professionals2 modules