Thinking like a director
Strategy, values, board roles and the top team.
A day on thinking like a director: strategic leadership, values and identity, strategic thinking and implementation, the chair, chief executive and board, and building a top team.
- 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
Newly appointed and aspiring directors in councils, health, housing and the voluntary sector
Overview
The first director's seat asks for a different kind of thinking, where judgement shapes the whole organisation rather than one service. The first part of the flagship Taking the director's chair begins with strategic leadership, from Ansoff and Mintzberg's emergent strategy to Lafley and Martin's Playing to Win, then values and identity with Goleman, Greenleaf and Neff. It builds strategic thinking, from Oberholzer-Gee's value creation and Kodak and Fujifilm to Cynefin, then tests implementation with DONG Energy's change into Orsted. The board follows: the chair and chief executive, Sir John Harvey-Jones at ICI and Berne's transactional analysis, closing with top teams, the Everest disaster and the Manchester Arena response.
Aims
The course exists to help new directors think wider than their own service: setting strategy that creates value, leading from clear values, making implementation stick, working well with their chair and board, and helping to build a top team that is truly a team.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Compare emergent and deliberate strategy and apply Playing to Win to frame strategic choices at director level.
- Plan implementation that sticks, drawing on cases such as Kodak and Fujifilm and DONG Energy's change into Orsted.
- Assess how well your top team and board relationships work, using lessons from the Everest disaster and the Manchester Arena response.
What you'll develop
By the end of this Immerse, 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 stated from revealed values and use Goleman's five components of emotional intelligence to assess how you show up under pressure.
- 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.
- Identify which frameworks, including the Strategic Choice Approach, Cynefin, Five Forces, Blue Ocean and Rumelt's kernel, were in play in each of the three cases.
- Describe the chair's four part role and the obligations chair and chief executive owe each other, and explain why the relationship needs both warmth and distance.
- Distinguish a single-leader unit from real team mode and choose deliberately which an agenda item needs.
- Apply team lenses such as voice, purpose and teaming to a real case, reading it forwards rather than with hindsight.
Built from 6 parts.
8 hours of learning.
- 01Setting the directionStrategic leadership for senior leadersBitesize · Leadership1 module
- 02Leading from the inside outValues-based leadership, ethics and identityBitesize · Leadership1 module
- 03Seeing the bigger pictureStrategic thinking and environmental scanningBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules
- 04Making it stickStrategy implementation and deliveryBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules
- 05The top tableRoles of the chair, chief executive and boardBitesize · Good Governance1 module
- 06At the top tableSenior leadership team developmentBitesize · Team Development2 modules