Topics include: 

1. Why explore the concept of leading and managing others?

• What is the nature of change and is our understanding and ways of responding being effective?

2. What is leading and managing and the difference between them?

• How do I define myself as a leader and manager?
• Embarking on the Heroes Journey of change to enhance performance
• Exploring who and how I need to be in different contexts- the difference between identity and role

3. How do I enhance my competencies for leading and managing myself and others?

• Identifying the foundations of how I relate to the world
• Identifying what is important to me and how that influences my priorities and decisions
• Knowing when to be vulnerable
• Using Complex Adaptive Systems as a lens to understand and interact with the world
• Using perceptual filters to enhance how I operate in the world

Learning outcomes:

Upon successful completion, participants will have the knowledge and skills to:

• become aware of how they have been relating to the world and to break the habits of how they are being
• lead themselves and others in their understanding about change and how to respond to it.
• enhance their capacity and capability to continually review how they make sense of their world and refine their ways of operating to enhance their performance and be more effective
• enhance their capacity and capability to understand the behaviours of other people and be able to lead and manage them to enhance their performance and the performance of other people
• enhance their confidence, capacity and capability to lead and manage themselves and others in ways that are more aligned with the complexity of the operating environment.

Skill and knowledge gaps:

Managers are constantly asking me how do they respond team members behaviours in a complex policy environment. They do not have the tools, frameworks, models or behavioural flexibility to respond effectively. Many people perceive leading others as a role practiced by others “at the top of the organisation/system or above them”. This is a highly inappropriate frame for leading self and others. It arises from the industrial model of society and business. In the information and knowledge age, such a frame about leading is creating major cultural and workplace constraints. 

Anticipated behavioural and business impacts:

This course can be life changing if participants open themselves up and work through the topics. It is designed to enable people to become aware of who they are, how they are operating in the world and undertake change to break the habit of who they are being now into a more responsive and effective person. The course provides people with a reset button. With this awareness they can then review a range of beliefs, values, mindsets, perceptual filters and reset them to be more effective in their role as an operative and/or leader/manager. 

By pressing the reset button, people have developed confidence in themselves, propelling them to take on greater responsibilities, be more willing to speak their truth, enhance their contribution, develop new ways of thinking and working that will add new insights to the work team. When a team collectively embarks on this course, they have the shared language, models, tools, learning and experiences to change the rules of how they work with each other. This is a self-organising process that leads to an emergent culture different to where they had started. This will support the evolution of the public service embrace when required a distributed versus hierarchical form of leadership. 

Leaders/managers will have the frameworks, confidence and skills, to lead and manage others in the workplace to be more effective to respond to complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity and volatility. 

Who should attend?

The course is applicable to all staff. It is not dependent on level. The secretary of the department can greatly benefit from this course as well as people at the APS 1 level. This is a course about how we are being human beings. The material will be applicable to all, and people will respond differently. The impact the course may have on the system will depend on the people who attend with power to support change to happen.