Thursday 19 May 2022

Day 100: My Leadership Story

It is apt that on Day 100 of my 100-day Blog I am away from work on a leadership course.  I am at Windsor Castle with Windsor Leadership on their Experienced Strategic Leaders Programme.  This is only possible because of funding through my scholarship from the Florence Nightingale Foundation and Turning Point honouring the time away from work for this.

Almost six months into my new role so this is perfect timing to take time out to reflect, think about what I have learnt, the successes of the past half a year, and what my plans and objectives are for the future.

My personal mission has always been to make other people’s lives better.  Professionally I work towards improving people’s outcomes and experience at a population level.  I have been challenged so far in the leadership course to make this much more personal to the people I want to make a difference for.

A theme that has come out has been the need for leaders to connect themselves and people around them with the “why”, but also that the “who” is important.  For me this means showing my passion for the people I want to make things better for.

We have explored the seminal events and points in our lives that have shaped the leadership behaviours we exhibit today, including childhood experiences, which directly affect our current personality types and preferences.  This is extremely helpful in being more self aware of the context in which we behave and how we operate as leaders.  It also allows some insight into how and why others behave and their leadership styles.

We each had to bring a real-life strategic leadership challenge to work through with other senior leaders in a safe space.  The approach used was extremely powerful and allows exposure of vulnerability whilst maintaining psychological safety.  A ‘coaching’ style feedback approach is used to tease out and probe beneath the real issue beneath the presenting challenge.  This is not role-play so none of the embarrassment of trying to ‘act’ or ‘perform’ as with other leadership training I have been on.

This has been extremely useful so far and we’ve only had the first 24 hours of the initial 2 ½ days.  There is a follow-up day in November, six months time, to check-in as to how our leadership journey is progressing and whether we are being successful in meeting our challenges.


(PS I know I’ve gone over the 100-word limit, but this is day 100 and this has been an exceptional day!)





1 comment:

  1. It was a journey for me too reading your blogs and has helped me immensely in my work. It was a pleasure working with you. Wishing you the very best in your Leadership journey.

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