This place is very special. It's a huge dairy farm in deepest Kent, beautiful gardens, lovely buildings, not overly restored. I was last here about 7 years ago on the PAL multi media labs and I met my wife here then.
So to day 1.
Intense time learning 30 people's names, just about had it by lunch time. Most of us arrived on Sunday night, most of us exhausted from trying to tie up all sorts of loose ends on our day jobs. But an air of expectation and excitement about what's to come. Some of us concerned at how on earth we can spend two whole weeks talking about leadership!
Shot some video to go with this blog which will post when have time, asking people about what they want to get out of all this. It's clear that for many this is a personal journey perhaps more of self disovery than one of picking up a few skills to be used back in the work place. Though interviewing people on day 1 over breakfast was pretty harsh so not all took it seriously - Mary was doing the Clore in order to become 'supremely, globally, fantastically successful and Annie's central question was whether cultural leaders had toast soldiers with their soft boilded eggs, she was moretified to discover that she was the only one.
Useful stuff I wrote down from day 1
Malcolm Higgs from the Henley Centre told us that only 30% of change programmes actually work and that organisation culture has a bigger effect on performence than most strategy and that leaders can have a BIG effect on organisational culture - so building a culture in which people can perform at their best is a good bet.
Perhaps this is a good example of the move away from 'Heroic Leadership' or the Cult of Peronality to a more engaging model that better supports people and builds capacity and resilience into an organisation.
Key words
Enquiry - invite challenge, accept leader is not an expert
Enable - provide resource and support to enable success
Develop - the people and the teams, coaching mentoring etc
Apparantly good leaders spend 60% of their time developing the teams and the people. Bit of a shock this one as I probably spend about 10% of time doing this. I MUST STOP MANAGING AND START LEADING.
Malcolm was a big advocate of positive psychology. I liked what he said about appraisals - that it was a waste of time spending so much effort on the things people do badly instead of focussing on freeing them up to do what they do well.
Malcolm talked about the change in the organisational paradigm as a shift from a machine to a living system.
I did wonder that he seemed to be implying one could lead without personality and charisma, which I'm not sure is true.
We spent nearly all the afternoon talking about words to apply to leadership and great leaders. The usual stuff came up - Drive, enthusiasm, focus, determination, courage etc. It was good to chat in the groups and one of the great leaders Tony came up with in our group was Clement Attlee. I hadn't quite realised what a huge change this rather unassuming man had pushed through after the second world war.
Some talk in the afternoon of work life balance and a nice quote from Socrates 'beware the baroness of a busy life' or is that baronness....?
Comments