Henley Leader's Toolkit Programme

Did you know there is a secret Language of Leadership: a secret set of verbal, vocal and physical cues that has remained largely unchanged throughout history; a secret code that still determines who rises to the top in politics and business? The Language of Leadership combines ancient rhetorical devices with recent breakthroughs in neuroscience and behavioural economics to offer the definitive guide to leadership communication. The Language of Leadership sets out a simple three-step approach to winning minds.

Learning outcomes

• A deep insight into the critical elements that determine how communication works and who wins arguments.

• Develop the practical tools to make yourself more engaging, inspiring and influential.

• Formulate a clearer idea of your unique leadership voice and style, which you can draw upon throughout your career.

What is the unique value you bring with you into each conversation? What are your areas of passion or expertise? What are the core values at the heart of your leadership? How would your colleagues, clients or stakeholders describe you?

You already have a personal brand; you are telling a story with every interaction. But are you telling your ideal story – one that will help your career journey or business growth?

Understanding and expressing your personal brand is vital to managing your success. In this interactive session, you will experience a wide range of tools to help you manage your personal brand and influence skilfully. We will explore how you can manage conversations with expertise and express your best self.

Learning outcomes

• A deep understanding of your personal brand
• Build an aspirational personal brand to guide your leadership and communication style
• Understand how to express your personal brand while influencing with impact
• A clear action plan for influencing skilfully using your personal brand

The main challenges in organisations lie in the interfaces and relationships between people, teams, functions and different stakeholder needs. We explore what makes an effective team in today’s complex and ambiguous world, and what is the real role of the leader. Taking a systemic lens, we look at what we mean by ‘collective leadership’ and how that can create and unleash value for individuals and the whole team.

The session will be highly interactive and participants will apply the thinking to their own teams, and explore some different ways of leading and collaborating to optimise the contributions of every member of their team.

Learning outcomes:

• Learn how collaboration can bring out the best in individuals for the benefit of the team
• Recognise how teams can add real value to the organisation
• Discover what it means as a leader to be systemically aware and why it matters
• Understand what is meant by collective team and systemic leadership and what gets in the way of operating in this way.

Do you sometimes encounter situations at work where you need to have a difficult conversation? Sometimes managers don’t know what to say and avoid dealing with the issue, hoping that it will eventually disappear. However, often the problem persists or becomes more serious, making it even more challenging to address.

In this practical and interactive online masterclass, we will share some frameworks which will enable you to confront tough situations with compassion and skill. You will also learn how to deal with team members who play the role of victim.

Learning outcomes

• Explore the kinds of situations where you find it difficult to have conversations
• Practise applying a model for having a ‘fierce conversation’ with other participants and receive feedback
• Learn how to address victim mentality and avoid the ‘drama triangle’.

In the challenging times we face, we often hear about the need for good leadership. At the same time, the pressure and expectations that leaders are facing are greater than ever. Leaders need to be able to respond and react to a myriad of complex situations and be able to remain resourceful to both themselves and their teams. They need to have high levels of self-awareness around how they thrive and what trips them up.

To deal with these challenges and to be able to serve their organisations, teams and societies, leaders need to be in good shape.

The critical element of staying in shape is resilience – the capacity to navigate and thrive in times of complexity and disruption.

Learning outcomes

• Deepening your understanding of resilience and what it means for you.
• Building range – finding different ways to deal with pressure.
• Self-awareness of your strengths and vulnerabilities.
• Building the capacity to respond rather than to react.
• Identifying good habits to build your resilience.

We will explore the territory of office politics – what is it? why does it happen? and why are some people savvy operators and some not? Why is it even important to be politically savvy? These are learnable skills which will increase your influence and ability to make things happen.

We will examine the dimensions of political savvy, how to measure them, and – most importantly – how to acquire them! The six secret skills of politically savvy individuals are fundamental to operating in the complex map of office politics with confidence, aplomb and success.

Learning outcomes

• Understand why some organisations are more political than others.

• Being aware of the concept and dimensions of political skills.

• Understand fundamental influence techniques.

• Seeing political skill as an asset.