Leadership development sessions
Connecting and developing leaders

Our organisation has a lot of training and support available but I felt there were some gaps in terms of development for our leaders. We had been running our own two-hour leadership team get togethers every month but came to a realisation we needed a facilitator to give it more focus. That’s when I thought of Jo, whom I have worked with before and always held in high esteem.

A key goal for us was bringing that group of people together on a regular basis – connecting and sharing.

! have known Jo for a while and worked with her in the wider organisation. People know and like her.

Jo makes the sessions a lot more purposeful and productive. She keeps them on-track whilst being creative, interactive and fun. Jo and I will have pre-planned what will be covered off each time and she builds an interactive session from that.

Some of our leaders are very busy and don’t always have a lot of bandwidth for this kind of thing so we work hard to plan these so that they are relevant, timely and practical. We know that is working as people are engaged. They want to come to the sessions.

Jo will sometimes bring in outside speakers or facilitators who can provide different knowledge and perspectives to our team. For example, we had a session on story-telling with a facilitator working alongside Jo – how do you as a leader tell good stories – that really got everyone engaged. People still talk about that as a favourite session.

Jo uses a lot of the established facilitation techniques. I’m always impressed that she is obviously up to date with her training and the latest trends in workshop facilitation.

Connections. These sessions are all about upskilling, supporting and connecting our people. This is quite a big ask in two hours but Jo’s very good. She is known well trusted amongst our people.

I like the way she asks us to have one key take away from each session. That’s a great strategy to keep you thinking about what we are doing and why. Reflecting back on what we’ve done helps us to think about and apply our learning from the sessions.

This is a lot of time every month for managers to give up, but the payoff is enormous.