1. Leadership Development Programme for Students’ Unions
Igniting The Talent
Leadership Development Programme for Students’ Unions
James Barrett
Principal Consultant
Cass Centre for Charity Effectiveness
Intellectual leadership: developing talent, enhancing performance

2. This Session Background to the NUS SU Leadership Development Programme
Centre for Charity Effectiveness
This Session
Background to the NUS SU Leadership Development Programme
Explore your ideas about leadership
Introduce the current Programme
Some tasters of what we cover on the Programme

3. Leadership Development Programme Vision
“We want to create and support a generation of outstanding leaders working to transform the already impressive impact of the student union movement on civil society.”

4. Centre for Charity Effectiveness
What is Management?

5. Centre for Charity Effectiveness
What is Leadership?

6. Centre for Charity Effectiveness
What is Leadership for?

7. Leadership Connection
Centre for Charity Effectiveness
Leadership Connection
Who was the most inspiring leader you ever had?
What was it that made the connection remarkable?
How did you feel at the time?

8. Leadership Disconnection
Centre for Charity Effectiveness
Leadership Disconnection
What’s the worst experience of leadership you ever had?
What was it that made it so bad?
How did you feel at the time?

9. Centre for Charity Effectiveness
Leader as Visionary
Organisations are in the business of bringing dreams to life – they speak to our hopes and aspirations.
Leaders inspire their followers through compelling visions which span the present and the future.
Gabriel & Hirschhorn (1999)

10. The Inspirational Leader
A great leader can understand the unconscious motives of the followers better than the followers understand them themselves.
Burns (1978) in Gabriel
The employee who shares in the leader's dream invests his/her effort and time in the hope that the dream will come true....
While [at the same time] working to make the dream come true [is] exciting in its own right.
Gabriel with Hirschhorn (1999)

11. Centre for Charity Effectiveness
Your Context
High turnover of elected officers – needs powerful working relationships to be formed quickly
Movement’s highly ambitious vision – needs exceptional influencing skills across vast network of stakeholders
Federal relationships are innately complex – requires balance of autonomy, strategy & brand protection
Questioning authority.

12. Programme Design Launch Event – introduction / whole system exercise
Centre for Charity Effectiveness
Programme Design
Launch Event – introduction / whole system exercise
Individual Coaching - with 360 profiling, personal development planning
Residential Programme - built around expert topics and a simulation
Action Learning Sets and road trips
Elective Programme – your topic choices, with accreditation option
Closing Booster Event and evaluation

13. Developments More experiential events cause they really work
Centre for Charity Effectiveness
Developments
More experiential events cause they really work
360 coaching and follow-up as the foundation stone - to keep up momentum and encourage greater self directed learning
Build and extend peer learning and make more of visits
Time away from operations
Structured action research and feedback loops to fill gaps and connect across individuals, groups, tiers and system
Growing the pool of alumni to transform the movement
Operational context sometimes risks stifling development of strong leadership:
Breadth vs depth, and activist culture
Overwhelming operational commitments
Not always a culture of follow-through
Many campaigns and messages competing for attention
Still need to establish a culture for self-directed learning, strategic personal development, and budgeting for SPD

14. Power & Experience: Focus Your Leadership Development
Centre for Charity Effectiveness
Empower
Influence
Low Experience
High Experience
Be curious, learn from others' experience. Build relations to test your ideas, engage others and build consensus for your plans.
Seek stretching leadership opportunities to build your portfolio of skills and expertise. Establish connections with those in positions of power.
Empower as much as possible, share knowledge and experience, and enable others to shine.
Use your knowledge and experience to engage stakeholders and build dynamic alliances, and leverage maximum influence.
Power & Experience: Focus Your Leadership Development
High Positional Power
Barrett, Copeman, MacWilliam 2014
(A Cass CCE collaboration developed at the March 2014 NUS SU LMDP Residential)
Engage
Stretch
Low Positional Power

15. SCARF –Threat & Reward Factors
Centre for Charity Effectiveness
SCARF –Threat & Reward Factors
Status
Certainty
Autonomy and choice
Relatedness and connection
Fairness
Infinite ways of feeling better than other people
Positive feedback, reducing your status over others
Improving our status relative to ourselves
Unfairness can feel like betrayal – a primary threat
Even worse if it goes unpunished
Rock D (2009) Your Brain at Work

16. A Powerful Development Opportunity
Centre for Charity Effectiveness
A Powerful Development Opportunity
You have a great deal in common and can learn so much from each other
Join a stimulating group of learners across the movement who are flourishing as they learn together
Take responsibility for your own L&D within a flexible and democratic framework
Most powerful with other colleagues from your union
The diversity that is the SU Movement gives a real impetus to leadership development
Thought leadership is a key element of the programme - shape new thinking for the Movement.

17. Join Us!
James Barrett Principal Consultant Centre for Charity Effectiveness Cass Business School 106 Bunhill Row London EC1Y 8TZ T: +44 (0) M: +44 (0) E: W: