Leadership Conversations in 2021
Below we set out the dates and themes for our Conversations through to December 2021. Some Conversations are marked “Fellows only” because attendance is restricted to Leadership Fellows. Others are marked “Fellows+” because we are very happy to welcome Fellows’ nominees, such as a member of their top team or a key business partner.
Special Zoom Programme – Wisdom in duality.
In 2021 we are introducing a new series of zoom programmes, once a quarter, which we hope will become a standard part of our format for the Society going forwards. This builds on the value and insights that have been generated from our shorter ‘leader to leader’ zoom conversations and provides a space for people to connect in more depth around key questions that emerge. The report from the first series can be found here.
The broad theme we will be exploring this year is how we handle some of the dualities we face as leaders which have us pulled in different directions by different pressures, both internal and external. We often construe these as ‘either/or’ choices when the reality is ‘both/and’.
We have found the zoom environment, properly managed, to be just as conducive to in-depth conversations and have also found that the most value is obtained when we clear the space for a day to give it our full focus rather than trying to fit it in between other commitments. That is why we have allocated a day to these – either a single day or an afternoon and a morning of consecutive days.
This programme is provided as an optional addition to the residential programme and Fellows will still be expected to attend at least one face-to-face Conversation a year, as this is central to the ethos of the Society. Rather it is intended for those Fellows who want to sustain a more frequent contact than their annual attendance.
The four programmes on this thread for 2021 are: (please click on the title to see the agenda)
‘Optimist or Realist’ – May 5th
‘Patience or Urgency’ – July 7th
‘Strong back, soft front’ – October 13th/14th
Also because of the continuing disruption of last minute cancellations arising from the lockdown and self-isolation, we have taken the decision to move two of our one day face-to-face programmes into the zoom format:
‘Their Future In Their Hands’ – 4th March
‘Retrench or Reimagine’ – 20th April
Further details about all of these themes can be found below.
New Leadership Themes from January 2021:
Wisdom in Leadership
Wisdom in leadership is about cultivating our presence and awareness to see more broadly and deeply into what is really happening and access a quality of response that is not available when we are caught up in the immediacy of their concerns.
Leading in these times
This theme will focus on conversations that have a specific relevance to ‘the times we find ourselves in’. They give us a chance as leaders to sense into how the wider forces at work in ‘these times’ are making themselves felt in our own leadership and organisations.
Growth
This will be a more practical theme, looking at how we expand our resourcefulness, competence and confidence by enquiring into core leadership challenges and dilemmas that we all face – learning from our shared experience and best practice as we do so.
To read more about these new themes please click here.