Leadership Conversations

Society of Leadership Fellows

Participants in future Conversations

Here is an up-to-date list of participants in Leadership Conversations from January to April 2019.

Our two Conversations in November and December are now fully booked and you can see the details of Fellows joining us on the Agenda page for each Conversation.

 

Themes for Conversations through to January 2020

Below we set out the dates and themes of our Leadership Conversations through to January 2020.

As you will see, Background Papers and Agendas are available for Conversations through to June 2019.

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.

 

Leadership Conversation
24
Managing conflict to maximise creativity
From 6.00pm on Monday 19th November 2018 until 3.30pm on Tuesday 20th
The list of Fellows joining us is on our Agenda page (link below).
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
25
Achieving your top priorities in 2019
From 10.30am until 4.30pm on Wednesday December 12th 2018
This Conversation is now fully booked, and the list of Fellows joining us is on the Agenda page (link below).

If you would have been interested in booking for this Conversation, please see the details for our February 5 Conversation below that will follow broadly the same agenda as this one.
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
26
Think, Reflect, Act - getting the balance right
From 6.00pm on Thursday 24th January 2019 until 3.30pm on Friday 25th
A follow-up to our 2018 Conversation on "Think Today, Reflect Tonight, Act Tomorrow". The core group of Fellows who joined us then will be returning - and they are looking for some fresh blood to help move out thinking on to the next stage. In February we confronted the hard truth that many leaders are “speed junkies”. Rather than creating space for ourselves to think and reflect before and after we act, we tend to act today/ tonight and tomorrow and fit in our thinking and reflection in spare moments! In this session we will ask what needs to change to convert the “stop/ start" leadership habit of many organisations into one that is about ongoing movement forward, reflecting and learning as we go? Limited places available. Fellows Only

The list of participants joining us for this Conversation can be found on the Agenda page (link below).
One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £745
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
27
Achieving your priorities in 2019 - 5 weeks in
From 10.30am until 4.30pm on Tuesday February 5th 2019
This will build on the outcomes of December's Conversation on the same theme. It is designed to support you in taking stock of your priorities as a leader in 2019, asking what personal strategies you need to ensure that you don't get in your own way this year and really nail your priorities for 2019 sooner rather than later. Fellows +
One-day Leadership Conversation fee: £400
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
28
Embracing the challenge of disruptive leadership
From 6.00pm on Monday 25th February 2019 until 3.30pm on Tuesday 26th
We talk a lot about the importance of the disruptive leader, and how disruptive leadership needs to be positive and creative. At this Conversation we will ask how much we want to develop our roles as disruptive leaders, to help kickstart changes in behaviour and culture. How can we best leverage the opportunities that disruptive leadership can create to ask challenging questions about the future of our organisation? How ambitious are we really to follow the lead set by Airbnb, Netflix and other sector-leading disruptors? Fellows +
One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £745
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
29
Becoming more effective as a thought leader
From 10.30am until 4.30pm on Thursday March 14th 2019
We are delighted to be offering this one day Conversation on a theme that has been suggested by a range of Leadership Fellows in recent months. Through the process described in the Background Paper and Agenda, we will support every Fellow joining us in developing your personal strategy for increasing your influence as a thought leader across 2019 and 2020. We hope that this will enable a good number of you to achieve significant breakthroughs in your thinking about how you position yourself as a thought leader. Fellows only
One-day Leadership Conversation fee: £400
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
30
Outstanding leadership: five key elements
From 6.00pm on Sunday 24th March 2019 until 11.15am on Wednesday 27th
The first time we will be offering an intensive three-night residential exploring the core elements of five different themes that have each been the subject of separate Leadership Conversations, and together sit at the core of outstanding leadership. These are trust, courage, integrity, championing others and striving for exceptionalness. For each theme, the Leadership Insights from a previous Conversation provide our starting point. This Conversation will support you in re-evaluating how you define yourself as a leader and empower others, truly modelling the behaviours of outstanding leadership that you seek from those around you. It will be pacy, challenging and stretching, with some innovations in our process to enable breakthroughs in our thinking about how best to become outstanding leaders. Fellows +
Three-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1475
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
31
Stepping forward as leaders of culture change
From 6.00pm on Thursday 25th April 2019 until 3.30pm on Friday 26th
At a previous Conversation we agreed that leading culture change is in many ways personal to us as leaders. Above all else, it requires us to ensure that our immediate and wider staff team can connect better with us. In this Conversation, we pick up this challenge and ask what we each see as the two or three aspects of our leadership style that we need to work on to achieve a stronger connection. Once we have identified them, we will support each other in developing personal strategies for stepping forward more confidently as leaders of culture change. Fellows +
One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £745
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
32
Maintaining the courage to reach for the stars
From 6.00pm on Sunday 12th May 2019 until 11.15am on Tuesday 14th
This Conversation is designed for those Fellows seeking at least one significant breakthrough in your thinking about your own journey from “good to great". We will start by asking you to step into a “spaceship” and take yourself forward in time by three years to a leadership role of your choosing. By some means, you have landed in May 2022! As you bring to life this possible future, we will ask what excites you about it and also whether you feel it might be a step too far. From this standpoint of self-challenge, we will support each other in exploring those greatest strengths of ours that are key to us achieving the future that we want. We will then invite you to step back into your “spaceship” with the option of charting a very different sort of journey, fuelled by your personal courage and sense of higher purpose. Our discussions from then on will depend upon where you choose to land second time round! Fellows +
Two-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1145
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
33
Role-modelling integrity in leadership
From 10.30am until 4.30pm on Tuesday June 4th 2019
Building on the outcomes of last September’s Annual Gathering and follow-up Conversation on Integrity in Leadership. We will ask what steps are proving to be most successful in establishing a workplace culture in which individuals’ integrity is regarded as a value that truly drives behaviours. What are our key challenges in role-modelling high integrity leadership as individuals and also members of our wider top team? What are the key dimensions that we need to foster in our organisational culture if we are to set the "integrity bar" ever higher? Fellows only
One-day Leadership Conversation fee: £400
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
34
Being decisive AND fair: managing the challenge
From 6.00pm on Thursday 20th June 2019 until 3.30pm on Friday 21st
At this Conversation we hope to break new ground in engaging with one of the greatest challenges facing many leaders: managing the tension between our desire to be fair AND decisive. The Background Paper tells the tale of a mythical CEO to bring to life the issues that we will engage with on June 20/21. We will ask how much our desire to be fair to close colleagues mean that we avoid difficult conversations and end up compromising our integrity as a leader, by not always “speaking our truth”. Should we be more decisive in challenging under-performance, even if this results in us being called unfair and ruthless? If the answer is a tentative yes, what is the best way of establishing our case? The Background Paper suggests some key principles. Fellows +
One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £745
See the Agenda
Leadership Conversation
35
Workaholics Anonymous
From 6.00pm on Thursday 11th July 2019 until 3.30pm on Friday 12th
Follows up our 2018 Conversation on Rebalancing our lives as leaders, which was regarded by pretty well all of us involved as a truly life-changing experience (Nurturing Wisdom, Volume 3, Chapter 6). We will ask those Fellows who think you have a grip on your inner “workaholic" how are you managing to maintain the balance that you want between the different strands of your life. For those of us who DON’T think we have a grip on our workaholic tendencies, what might we do differently to achieve a better balance between the work and non-work parts of our lives? We intend to develop practical strategies for supporting the workaholics among us in ensuring that we no longer marginalise our family and other non-work time through over-investing in our leadership roles at work. This will be a lively Conversation in which we ask for full authenticity on the part of everyone joining us! In-between sessions we also intend to create SOME time for enjoying ourselves. Fellows only
One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £745
Leadership Conversation
36
Disruptive leadership - YOUR way
From 6.00pm on Thursday 12th September 2019 until 3.30pm on Friday 13th
This Conversation will build on the insights arising from our 28th Conversation on February 25/26 on “Embracing the challenge of disruptive leadership”. We will start by challenging ourselves as to how we each see disruptive leadership. Is it a short-term tactic to achieve some specific goals or a chosen leadership style that we wish to adopt over the long-term to help keep our organisation on its toes? We each then think of one moment over the next few months when we would wish to see ourselves acting as a “disruptive leader”, and ask what we would want the outcome to be. Would we see this as a solo activity or a team effort that we take on with senior colleagues? If we favour senior leaders more widely having licence to be disruptive, should we set some boundaries to define what is acceptable disruptive leadership and what is a step too far? Or would that be seen as an attempt to “tame” disruptive leaders in a way that makes disruption too safe - and not disruptive enough? Fellows +
One-day Leadership Conversation fee: £745
Leadership Conversation
37
Leading an all-star top team
From 6.00pm on Monday 23rd September 2019 until 3.30pm on Tuesday 24th
Building on the outcomes of a previous Conversation on Leading a Winning Team (Nurturing Wisdom, Volume 1, Chapter 9). This time we ask each Fellow joining us to identify the two or three aspects of your top team - at corporate or divisional level - that hold you back from being able to see yourselves as truly top performers. We compare notes and then support each other in tackling those key behaviours that hold our teams back from becoming exceptional. In the second part of the Conversation we focus on our own roles as team leaders, since the primary responsibility for poor performance on the part of any team rests with the team leader. What is the most effective thing we could each do to kickstart rapid and significant development among our team to help transform them into an all-star top team? Fellows +
One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £745
Leadership Conversation
38
Outstanding leaders: five keys to driving change
From 6.00pm on Sunday 13th October 2019 until 11.15am on Wednesday 16th
This is our second three-night residential exploring five different elements of outstanding leadership. At our 30th Conversation in March 2019 we explored trust, courage, integrity, championing others and striving for exceptionalness. This time we will explore five keys that outstanding leaders use to drive change: ambition, authenticity, culture, challenge and courage. As we consider each of the five keys and how we might use them to maximum effect, we will draw directly on the insights gained through five previous Leadership Conversations. Our process will be designed to enable breakthroughs in thinking among ourselves as a group in a way that we hope will be truly inspiring. Our aim is that by 11.15am on 16th October everyone joining this Conversation will be more confident and determined in the ways in which we step forward as drivers of change, inspiring others around us to step forward in their own way too as outstanding leaders. Fellows +
Three-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1475
Leadership Conversation
39
As a leader, do I "tone myself down" too much?
From 10.30am until 4.30pm on Tuesday October 29th 2019
At a previous Conversation (Nurturing Wisdom, Volume 3, Chapter 3) we agreed that we should challenge ourselves more often about whether we are “toning ourselves down” too much and in the process limiting our offer as leaders. Hence this one-day Conversation to support you in thinking through what you might do differently in those situations where you tone yourself down too much - as well as those situations where you might be toning yourself UP too much! How should we aim to become more consistent across our lives as leaders, and what do our answers tell us about our personal brands as leaders? We will challenge ourselves as to how much we would still feel a need to tone ourselves down occasionally if we were completely happy with our personal brands as leaders. What do our answers tell us about how much we need to “re-engineer” our personal brands? Fellows +
One-day Leadership Conversation fee: £400
Leadership Conversation
40
Authenticity and trust: which one comes first?
From 6.00pm on Sunday 10th November 2019 until 11.15am on Tuesday 12th
This Conversation will cover two nights, so that every Fellow joining us can be confident of ending up with a considered strategy for becoming a more authentic and higher trust leader. It builds on the outcomes of our 2018 Conversation on Being more authentic as leaders (Nurturing Wisdom, Volume 3, Chapter 2). One of our ideas then was that as leaders we need to offer higher levels of authenticity and trust especially for our “inner circle”. Thinking of work colleagues outside our inner circle, would it be possible to trust some of them more without being fully authentic - on the basis that full authenticity might make us more vulnerable than we would want? Or should we try to be more authentic more generally still, as a means of building greater trust? Authenticity and trust: which one comes first for you? At every stage, we will support each other in answering this challenge by pressing for us to be as clear as possible in our thinking - and perhaps a little riskier in the propositions that we test out on each other. Fellows +
Two-night Leadership Conversation fee: £1145
Leadership Conversation
41
From good to great: creating your own fast track
From 6.00pm on Monday 25th November 2019 until 3.30pm on Tuesday 26th
Draws on previous Conversations supporting Fellows in developing your personal strategy for moving from good/ v good to great as a leader. We assess ourselves against the 11 key qualities of exceptional leaders identified in Chapter 3 of Volume 3 of Nurturing Wisdom. Give that moving from good to exceptional is “a constant state of movement rather than a state of being”, how can we each best move forward more quickly? We support each other in identifying three key aspects of our leadership styles that could enable us to move forward with pace and “maintain our courage to reach for the stars” (building on our May 2019 Conversation). We hope that every Fellow joining us will end up with your own personalised strategy for fast-tracking your leadership from good/ very good to great. Fellows only
One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £745
Leadership Conversation
42
Achieving your top priorities in 2020
From 10.30am until 4.30pm on Tuesday December 10th 2019
Summary details to follow
One-day Leadership Conversation fee: £400
Leadership Conversation
43
Leading with humility
From 6.00pm on Thursday 23rd January 2020 until 3.30pm on Friday 24th
Summary details to follow
One-night Leadership Conversation fee: £745
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