Leadership Development Programme
- Government sector

A large national client’s decision to raise the level of leadership across their management staff provided an opportunity to design a unique 5-day residential leadership program. Working with the client, we structured the program to ensure people recognised the areas they needed to work on and to gain useful information in both a formal and collaborative way. This was achieved through ‘hands on’ leadership experience supported by ‘brain dumps’ on a variety of leadership issues. These included emotional intelligence, change management, negotiation, personal style, and leadership impact.


A series of scenarios were developed in consultation with the client. Although these mirrored issues within the organisation they were set within a bogus company to avoid compromising participants who may have been personally involved. Individual roles were described for each scenario and each participant took turns to play the role of ‘leader’. These role-plays took ¾ of an hour, during which time the ‘leader’ was placed under pressure by the characters in the scenario and observed by colleagues. On completion the ‘leader’ gave their view on how it had gone, then specific feedback was given by colleagues, and then the facilitator - who picked up on other points not already covered. This was followed by general group discussion which allowed participants to share similar experiences and learnings. Everyone got to participate over a period of three days. While these sessions were initially approached with some trepidation by participants, they were consistently rated highly in evaluations as a very useful learning tool.