Brave Leadership: One Year Leadership Development Programme for Women

A Menu of Key Themes to be Included

This programme is all about maximising your leadership scope of influence and progression. During this programme, you will gain the confidence, knowledge and sustainable skills to make the transition to greater professional impact.

At Happy, we support an inclusive definition of 'women' and this programme is open to anyone who is cis, trans and nonbinary for whom womanhood is part of their gender identity or experience.

Your leadership brand

• Daring to lead, and to do it brilliantly
• Understanding your assertiveness style — combining strength and compassion
• Identifying and understanding your unique combination of strengths
• Your leadership code of ethics, values, and purpose
• Building your personal authentic brand
• Expressing yourself positively, even in difficult situations
• Building trust and credibility
• A user guide for working with you

Personal presence

• Reframing imposter syndrome
• Developing your Emotional Intelligence
• The stories you tell yourself that hold you back
• Managing the likeability expectations of being a woman in business
• Bringing your 'people pleaser' into check
• Enhancing your self-belief — understanding how and where you add value
• Becoming a force for greatness — having and demonstrating courage
• Building the three resilience energies — physical, mental, and emotional to support your wellbeing
• Understanding the process of building sustainable habits and changing behaviours long term, to embed the learning and create real action

Powerful communication

• Discovering your own communication style and understanding others', to maximise your influence
• Identifying your default way of communicating, Cat or Dog, and how to adapt to maximise impact
• Developing your presentation skills through practical experience

Empowering others

• Raising awareness of how our own behaviour can impact the female leaders around us
• Advocating for each other — becoming a mentor of others
• Creating a culture of high performance
• Leadership focused on people
• Creating psychological safety at work
• Working adult to adult — understanding transactional analysis
• Becoming a Multiplier of your people's talents (Liz Wiseman)
• Enabling trust and autonomy, successfully delegating and holding people to account
• Understanding Unconscious Bias

Effectiveness

• Being productive, not just busy
• Leading in a crisis — understanding the tendency to take a narrow view and using techniques to think strategically
• Facilitating principle-led decision making

As a woman

• Identify the challenges and opportunities of working and leading in a predominantly man's world
• Making the right choices for yourself
• Identifying your personal career aspirations and what you need to achieve them
• Taking control of your career progression beyond the linear
• Addressing the challenges in the career cycle of a woman, e.g. returning from childcare leave, menopause, taking carers leave
• Sharing your experience, supporting one another generally, and finding unique perspectives on your challenges through this leadership network
• Partner with an accountability and support buddy

Leading the team

• Leading remote teams and facilitating great remote meetings
• Using Liberating Structures to enhance the involvement, collaboration and output of your teams
• Creating Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind (Nancy Klein)
• The 5 dysfunctions of a team and what to do about them
• Creating a team that works to its strengths
• Building and nurturing the resilience of your team
• Recruiting the right team members and ensuring their induction is a motivating experience
• Enabling your team to innovate and generate creative ways to tackle problems
• Guiding your team through complex change
• Creating high-performing teams that everyone wants to be a part of

Building relationships

• Having great 1 to 1's with your people
• Coaching your team to success by empowering them to discover their own solutions
• Providing positive and constructive feedback that leads to action and solutions
• How to have those conversations that feel difficult but matter

Self-Reflection and Feedback

Each participant will complete self-reflection surveys at the start of the programme, half-way through and at the end of the programme around your confidence, skills and behaviours. In addition, you will be able to identify a key group of stakeholders who will be asked to provide feedback on their experience of you as a colleague and your leadership style.

Supporting Resources

All resources used in the programme will be available through the sessions and beyond, along with an extensive library of eLearning and other resources to enhance offline and online learning. There will be a variety of ways to connect with each other and your facilitators throughout.

Our Facilitation Style and Ethos

Making it effective — research shows us that the effectiveness of any learning programme can be boosted by what happens before and after each learning session. The facilitated online and in person sessions are only one part of making the learning effective. The development journey starts on joining the programme and the personal network that is created lasts a lifetime.

Everything we facilitate is designed to ensure complete individual involvement and participation. This stimulates thinking and challenges assumptions. Our aim is to create a multi-sensory engaging experience, which will usually include: small and large group discussion, individual and group reflection, case studies and examples, quizzes, questionnaires, videos, practical stories as well as opportunities to real play (rather than role play!) and practice the techniques learnt.