Welcome/Kick-off Event Pre-Program (Dates TBD)
Day 1:
- Motivation: Aligning personal and organizational goals
- Behaviour: Preventing burnout and facilitating agency
Day 2:
- Emotions: Developing personal and organizational resilience
- Mind/Body: Cultivating focus and adapting to change
Ongoing:
- Self-development project
Participants will be asked to self-identify an underdeveloped skill they believe is hindering their leadership success, and work on it throughout the program. At the end of each day of the program, participants will be given techniques and exercises to practice and work on their self-development.
TBD:
- Individualized feedback session
In the individualized feedback session, the instructor and each participant will spend 30 min. in which they will
- discuss progress,
- identify obstacles, and
- propose alternate techniques, as necessary, for a successful completion of the self-development project.
Schedule subject to change.
Motivation: Aligning personal and organizational goals
The motivational system sets the short and long-term goals that govern our lives. Because the wants system can be misguided and wants can be unconsciously internalized from our environment, we often find ourselves pursuing conflicting and contradicting goals. How are we to assess, evaluate and prioritize them? How do we evaluate alignment of our goals with organizational goals? And how do we deal with areas of conflicting wants?
In this part of the program, participants will learn how wants are generated and misguided, and practice techniques that allow for a more rapid and clear assessment of one’s own motivational direction. They will learn how to guide their teams toward clarity regarding personal and organizational goal alignment.
Behaviour: Preventing burnout and facilitating agency
Behaviour is the most visible part of the self and the part on which most attempts at change have been focused. Whether we are attempting to change our own behaviour or encouraging change in someone else, we are likely to meet significant obstacles to change.
In this session, participants will learn the dynamics of will (or self-regulation), what makes it dissipate or build, and what are the best uses of will in the process of self-change. The scarce economy of self-regulation often results in a physiological state in which the restoration of self-regulatory energy becomes increasingly diminished (known as ‘burnout’). We will discuss the most effective tools to distribute self-regulatory energy, prevent burn-out, and facilitate agency.
Emotions: Developing personal resilience and healthy organizational culture
Emotion is central in understanding our thoughts and behaviours. In this part of the program, participants will learn about emotions’ signaling function and primate modes of expression. They will develop skills to mindfully interrupt the part of our evolutionary emotion-expression system that leads to ineffective choices and poor long-term outcomes.
Participants will also learn how emotions of managers and employees build organizational culture. Finally, they will be given strategies for emotion-heavy interpersonal interactions and review best emotion practices at work that cultivate healthy organizational culture.
Mind/Body: Cultivating focus and adapting to change
The human mind has evolved to solve complex problems and simulate intricate inter-personal interactions. When we find ourselves amid competing pressures and distractions, our ability to fully focus and solve complex problems diminishes. Thoughts are generated by the body, which carries old learnings through active neural pathways.
Participants will be introduced to techniques that utilize the plastic nature of the nervous system to build alternatives to ineffective and impermeable learnings which prevent sustainable self-development. They will also ask to reflect on organizational past, which like personal past, can have long-ranging impact on our motivation, mind, emotions, and behaviour.