Leadership Essentials at XLRI, Jamshedpur, India

By Meena S. Wilson

Orientation week at Xavier Labour Relations Institute, a premiere provider of post-graduate business management (BM) and personnel management and industrial relations (PMIR) programs in India. CCL is tasked with introducing 240 incoming students to the essentials of leadership. The four CCL faculty and adjuncts – Anupam, Meena, Sudha and Kaushik, are confident and edgy about taking on four cohorts of 60 young adults in their early to mid-20s over 2 days. We need not have been.

They had come from every corner of India. Aiming for C-level jobs eventually, the students were keen to know more about leadership and how to develop themselves. They were pleased with their dip into social identity, mental models, EQ, ACS, learning curves, SBI and learning from experience – all the more so since their program was designed to be highly interactive, experiential and oriented toward peer learning. As could be expected, each day ended on a high with visual exploration of their personal image of leadership and circling up to share what they would carry back into their world from the Leadership Essentials experience.

Leadership Beyond Boundaries -- Looking Back

We recently looked back at the road we have travelled with the Leadership Beyond Boundaries effort. In the two years since we launched this effort, CCL has reached some 2,000 people in Asia, Africa, and North America through our training. An additional three- to four-thousand more people have been reached via trainers who we've trained. This includes populations such as: women's self-help groups, orphans, police and prison officers, principals and teachers, college students, village communities, among others.



We're now working to scale a number of models that we hope will take leadership development to millions more to build self-esteem, empowement, and leadership skills. Join the movement via our group site on Facebook.

Leadership Essentials for Kate B. Reynolds Grantees

by Judson Bobo

Health care professionals from NGOs across North Carolina recently gathered for a weekend of leadership training in Fayetteville, NC. This meeting comprised the second of a series of leadership development sessions resulting from the collaboration of the Center for Creative Leadership’s (CCL) Leadership Beyond Boundaries initiative and the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust (KBR). The aim of this training is to give public health care officials across the state the skills they need to become better leaders in their respective work places, and to enhance cooperation and teamwork among this group as a whole. The more effective these professionals become at leading their individual organizations, the more effective they are at maximizing the effectiveness and impact of limited resources. The better they learn to communicate and work together, the better able they are to guide North Carolina toward a brighter future for those who need, but cannot afford, health care.

Joel Wright and Lynn Fick-Cooper acted as facilitators during the weekend and presented the Leadership Essentials® workbook to the 24 participants, who were selected by KBR. According to the participant feedback gathered at the end of the weekend, the material introduced new skills that were highly applicable to North Carolina’s health care industry. The participants appreciated the simplicity of the presentation while commenting on the depth of awareness it facilitated and the utility of the leadership tools. One participant’s comment describes the breadth of learning he received:

“We [learned] a lot of basic information on leading: how to go about leading, how to engage people, how to work collaboratively to pool our resources instead of fighting over a smaller pot of resources, how to expand our whole notion, our mental model, [concerning maximization of] resources. How to get people to tap into their passion, how to [motivate] people to follow a vision that is bigger than just the bottom line.”
- LE participant

Another participant reflects on the big picture, on the long-term effects of the collaboration between CCL and KBR – how it affects North Carolina’s financially needy on a large scale:

“While it is an indirect investment, it is a very significant one, a very critical one that ultimately serves the clients that we serve. I want to thank the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust for the opportunity to attend this training.”
- LE participant

The basic leadership skills that KBR is helping spread among regional health care NGOs is having a positive impact on this industry. By making leadership development widespread and affordable, society, as a whole, benefits. With success stories in Africa, India, and most recently the United States, Leadership Essentials® really is changing the world, one leader at a time.

CCL Seeks Affordable, Accessible Publication Offerings in East Africa

See the full article by Jesse James Deconto in the News & Observer:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1558820.html

Excerpt -

So, for example, Africa Rising helped to connect Greensboro's Center for Creative Leadership with Kwani, an organization that aims to nurture African writers who can portray their continent from an insider's perspective. The center wanted to expand the reach of its leadership training materials into East Africa but needed to cut the consumer price by about 80 percent.

"There's a hunger," said Steadman Harrison, a senior innovation associate with the center. "You have to find a price point that meets their pocketbook."

The center needed publishing partners who could translate their intellectual property into new languages and cultures at a low cost and without abusing the organization's copyrights.

"We don't have people on the ground in places like Nairobi, Kenya," Harrison said. "We have to work with an organization we believe we can trust. ... Africa Rising was a good vetting organization."