Leadership as Mindful Practice

This course maps to capability: 1, 2
COST Prices include GST and are subject to change
Please contact IPAA New South Wales for more information.

Pre-Course Requirements

  • Review the ARIES framework at www.dondunoon.com
  • Come prepared with a current contentious issue - at work or outside - that you would like to explore with colleagues.

Overview

Leadership as Mindful Practice is a highly interactive, practically-oriented workshop program in which participants gain skills in exercising leadership in working through contentious issues productively. These issues, often with strongly-felt emotions involved, can be to do with such things as group or individual performance matters, stuck change efforts and teamwork/partnering difficulties. Participants learn to apply a set of practices and tools, ARIES (Attending, Reflecting, Inquiring, Expressing and Synthesising) for mindfully working through and making headway with virtually any type of leadership-related issue.

Customised Agency Program

Customised agency programs are training programs uniquely designed in content and format to address the particular needs of your organisation. Customised agency programs are delivered at your workplace, thus saving your organisation money and enhancing team building.

All IPAA NSW courses are available as customised agency programs. Case studies and organisational policies and procedures from your organisation can be incorporated into these programs.

IPAA NSW matches the most appropriate consultant to the needs of your organisation, and offers flexibility in content, length and timetable, all at a convenient location. This flexible and cost-effective option benefits all agencies, particularly those with offices in regional NSW.

For further information or to receive a written proposal, contact IPAA NSW:

Tel: 02 9228 5225

Fax: 02 9241 1920

info@nsw.ipaa.org.au

Course Content

The program explores mindful leadership practice in the sense of being actively attentive, open, inquiring and creative in making sense of, and taking action with, contentious issues. After some introduction to the concepts, the program’s focus is practical application of the ARIES tools to aid in-the-moment sense-making and action with issues of current concern to participants. Among the topics explored are: tapping 'hidden' intelligence (what people think and feel but have not stated), containing threat and fostering safety, differentiating observation from inference, making sense of multiple perspectives, asking questions to safely 'get underneath' the issues, finding common ground from diverse perspectives, and assessing the opportunities and challenges for intervention.

Course Outcomes

By the end of this course attendees should be able to:

  • open-up and sustain discussion on issues that might previously have been thought 'too hard'
  • maintain safety while exploring difficult issues with others
  • observe without immediately moving to judgment in specific instances
  • identify stakeholders' possible hidden assumptions, interests, feelings and knowledge, as a basis for testing
  • ask questions in ways that illuminate the hidden side of issues while maintaining safety
  • speak up about issues in ways that are both reflective and influential
  • develop creative syntheses from diverse stakeholder perspectives
  • build shared meaning with stakeholders, and in the process draw forth energy for change.

Benefits to your organisation

  • greater capacity to get to the heart of issues and identify emerging possibilities
  • better use made of the intelligence of stakeholders, including 'hidden' intelligence
  • more substantial progress made on contentious issues

Benefits to you

  • development of skills in mindfully dealing with contentious issues
  • gaining of insights into intervention strategies and choices with issues of particular concern to you
  • framework that you can apply with virtually any contentious issue