What it was:

Some reflections on my overall learning, plus some miscellaneous learning from my notes, derived from the two days of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 16 and 17 September 2019.

What I learned:

Focus on personal impact:

• Focus on the key six or so relationships (boss, close peers, direct reports) where you can make a difference.
• Where can I take a leadership position? How can I be useful to the wider programme?

Find the bandwidth to be a leader:

• Carve out time in the diary!
• Carve out time within the framework you are already operating in… so for example, Use 5 or 10 mins within existing meetings – do some reflection, ask how we are doing, how are people feeling, do we understand what we are doing and why?
• Just do it!  Stop operating and start leading. Just stop doing the operator or manager work – give it to someone else. You are making the conscious choice to be in a different mode.

Miscellaneous points

• People watch what you do and how you act, be aware of the shadow you cast.
• Be a lateral thinker – think of it like a dating agency – how can you join together different unconnected parties to the common good?
• Like a lobster, it’s good to feel uncomfortable as you grow
• The importance of being able to manage between ambiguity and clarity

What I will aim to do differently as a result:

• Re-engage on leadership and learning
• Get back into coaching and mentoring (myself and others)
• Carve out leadership time
• Make the conscious decision to lead not just do work

Some specific actions:

• Adapt and update my leadership statement
• Update my learning and development plan
• Make time for leadership thinking and review
• Re-engage on networking and stakeholder engagement
• Put in new learning time (Thursday and Tuesday nights)
• Get this blog into better shape and be more disciplined in publishing my learning
• Start gathering shareable data about my work and consider how to publish it
• Set up some self-coaching – e.g. some automated tweets or a similar tool
• Complete an exercise to capture my reflections from my time as Hd C&MI
• Write up the EOY feedback and make this the basis of the next phase of learning