Professional development
Details of workshops, new courses, recommended reading and professional development opportunities
University of Exeter Degree Apprenticeships – applications closing soon!
As you may be aware, the University of Exeter Business School offers a range of outstanding Apprenticeship Programmes. Please help us to promote these programmes by circulating the short paragraph below to your professional networks:
Our Senior Leader Apprenticeship, Senior People Professional Degree Apprenticeship and Chartered Manager Degree Apprenticeship offer fantastic opportunities for your business to address potential skills gaps, create career progression and ensure full use of your apprenticeship levy. The programmes are now being delivered entirely online enabling employees to apply from all over the country with no travel required. For more information, please click here or contact the Business School Degree Apprenticeships Team directly at businessDAs@exeter.ac.uk.
'Starter for 10' zone: Ideas for discussions in the workplace?
You might want to cascade some of the applied learning you have gleaned from the Senior Leader course. Prompting and promoting discussions within your teams, peers and wider organisation is another way to continue your lifelong, and work-based, learning.
Here are some power questions that are currently being discussed by our Senior Leaders:
- Where do our best ideas come from and how can we spawn more creativity?
- What makes our culture uniques and how do we protect and develop it?
'Beside the bed' reading suggestions:
In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John C. Maxwell outlines clear guidelines for leaders to follow to maximize influence and ensure that employees achieve a common vision. The book shares wisdom such as “leadership develops daily, not in a day,” and “leaders understand that activity is not necessarily accomplishment.” The book explains each rule plainly and provides anecdotal examples, covering every aspect of leadership from attracting and forming teams to securing legacy by planning for succession.
Notable Quote: “You can’t move people to action unless you first move them with emotion…. The heart comes before the head.”
Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients – or that two judges in the same court give different sentences to people who have committed matching crimes. Now imagine that the same doctor and the same judge make different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday, or they haven’t yet had lunch. These are examples of noise: variability in judgements that should be identical.
In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein show how noise produces errors in many fields, including in medicine, law, public health, economic forecasting, forensic science, child protection, creative strategy, performance review and hiring. And although noise can be found wherever people are making judgements and decisions, individuals and organizations alike commonly ignore its impact, at great cost.
Kindness in Leadership is one of the first books to explore both the concept and practice of kindness in leadership and consider them in different societal and organisational settings. Its uniqueness lies in combining an innovative mix of personal views from leaders with explorations of organisational philosophies and practices. It opens with a definition of kindness and its contours and underpinnings. It then explores the importance of kindness within different organisations, parts of the world, economic strata, age groups and genders, drawing on research on organisational compassion and neuroscience. In order to support learning, each chapter is supported by a series of questions for consideration and discussion.
Those who work in health and social care give inspiring support for the health, happiness and well-being of all – communities, societies and nations. Yet their workplaces often harm their own health and well-being, affecting care quality, motivation, patient satisfaction and corroding cultures of compassion.
In these pages, an evidence-based approach to transforming the leadership and cultures of health and social care teams and organisations is described. Practical, powerful and compelling, it describes a strategy based on the core human value of compassion, showing that by sustaining that value in health and social care, we can cultivate wisdom, humanity, presence and high-quality in health and care services. Supplemented with practical resources, case examples and searching questions for discussion, it offers a simple, radical and powerfully effective strategy for change.
