Yesterday the University of Canterbury’s Executive Education team hosted a vibrant, engaging and thought-provoking VIP breakfast to kick off 2022, share insights from future-thinking Carl Davidson, and launch their new Professors of Practice. Liz and the team there are well on their way to delivering “the most relevant Executive Education in New Zealand” and I’m really excited that I get a front-row seat as I’m one of these Professors of Practice!
I’ll be delivering two courses this year, the first of which is "'Kill Your Darlings’: Applied Decision Making" and I am really excited about this one.
Here's some context behind it, starting with a quote from a leadership boffin: “It is our decisions, not our conditions that determine our quality of life.”- John C. Maxwell. He has a point, yet where, as leaders, do we learn tools and techniques for making good decisions both individually and collectively? It’s usually through experience, and then outcome bias kicks in (if the outcome is good, we assume the decisions to get there were good, and vice versa, but often we can get a poor outcome, but the decisions made were still good decisions).
The title of the course, talking about killing your darlings, draws from literature where writers are often told to make the hard decisions and “get rid of your most precious and especially self-indulgent passages for the greater good of your literary work”. When it’s our idea or one we love, the decision gets even tougher, so working through this is all part of the process.
The second one is aligned with an area I am very passionate about – high performance, which I truly believe only happens when you harness the power of diversity. There’s a lot of noise about diversity but knowing how to unlock its power of it, is where it’s at!
With five generations in the workforce, a bi-cultural nation with a population represented around six ethnic groups, a global war for talent that is about to heat up as borders open – how do you create and harness the power of a diverse team? How do you innovate and add value to your markets without it?
The course will cover off more than why it matters, we will showcase real examples, how it looks when done well and some challenges, and talk through how and where to start. The focus is on how to be a great leader when creating and harnessing the power of a diverse team.
The world around is rapidly changing and much of what happens is out of our control so I wanted to focus the courses on what we each can do – improve our decisions, shape teams with the right people and achieve great outcomes. Nothing like a grand vision to get the blood pumping right?
There are four Professors of Practise so far and they’re a talented cohort offering a wide range of courses, I’m hoping to head along to theirs as there’s so much depth there. Check them out here.
"The best gift you can give to yourself is to invest in yourself."
― Pooja Agnihotri, 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail: Unscrew Yourself from Business Failure
