Leadership workshop Manual

Students from Rare Gem Academy at the leadership training conducted by Tanar Educational consultancy

Essential Leadership skills for 21^st century leadership

Workshop Handout

Prepared by

Namse Udosen and Micheal Ideva

For

Tannar Educational consultancy

21^st May 2016

Workshop Objectives

The students of Rare Gem Academy would be able to apply 21^st century leadership skills to their life situations especially when faced with responsibility after taking part in the group discussions and going through the training module. The specific objectives are to:

1.      Promote a better understanding of leadership

2.      Encourage critical thinking

3.      Demonstrate team building skills

4.      Practice how to handle group diversity

Essential Leadership skills for 21^st century leadership

Module 1

Introduction to leadership

 

The word "leadership" can bring to mind a variety of images. For example:

A political leader, pursuing a passionate, personal cause.

An explorer, cutting a path through the jungle for the rest of his group to follow.

An executive, developing her company's strategy to beat the competition.

Leaders help themselves and others to do the right things. They set direction, build an inspiring vision, and create something new. Leadership is about mapping out where you need to go to "win" as a team or an organization; and it is dynamic, exciting, and inspiring. Yet, while leaders set the direction, they must also use management skills to guide their people to the right destination, in a smooth and efficient way.

What is leadership?

Leadership is the ability to inspire or influence others towards the leader's goal. If someone has followers, he or she is a leader. Management literature mostly focuses on the characteristics of the leader - it asks "what make this person a leader", rather than "why do these people choose to follow". Social scientists have over the years come up with four types of leaders:

·         Authoritarian

When a leader dictates policies and procedures, decides what goals are to be achieved and directs and control activities without any meaningful participation by the subordinates.

E.g Military

·         Inspirational

Inspirational leaders promote change by the power of their passionate commitment to ideas and ideals. They lift our eyes from present practicalities to future possibilities. Their words stir up our spirits, strengthen our convictions, and move us to action. We are eager to follow them because they call forth the best that is in us.

Inspirational leaders have positive attitudes that create strong emotional connections with people. Their speech is enlivened with words such as justice, freedom, honor, respect, pride, and love. Their affirming and encouraging demeanor builds the confidence of their followers and elicits their wholehearted devotion.

E,g marthin luther King Jr.

·         Servant leaders

Servant leaders care deeply about people. They seek to remove the barriers and obstacles that hold others back from achieving their full potential. They strive to create an environment where their followers can do their best work. Servant leaders frequently ask, “How can I help?

E,g Mother Teresa

·         Laissez-faire leaders

This kind of leaders hands off and allows followers to take decisions by themselves.

Role play

Display Thinking

  Using a marker, write on two separate pieces of flip chart paper the following words:

Flip Chart Paper #1: What I Know;

Flip Chart Paper #2: What I Want to Know;

Flip Chart Paper #3: What You Need to Know

• Tape these sheets up in the room where they can be seen and easily accessed.

• Have each person take two sticky notes. Instruct each person to write down on one Post-It three things they already know. These can be skills, knowledge, or understanding they already possess. (E.g. speaking, writing,)

• Next, they need to write on the other sticky note, three things they want to learn, experience, or better understand during the course of the session(s).

(E.g. teamwork, gettng along with people, improving communication).

• After they have written these things down, have the participants share at least one item from each list with their group. As they share they should use the words: “I know ____________. What I want to know is__________.”

• The third flip chart “What You Need to know” is for the facilitator to express what they want each participant to absolutely know. It’s safe to say that participants in the beginning “don’t know what they don’t know.” So, while Participants may know how to set a goal and may want to learn how to

Communicate better, the facilitator may also want them to know how to complete a program of work or learn better time management skills.

• Once everyone in the team is done sharing, have them take their Post-It notes up to the flip chart paper and place it on the respective sheet.

Discussion

1.      Can each person identify 2 leaders in your community?

2.      What type of leaders do you think they are?

3.      What would suggest is the best type of leadership?

Leadership: A Definition

The modern concept or 21st century concept of leadership describes an effective leader as a person who does the following:

·         Creates an inspiring vision of the future.

·         Motivates and inspires people to engage with that vision.

·         Manages delivery of the vision.

·         Coaches and builds a team, so that it is more effective at achieving the vision.

·         To be able to carry out these activities a leaders needs a new set of skills set. They include:

-Planning and team building

-Building trust

-Creative and critical thinking

-Dealing with diversity

-Effective communication

The next session would examine these skills.

.

Module 2

Essential leadership skills

Planning and team building

Planning means creating a roadmap for your vision. It involves setting goals and mobilizing human and material resources to meet them. Developing sound personal and organizational goals is critical to managing your performances in every sphere of your life and is a hallmark of modern leadership. It focuses your acquisition of knowledge and helps you organize time and resources.

The best goals are the ones that are SMART! That is they are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound.

Activity

Think of something great you want to achieve in the next one year and draw up a smart goal using the template.

Building Trust

In the knowledge driven world that we live in trust is an essential characteristic for a leader. “Without trust, a leader won’t have any followers”- Amy Harris. Trust building goes beyond telling the truth or keeping, it means having the capacity to consistently solve the problems for those around you. To build trust a leader must constantly expand his/her skills set.

Activity

·         Each person thinks of someone in your class, school, family or community who you would go to if you had an academic, social or spiritual problem.

·         Pair up and discuss reasons why you would go to that person.

Critical and Creative thinking

Critical thinking involves suspending your beliefs to explore and question issues from a blank point of view. It also involves the ability to separate fact from opinion. Cultural prejudices often cloud our ability to think critically and be innovative. Fear and prejudice makes it difficult for us to make critical judgements, but a leader must rise above sentiments and separate fact from fiction. If you don’t learn the difference between fact and opinion, you will get stuck reading and watching thinks that only reinforce beliefs and assumptions you already own. And that is the opposite of learning.

Activity

Pair up and try to determine whether each statement is fact or opinion:

1.      My mom is the best cook in the world.

2.      Rain contains water

3.      All men drink beer.

4.      Traders always cheat.

5.      Dogs are better pets than cats.

6.      Nigeria is in west Africa

If you can debate the truthfulness of a statement with your partner then is probably an opinion!

Group Discussion

• Choose a problem in your family or school that you have thought about before, but have not been able to solve.

 Think about that situation creatively in ways that you never thought might be possible.

• Evaluate the solutions to see whether you can improve this situation a little.

Each group makes their presentation.

Dealing with diversity

The world has become a global community. Leaders of the past did not always have the problem of dealing with diverse groups, as most communities were homogenous. 21 first century leadership development includes learning how to relate to all types of people. We must learn how to build alliances across borders within our group and without. Diversity could be in form of gender, religion, social status, education. Our country needs strong and courageous men and women who can lead with integrity.

Group Discussion

Each group should come up with how they would deal with a group of 5 workers, each from a different ethnic or religious background.

Communication

Communication is at the heart of leadership. A leader must be able to communicate values, messages, directions and desires to his followers.

Activity

• Participants stand in a circle.

•  The facilitator asks a volunteer to begin the exercise by thinking of a sentence that describes something she about herself.

•  The game begins with the volunteer whispering the sentence to the girl on her left.

•  Each participant continues passing the sentence around the circle, whispering in the ear of the girl on her left, until the final participant hears the sentence.

•  Once the circle has been completed, the final participant says the sentence out loud.

•  The game finishes with the volunteer speaking the original sentence out loud, comparing it to the version

The facilitator then highlights the importance of communication.

Conclusion

Each participant speaks for 5 minutes on what she has learnt from the workshop.