Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
— John F. Kennedy
This is the first installment in the Adaptive Capacity series, designed to be taken before the Adaptive Learning Workshop.
Focus, Alignment, Discipline, and Agility
The path to progress is never easy. Whenever you’re orchestrating change, implementing a new strategy, responding to a disruptive event, or improving a process, you’ll inevitably run into challenges along the way.
That’s where this workshop comes in. You and your team will learn to generate the necessary teamwork – both within teams and between them – for effectively engaging your biggest challenges with greater focus, alignment, discipline, and agility.
What Kind of Leadership does Your District Need?
To provide leadership for a fractured world, we need a different way to think about leadership.
— Dean Williams
What kind of leadership does your school or district need right now? There is no way to answer that question unless you’re clear on what you’re up to – your district’s purpose, goals, and strategy – and what you’re up against – the problems, obstacles, and challenges you’ll face in the process. The kind of leadership your organization needs depends on the nature of the work you need it to do.
Adaptive Challenges
All our difficulties fall somewhere on a spectrum; at one end of this spectrum we find familiar, routine problems, and, at the other end, unfamiliar, adaptive challenges. In a routine situation, skilled action is the path to success. When facing an adaptive challenge, however, learning is the key to progress.
Effective leadership focuses the team on the right challenge, and then mobilizes the team to engage it in the most effective way. A core task of leadership, therefore, is capacity building – both the conversational and the adaptive capacity of your organization.
This workshop will help you strengthen both.
Learning Outcomes:
In this workshop participants will learn to
- Clarify strategic objectives and identify the challenges you’ll face in making it happen.
- Properly diagnose the nature of those challenges and the work required to address them.
- Create greater strategic alignment by orchestrating more collaborative and purposeful action across the district.
- Create a disciplined culture in which people balance candor and courage with curiosity and humility as they pursue team and organizational goals.
- Reinforce core district values – and the behaviors that make them active.
- Promote teamwork characterized by more focus and discipline and less friction and dysfunction.
- Identify the leadership behaviors that encourage everyone – no matter their station or status – to constructively engage the major challenges facing the district.
- Build your personal and collective conversational capacity in the process.
At the end of the session you’ll identify key places to work and practice, update your Personal Plans and Application Plans.
Patterns and Purpose
The framework this workshop provides will change how you lead forever. I will never look at my organization, my strategy, my team, or my own behavior the same way again.
— CEO
The concepts and skills in this interactive workshop are rigorous, research-based, and highly actionable. They’ll help you connect patterns of conversational behavior with the district’s purpose and strategy, and adopt practices that elevate the leadership acumen of your team in an ongoing way.
Prerequisite: Conversational Capacity for Educational Professionals.
Length: Customized to fit your training schedule.
