Bring out your best as a leader in five days

How  might you need to develop yourself as a leader to create a high-performance environment? The Creating, Leading and Growing High Performance Environments course by AIM WA-UWA Business School Executive Education sees participants learn to deepen their creative, analytical, practical and emotional abilities to build leadership talents and develop their organisation into a high-performance environment.

Award winning speaker and author, course facilitator Glenn Capelli, said a key aspect of the course was the ability for nuance.

“One of the things I teach is to be aware of the binary brain – good or bad, right or wrong,” he said.

“It’s the ability to nuance, tweak and to do a little bit of ‘how else, how different and how better’, that creates a synthesising mind.

“Leaders with a synthesising mind can pull different things together and create teams of ‘ideas people’. 

“If we leave it all up to the CEO, it’s a very limited model.”

With a new theme each day, the five-day course goes through the different aspects of being a leader in the workplace and elsewhere.

Day one - you the leader

Mr Capelli said the first day looked at you as the leader, with the keyword being the philosophy term ‘quiddity’ – the inherent nature or essence of someone or something.

“The first layer of quiddity is your essential essence – what is the essential essence of your place and what are you about as an organisation or a team?,” he said.

“The second layer is that in your quiddity, you’ll have some quirkiness – what is the uniqueness of your place that makes it attractive and interesting?

“You, as the leader, are really able to find, unearth and grow that quiddity.”

Day two - you the motivator

Day two’s theme is motivator, focusing on research from Psychologist and Author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studied flow theory and created the eight characteristics of flow concept.

“When we’re in flow, we’re at our very best and our team is at their very best, whether it’s a sporting team, a business team or a family,” Mr Capelli said.

“It’s not that there aren’t challenges, but we’re constantly getting better and feeling that what we’re doing is making a positive contribution.

“It can be simple little things like recognising somebody has done a good job and saying ‘well done’ and ‘thank you’.”

Day three - you the presenter

Day three looks at a leader as a presenter, whether you are speaking at a conference to 1000 people or just talking one on one.

“How can you present ideas to people so they make sense, how can you articulate things beautifully so they inspire and how can you unearth the stories of your life so communication is captivating?,” Mr Capelli said.

“In a world with Zoom, maintaining captivation becomes a great challenge and presentation skills to get things across are important.”

Day four - you the learner

Mr Capelli said day four focused on you as a learner, highlighting that different people had diverse ways of learning.

“I ran a workshop and the CEO of a legal firm wanted to spread one of the concepts I’d been teaching through his entire organisation nationally to make it the theme of that year,” he said.

“The word was ‘kaizen’, a Japanese process meaning little improvements.

“He said to me, ‘I want you to run a workshop for my people about this, but you won’t have to explain to them what kaizen means because I’ve already done a speech to the whole organisation’. 

“In the first few workshops we did, he was appalled because most of the people didn’t remember that their annual theme was kaizen, let alone remember what it meant.

“Most adult learners are pretty good at pseudo-learning when the CEO has been talking for a while, so to teach that concept you have to apply it in so many different ways, in so many different circumstances.”

Day five - you the example

Mr Capelli said day five was dedicated to synthesising the concepts learnt on the course.

“It’s bringing it all together so you can work out what you need to do to help yourself be a better leader, learner and presenter, and how you are going to apply this in every field of your life,” he said.

Mr Capelli said the concepts on the course resonated because they could be applicable to any kind of ongoing relationship.

“It’s not a program just to pass an exam or get credit points, it’s a program to learn stuff that’s going to assist you in being a better human being for the rest of your life,” he said.

“I’m not saying ‘here’s your answer’, I’m saying ‘here are all the tools and you, as a wise leader, will know when to apply them’.

“It’s up to you to create an environment where people feel that their ideas are listened to and acted upon, whether it’s a netball or football team, a work team or a marriage.”