Collaborative Leadership: Lessons from the 2022 Games and Beyond
Summary
One of the three landmark objects the Association set in our 2025 strategy is to move the dial on leadership capability. In 2022, we looked at leadership from a systems perspective in the 'Systems Thinking, Systems Leading' seminar. This seminar looks at leadership from the perspective of collaboration. We will explore what good collaborative leadership looks like, when it is needed, and what the challenges and opportunities are for collaborative leadership in major projects.
We will explore collaborative leadership drawing on lessons from the success of the 2022 Commonwealth Games (CWG) based in Birmingham. The success of the games was due, in no small part to the collaboration between the funders, the clients, the deliverers and those on the ground, the volunteers. We will hear from all of those voices to help us understand how such collaboration was established, managed and maintained. We will also hear how "leading collaboratively" can mean different things in different settings.
In addition to hearing the "warts and all" experience from global leaders across our core sectors, we will also look to experience from outside the major projects community to engage, provoke and challenge attendees to evaluate "what good looks like" for modern leadership in our increasingly complex and ambiguous world.
To further provoke, we will include perspectives and inevitable contrasting challenges from two highly regarded practitioners-turned-academics before having the opportunity to discuss whether there is a standard model for modern leadership and what that might look like.
We're delighted to confirm that the seminar will be chaired by Deirdre Fox (herself a CWG 2022 Volunteer. Deirdre comes from a career in the steel industry where collaboration through the supply chain is critical. She is non Non-Executive Director for The Advance Consultancy Ltd who focus on helping individuals, teams and organisations evolve collaboratively through challenge and support. Deirdre brings her own experience and laser-focused ruthless compassion to this topic.