Leadership Development

At the Centre for Issue and Crisis Management (CICM) leadership is at the core of everything we do. Our mission is to develop leaders fit for the challenges of the future. We wish to break free from "old world" thinking and the constraints of much traditional leadership teaching, which is becoming progressively ineffective in a highly networked, knowledge-based economy.

We focus on the skills and capabilities that leaders need to gain in order to navigate environments replete with hyper global competition, ambiguity, complexity and technological disruption. Future organisational leaders are very likely to witness a diffusion of power and influence towards individual consumers and away from organisations.

The "crisis of leadership" that is often cited within business and academia has arisen largely because the world is evolving at speeds that traditional models of leadership and practices are increasingly maladapted to. Leadership used to be about securing some degree of certainty, now it is about leading organisations through uncertainty and ambiguity. Our approach to leadership is not radical, but it is clear and unashamedly future-orientated, anchored in the skills of strategic issue management and problem finding.

For us at CICM, leadership development is based more on strategic anticipation and predictive problem solving, with leaders taking advantage of emergent properties and being comfortable with risk and ambiguity. Leadership has to adapt to how things are changing – indeed change itself is now generally discontinuous and the idea that the past will inform the present can be counterproductive as inferences based on past assumptions may no longer be valid.

10 key objectives at the Leadership Development Centre are to:

Leadership as a skill is a synthesis of disciplines. As a result, all of our training and consultancy reinforces the need for those who wish to become leaders or develop existing leadership capabilities, need to be prepared to adopt a pluralistic approach and recognise that there is no "one size fits all". Equally, although individuals can make significant changes, the notion of a "superman" and the transformational leader has been much over-stated; effective leadership requires well led and disciplined teams. Accordingly, we place particular emphasis on team development, collaborative problem identification and resolution.