There is no personality template for leadership, North West NSW landholders will learn over the coming months: it’s a quality that can emerge in the right people in the right circumstances.
How those qualities can be drawn out will be explored over the next 12 weeks in a comprehensive leadership program hosted by Tamworth Regional Landcare Association (TRLA) and facilitated by Dr Simon Burgess, Lecturer in Management at the University of New England (UNE).
The North West Emerging Leaders program was conceived with a broad definition of ‘leadership’ in mind, says North West Regional Landcare Co-ordinator and the program’s instigator, Craig Pullman.
“A lot of people don’t see themselves as leaders, but as soon as you try to make change or get something done that involves more than yourself, leadership is involved.”
“Landcare is all about mobilising the community, so the idea of this program is to give individuals who may not have previously thought about leadership, the tools, and the concepts they need to carry others along with them in their projects.”
With this idea of empowering Landcarers to “take action themselves”, Mr Pullman approached Head of UNE Business School and Professor in Management, Dr Sujana Adapa, with the idea of a course for emerging leaders.
Dr Adapa developed the course content and consulted Dr Burgess, who seized at the opportunity to take his teaching to a wider audience.
A specialist in business and professional ethics and corporate responsibility, Dr Burgess aims to turn participants’ gaze away from external, pre-defined models of leadership to their own latent capability.
“Traditional leadership training has so often suggested what leaders need to be like,” Dr Burgess says.
“What’s often been under-appreciated, however, is the need to recognise the specific strengths that a particular individual already has.”
Certain leadership tendencies may be inherent in a person’s makeup, but others may have to find the qualities in themselves.
“Most of us know that good leadership requires self-awareness. But even for many wonderfully accomplished people, self-awareness often doesn’t come naturally. Something that we emphasise in this course is that leaders need to be comfortable in seeing themselves through the eyes of others.”
“If they can do that, they’ll be so much better at winning the trust and support of those around them.”
The North West Emerging Leaders program will run between 5th August and 4th November 2022, alternating between webinars and in-person sessions.
Dr Burgess will be joined by co-facilitators from local community groups, businesses and government who will share other examples of leadership in action.
Landcare is running the course as a not-for-profit exercise, without a particular focus on the Landcare organisation.
“It’s a purely altruistic exercise,” Mr Pullman said. “The goal is to encourage more community-based action – because that’s where Landcare comes from.”
For UNE, the course represents an opportunity to bring the University’s expertise to bear on community capacity building.
“The University is committed to providing expertise that empowers the communities it sits within,” Dr Adapa says.
“Teaching ready-to-apply leadership skills that can help people lead change within their respective communities aligns with UNE’s strategic priorities.”
LEADERSHIP TODAY
From Dr Simon Burgess, an extended perspective on contemporary understanding of leadership:
Are leaders born or made?
It’s a bit of both. Great leaders don’t conform to a particular personality type. But if you’re a leader it’s vitally important to be very aware of your own strengths and tendencies. It so happens that some of those strengths and tendencies do appear to have their origins in childhood, and to some extent they probably are in a person’s DNA.
Consider the contrast between extraversion and introversion, for example, which concerns a dimension of human personality that pretty clearly has a strong genetic component to it. If you’re wishing to secure a leadership role, it’s typically an advantage to have been born with a relatively high degree of extraversion. That’s because extraverts like to be around people, and so they’re often able to develop reasonably well-informed relationships with various people fairly quickly.
But when it comes to being effective in a leadership role, the evidence is more complicated. Extroverts tend to do better than introverts when leading teams that need to be energised and need a lot of support. When teams are relatively self-motivated and autonomous, however, being led by an extrovert tends to be counterproductive.
In those circumstances, it’s actually the introverts who are often more effective.
Does our contemporary world require a new way of teaching leadership? Or new forms of leadership?
Traditional leadership training has so often suggested what leaders need to be like. What’s often been under-appreciated, however, is the need to recognise the specific strengths that a particular individual already has. Most of us know that good leadership requires self-awareness. Many of us notice that leaders who are clueless about themselves don’t communicate very well and usually fail to gain our trust. But even for many wonderfully accomplished people, self-awareness often doesn’t come naturally. So something that we emphasise in this course is that leaders need to be comfortable in seeing themselves through the eyes of others. If they can do that, they’ll be so much better at winning the trust and support of those around them.
From Dr Sujana Adapa, further details on the North West Emerging Leaders course:
The course recognises industry’s unique needs. It’s structured for 12 weeks and will be delivered in a hybrid model; nine weeks of online learning and three weeks of face-to-face learning.
The material is modularised and features slides with embedded self-reflection activities; a mini case study following a problem, intervention and solution format; brief notes that unpack the threshold concepts; and various learning-by-doing activities. The course material is also supplemented with real-life leadership examples that enable participants to easily relate to the relevant leadership concepts and models of practice.
Participants’ engagement with the facilitator is through Zoom webinars and face-to-face workshops. The workshop content is contemporary with a focus upon “leadership in the rumble”, “leadership at the edge” and “leadership in the rough”.
The workshops will be co-facilitated by academic and industry experts to allow for meaningful peer-to-peer and peer-to-facilitator engagement.
The overarching focus of the face-to-face workshops will be to enable participants to engage with exercises on team building, role-playing, conflict resolution and change management. Practical exercises for participants during in-person workshops with Lego blocks, sugar cubes and old magazines will no doubt foster experiential learning and design thinking.
The program will also highlight the transferability of the theoretical concepts of leadership to real-life practical application in the workplace setting.
The participants will be exposed to authentic, experiential and cooperative learning that allows for active engagement and for sense-making experimentation.
Dr Adapa and Dr Burgess would like to sincerely thank A/Professor Melanie Fillios from UNE, Director, Place Based Education and Research for providing the connection with Craig Pullman and Stephanie Cameron from Tamworth Regional Landcare Association. “Weekly conversations provided us with deeper insights into the context specificity and the development of authentic course content.”
