LD-F01 — Foundations of Leadership

What this course is about

Leadership training has a credibility problem: much of it consists of inspirational vocabulary attached to no verifiable mechanism. This foundation course takes a narrower and more defensible approach. It concentrates on three things that can be defined, observed and improved — the difference between authority, power and influence; the specific decisions a person in charge cannot delegate; and the organisational conditions under which good intentions produce bad outcomes.

How the course is structured

The opening sessions separate the three sources of leverage. Authority is granted by position and is the weakest of the three. Power rests on control of something others need. Influence is earned and is the only one that survives a change of role. Most leadership failures involve someone relying on authority in a situation that required influence.

The middle sessions deal with decisions: which ones belong to the person in charge, how to make them with insufficient information, and how to communicate them so that people who disagree can still execute. Students work through cases where every available option is bad, since those are the decisions that actually define a leader.

Later sessions examine organisational context — incentive structures, information flow, and the way hierarchy filters bad news upward until it disappears. Students diagnose a dysfunction in an organisation they know and trace it to structure rather than to individual character.

What you will be able to do

You should be able to identify which form of leverage a situation calls for, hold a difficult conversation without either avoiding it or damaging the relationship, make and defend a decision under uncertainty, and recognise when a performance problem is actually a system problem.

Who it suits

First-time managers, technical specialists moving into supervision, founders whose organisations have outgrown informal coordination, and experienced managers who suspect their habits stopped working when the organisation changed size. No prior management study is assumed.

This is the entry course for the School of Leadership & Organizational Development. Those whose responsibility is policy delivery should also look at the School of Public Policy & Governance. Advisory engagements are described under Consulting; the full catalogue sits in the Academy.