How does the Leadership Program work?

One of the principles is that the best content in the world won’t, absolutely won’t, make a bit of difference unless you somehow support application and experience in the work place.

You choose things that you believe will make a difference in terms of real practice, in terms of how people actually behave, and you offer them a smorgasbord. And then you let individual, grown up leaders choose for themselves what fits best and what aligns best with the organisation.

How does the program fit with Mater’s mission?

Our Executive Director of Mission and Leadership used to describe it as, “When you are visiting a foreign country, you don’t have to become a native, but it makes sense to learn the language to truly understand the culture—to wear the clothes for a while”. And to understand what the motivations for decisions, or for ways of approaching work are, even thought they might not have been your decisions or your approaches in the first place.

Does the program include activities?

Any of the sorts of standard corporate commercial leadership programs that you go on to generally involve some sort of mildly humiliating but ultimately pretty fun team bonding activities. So yes, they learnt how to juggle, they built what we call Red Machine, but yes, they certainly did bits and pieces like that in between the much more serious events.