The Athena programme offers women executives a unique opportunity to develop their leadership potential.

Designed to enhance personal visibility and leadership skills, it provides women aspiring to increase their impact in organisational life with a range of different and challenging learning opportunities.

Programme outline

The educational principles underpinning the programme require you to engage fully in learning, challenging your attitudes, beliefs and assumptions about yourself, and about the effectiveness of your organisation. It will empower you to do things differently in your workplace, and strengthen your ability to handle complex systems change.

If you want to be a leader who creates lasting change, you need to use your emotional and political intelligence to transform services. To achieve this, you require a deep understanding of yourself and the effect of your behaviour on other people. The effective leader motivates, influences and creates an environment around them that will maximise potential. All the strands of the training are based on the latest thinking about management effectiveness.

How the training works

Our core aims are to help participants build on and develop their qualities and skills as professionals, and to integrate their personal and professional development. We adopt an integrated approach where emotion, imagination and intellect are valued.

Learning is through participation – so you need to be willing to be open and active in group settings, and to take risks. New insights emerge through drawing on personal experience and hearing the experience of others. Decisions about content and educational methods are balanced with participants' ability to generate knowledge and to be creative.

We aim to build an effective learning community that supports personal development. All participants are jointly responsible for supporting each other's learning and sharing the rich resources of experience, skills and understanding each brings to the training programme. The creation of a learning community will enable you to:

• explore your own leadership style, focusing on your emotional as well as political fluency
• learn from your own experience, and the personal stories of other women, and enhance your ability to listen and find your own authoritative voice
• deepen your self-awareness and increase your personal authority and impact.

Benefits for you and your organisation

While much of the Athena training programme focuses on your personal development, it has an important wider purpose – to enhance the leadership capacity of organisations in the public sector. Our aim is to make a difference by increasing your capacity to contribute more effectively within your own organisation and in partnerships. The benefits for you will be:

• increased personal impact
• a deeper understanding of yourself
• an introduction to a networking style of leadership
• clarification of personal values and beliefs
• reflective skills as an integral part of leadership
• the encouragement to sustain continuous learning and self-directed development.

The benefits for your organisation will be:

• increased capacity for emergent and opportunistic strategy development
• the ability to understand organisational problems and the wider context at a deeper level
• an increased understanding of how to build partnerships between different organisations
• effective leading and working in groups
• increased ability to handle and manage conflict
• a willingness to innovate and take risks

Programme structure

The Athena programme has been designed in line with feedback from women on previous training programmes to ensure it fits in with the demands of your work and home life. It runs over a period of seven months, and is delivered in four modules as follows:

• Module 1 (4 days) - Self-development and leadership from women’s perspectives
• Module 2 (4 days, residential) - Self in relationship to others and critical reflection on group participation
• Module 3 (3 days) - Self in the cultural and organisational context
• Module 4 (3 days) - Coherence, community and women’s leadership. This module also includes presentation and media training to increase personal impact in organisational life.

Three facilitated peer-group learning sets (two days each) will take place between each module, with dates and locations negotiated to suit members.

Two executive one-to-one coaching sessions will take place from Module 2 onwards, and offer opportunities to work with a member of the King's Fund's Faculty of Leadership Development.

Price

Dates

• Janet Wilson