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Leadership is who you are

How you make things happen

And how you make them happen 
through others

“LEADERSHIP is who you are, how you make things happen, and how you make things happen through others”

Elisabeth Henderson

What We Believe

The essence of leadership is:

  • Credibly inspiring people
  • Achieving real impact with courage and will
  • Clarifying the principles you live by, and making them work in practice
  • Taking action in personal, public, and professional spaces
  • Ability to stand alone

The challenge is how you engage with what you can influence – yet cannot control:

  • The unpredictability in the world
  • The unexpectedness of other people's reactions
  • The uncertainty of the future
The key to leadership is to lead yourself – in order to (also) lead others.

Self-Leadership

Self-leadership is the unique capability of addressing and working with your concerns & personal coping patterns without imposing these on others at your home and in work. 

Mastering this capability makes you more able to ‘read’ others effectively: impact their behaviour and make things happen through others. Self-leadership is at the heart of what we do in the Recess College.

How We Work

In our programmes participants learn leadership through experiencing what makes people ‘good at what they do’ and how they may sabotage themselves and others. Our programmes are a condensed version of ’real-life’. They are an opportunity to experiment, challenge and grapple with new ideas, behaviours, and ambitions. This allows you to take risks safely. You are free to do this uniquely without the pressure of direct consequences at work or home.

  • Participants experience and learn to use their energy to good effect for themselves and others. This is enhanced through being in a community of collaboration and shared purpose, created by the participants.
  • Participants develop and experience high performing teamwork.
  • Leadership then becomes congruent with their personality, and effective in real, complex, and unforeseeable situations.

That means we go well beyond:

  • Simplified psychometric analyses and reliance on personality tests
  • Rule-based ‘tips and tricks’ from any popular management theory
  • The temptation of one-dimensional views & positions 

Overall Benefits

The Recess College is unique in helping you invest in your personal growth, with an equal focus on how you collaborate and interact with your organisation.

What you gain…

You will experience and challenge your patterns, behavioural and emotional blocks, and those coping mechanisms that no longer serve you well and may sabotage your best endeavours. You will be able to gain confidence in the drivers that make you good at what you do, encouraging your wider influence with others.

You develop relevant emotional maturity in your relationships at home and at work.

What your organisation and colleagues gain…

Your working environment can expect you to return to work increasingly comfortable with yourself and the challenges of the organisation, and able to display good judgement in critical situations.

Community

Many organisations have lost the power of community and find the need to reinstate a ’replica’ of it through team-building and organisational development. In all our College programmes we explore what a healthy, purposeful community can do for an organisation, and how you as a leader, at whatever level you are, can do to foster such community experience in your life and work – and benefit from it.