We began day two of the Opening Residential with group personal training and yoga sessions, designed to provide stimulation to presence of mind for the day ahead and at the very least realise our capabilities and potential for growth.
The day ahead exposed us to a variety of presenters with the same underlying message of understanding the individuality of human behaviour, harnessing and empowering individual strengths and what is both our personal and professional “why”. Jem Fuller from Leaders in Life Pty Ltd, walked us through, why we have a why!
Through the process, the importance of understanding our personal and organisational values was addressed, and how to make them part of our daily conversations through discussions, leading both up and down. Everyone within any organisation is a leader and focusing on the strengths of individuals has the power to strengthen the team within an organisation. It is also important that leaders realise why they enjoy doing what they do in their personal and work lives.
Damien O’Malley, Director and Senior Consultant, OMC Group, explained the theory behind Leadership Behaviour Insights. As individuals, we reflected on an event in the last 30 days through work or personal life and the feelings it gave us. It enabled us to focus on the positivity it provided. As all people lead, we all have a choice to bring positivity to our day by understanding our behaviours, what the activators are and the consequences of our actions.
As we moved into our Life Style Inventory exercise, our understanding of being open to change through self-reflection and willingness to lead in supporting strengthening diversity enabled us to understand how we see ourselves and challenge us to take on others opinions to enable growth.
Kevin Larkins, CEO, Leading Australia reflected on the importance of understanding who we are as individuals and how we lead. Through Kevin’s experiences of leading, we discussed the time we as individuals have to seize the opportunity of empowering people and what our legacy will be?
We moved into discussing leadership and understanding that leadership is who you need to be, not do. A key ingredient to successful organisational cultures is found through appreciating attitude over aptitude. In closing the day, as a group we reflected on the one thing that each of us took from the previous days.
An eager willingness to progress in the program is evident amongst the group. We are looking forward to how we can evolve as a group and make a positive difference to our teams, workplace and community.
Luke Gibson, 2020/21 Leaders for Geelong Participant