Who Sheffield Leader 4 is for:

You will either be amongst the University’s ‘senior leadership cadre’ (Head of Department-level or equivalent) or you will be expecting to assume such a position in the near future. As such, you will be already involved with the University’s governance systems in some way.

You will be responsible for a large and institutionally significant work area, involving both soft and hard resource responsibilities. Your stakeholders will be wide and varied - from your local departmental staff, to senior staff across the University, to national and international leaders in your chosen field.

You may already hold a deep understanding and awareness of leadership practice and theory, gained through either formal development or your own experience and research.

The aims of Sheffield Leader 4:

• Move beyond traditional models of leadership towards leadership that is based on building an adaptive sustainable community in which collective leadership, more than individual leadership is more likely to address the external complexity facing HEIs
• Bring a community of leaders together in an environment where what they have in common (around building and sustaining a world class university) is reinforced
• Use the actual leadership challenges and experiences of participants as sources of learning and build dialogue around these
• Involve outstanding leaders from industry and public life who are able to share their experience of leadership with participants and provide insights of leadership in a range of other organisations
• Draw on input from eminent academics and speakers with an intimate appreciation of the challenges facing HE
• Use self-organising action groups as part of Sheffield Leader 4. These will be designed to produce detailed proposals for specific organisational improvements based on the emerging challenges at Sheffield. These action groups will also involve significant individual and collective learning for participants to demonstrate collaborative, adaptive leadership that is better able to address pan-institutional issues

What Sheffield Leader 4 involves:

For each participant the time commitment will be approximately 10.5 days including 6 nights residential over 9-10 months, which entails a combination of class- and work-based events providing a pragmatic, reflective, experiential and theoretically robust curriculum. Initiated with a short launch event, participants will then embark on a series of 3 day residential modules (‘The World We’re In, ‘Leadership Within Higher Education’ and ‘Authentic Leadership’) supported by 1 x ½-day strategic impact event, leadership exchanges and further developmental material. The culmination of these modules will be an event which brings participants together to share both the impact of this journey alongside the key lessons which have emerged; individually, collectively and systemically.

A member of UEB will lead a session on module 1 to share the Executive Board’s strategic position and answer questions from the group. The Strategic Impact Groups will present the findings of their projects to a group of UEB members following the final module.

Click here for more detail on Sheffield Leader 4 modules and events.