I wanted to flag up a series of really interesting (and free!) webinars taking place this week on leadership from The Open University. These webinars will be a chance for you to engage with some leading academics and practitioners, such as Jean Hartley, Caroline Ramsey, Ben Hardy and Murray Eldridge.
Jean rose to prominence within the academic world as the authority on political leadership but holds broader expertise in public leadership. She will talk about political astuteness in leadership. I have long admired Caroline Ramsey as a critical scholar and provocative thinker. Caroline is currently exploring leadership through conversation. Her ideas in this area are quite original but also very relevant to practitioners. Murray Eldridge holds vast experience in business, particularly in oil, gas and telecoms. He will be talking about resilience and learning from set-backs (not that any of us have ever done anything other than succeed in all we do, perish the thought!). Ben Hardy opens the week of webinars with a session later today on the panoply of leadership theory and writing, which he views as a positive thing. Ben is an engaging writer, speaker and teacher, so no doubt he has some mischievousness in store!
On Wednesday I will be hosting a session with Rob Paton on leadership as influencing the things that matter. Rob is an academic with a significant track record of voluntary sector scholarship. His current focus is on a collaborative project with the Ghana Ministry of Education on the introduction of Open Educational Resources. And Owain is ... Well you probably know me well enough. In our webinar we will be talking about leadership as only really being of value if it addresses things that matter to people. Sounds a tad obvious and banal? Well, once you start digging you get to the interesting stuff. How do we decide what's important? Who decides what's important? Who does the leading and why? How can more people learn to lead and follow robustly? So we will be tackling power, authority, the political, the inspirational and a healthy dose of the psychoanalytic along the way.
You can join in by following the link below, which will also link you through to the other webinars. Registration is easy and there are no gimmicks. This is a free series of events as part of Learning at Work Week. That said, if any of you come away from the sessions thinking that the OU is a wonderful institution and raring to sign up to one of our degrees, you really should not fight the urge.
I'll see you all online.
- Owain
