Our Programme
Explore each of the Leadership Lab's three steps in more detail.
Three steps, a single progression.
The Leadership Lab is built around a single progression. You set a direction for yourself, then for your team, then for your organisation, and at every stage you practise how you communicate it to the people you lead. This journey to your Leadership Roadmap is made up of three steps.
Focus on how you lead and where you want that to go.
Set expectations, give feedback, and hold the conversations that matter.
Analyse your organsiation and make the case for where you are taking it.
You leave with your roadmap, and the confidence to implement it.
Direct conversations about the real challenges everyone brings into the room.
Before we hand you a single framework or tool, we start with a straight conversation: What does leadership actually mean to you? What is it not? And where, honestly, is it missing from the way you work right now? The Lab opens with your real-world material - the board that has stopped deciding, the team waiting to be told, the mandate that has quietly outgrown its structure. Over the next three days, the work forms around those candid answers, using the real weight everyone carries to set the trajectory for our first session and shape everything that follows.
Before you can set a clear direction for your organisation, you need to understand your own.
Together, we’ll begin by exploring what leadership really means in practice. We’ll look beyond formal titles and traditional assumptions to consider the different ways people lead, influence others and create positive change.
We’ll examine a range of leadership styles, reflecting on their strengths, limitations and suitability in different situations. You’ll have the opportunity to identify the approaches that feel most natural to you, while also recognising when another style may be more effective.
Just as importantly, we’ll discuss the behaviours that build trust, encourage collaboration and support good decision-making - as well as those that can undermine confidence, motivation and team performance. This first step is about developing a clearer understanding of leadership and beginning to shape an authentic approach of your own.
There is no single right way to lead; instead, leadership types and styles offer a vocabulary for what many leaders only sense intuitively - that you have a natural register that serves you well in some rooms and less so in others. By mapping these types and placing yourself among them through a short diagnostic, you will see which styles align with your strengths and which you might want to reach for more regularly. You will then compare your readings with peers who navigate the same situations very differently. The goal isn’t to be reassigned to a “better” type but to recognise clearly that you are not leading wrongly; you simply do some things more strongly than others by disposition and habit. That self-reading will become the reference point for everything that follows, because the leadership types you want to hold on to - and the ones you’d like more room to use - are exactly what the rest of the programme gives you practice in.
Most leaders can articulate what their organisation should achieve this year, yet far fewer can say what they want to be true of their own leadership by the same date; this session closes that gap by helping you define where you want your leadership to go and how you’ll know you’re getting there. You’ll set a clear direction - the kind of leader you aspire to be and what that means over the longer term - then translate it into something immediately usable: a short set of specific goals and measures for the coming months that let you track whether you’re moving. Drawing on your archetype reading as raw material, what you write here becomes the first of three layers that build into your personal leadership roadmap. You’ll then have the rest of the sessions to refine those goals and test them against a room of peers, leaving with a leadership vision and a handful of commitments you can hold yourself to.
Leadership becomes real in the way you work with other people.
The coaching conversation is one of the most portable tools participants take away from the Lab. At its heart are two habits: listening to understand rather than to reply, and asking questions that move the other person’s thinking forward instead of showcasing your own. This simple structure is immediately put to work on real situations from the room - whether a colleague presents a problem they could solve themselves, a board member has dug in, or a demanding member is on the phone. Because the group agrees to operate this way for the remainder of the Lab sessions, everyone gains extended practice rather than just participating in a one-off exercise, which embeds the approach through repeated, authentic use.
Effective leadership hinges on the ability to communicate with clarity and impact, ensuring that your intended message arrives intact whether you’re addressing a team, a board, or a membership. Too often, leaders unintentionally dilute their instructions - softening directives into questions, implying deadlines instead of stating them outright, or allowing ambiguity to creep in so that everyone leaves the room with a slightly different understanding of what comes next. This session tackles the mechanics of clear communication head-on: being direct and concise, explicitly stating what you want and by when, and adapting a single core message for different audiences without losing its essence. Feedback, a critical yet often avoided leadership tool, is given its own straightforward structure: name what happened, explain what you would have preferred, and clearly outline what you expect moving forward. Rather than relying on hypothetical scenarios, you’ll practice these techniques on real situations you bring to the table, equipping you to handle the tough conversations many leaders tend to postpone with confidence and clarity.
The second layer of goal-setting is about co-creating what you expect from your team rather than handing down targets, and then having the conversation in which you make those expectations explicit. Team goals typically fail for two reasons: they are issued instead of built together, and they are mentioned once in a meeting and then quietly forgotten. To avoid this, you will work on both the substance and the conversation. On the substance side, you will define what 'good' looks like for your team over the coming period, what is realistic within a lean secretariat, and where individual goals intersect with the goals of the whole. On the conversational side, you will draw on the communication and coaching tools from the two preceding sessions and, through role play, practice setting those expectations with your team - including the expectations that are uncomfortable to raise but essential to name.
Step 3: Leading Organisations
With a clearer sense of your own leadership and your team's priorities, you can step back and look at the organisation as a whole.
Imagine carving out a full half-day solely to chart where your organisation is headed - time to shape the strategy itself, define the goals beneath it, and think deeply enough to craft something you’d confidently defend. Because strategy is the part of the job that everything else tends to displace, we give it the most room in the Lab: a half-day session, an evening to reflect, and group work the following morning. During this time, you will turn the lens on your own association - where it should be heading, what it will stop doing, how the member offer needs to evolve, and which goals will tell you whether any of it is working. This forms the third and widest layer of the line that began with your own leadership and ran through your team. And your peers are your first critical audience: most sit in comparable seats, so the questions you field here are the very ones your board will ask later.
Leading an association means becoming its public voice - addressing a general assembly, pitching to funders, or presenting from a conference stage to audiences who aren’t already convinced. This outward-facing communication demands a different skill set than internal messaging, yet it’s rarely taught to those expected to excel at it. This session tackles the practical essentials: how to structure a compelling case, command a room, craft a strong opening and closing, and decide what to cut when time is tight. You’ll bring a real presentation you’re preparing, receive targeted feedback, and have the chance to rehearse it again with those improvements applied - setting you up directly for success in the final session.
Your Leadership Pitch
Everything comes together in a pitch of your own: on the final morning, you put the three days to work by presenting your strategy, your expectations for your team, and the direction you’re taking your organisation to a room - and a fresh pair of eyes. You choose the audience that matters most to you - your board, your own team, or a room of members and stakeholders - so the stakes feel real. The group responds, and so does a facilitator who hasn’t been with you all week, mirroring the conditions you’ll face back home when you need to persuade people who aren’t already on board. We place this exercise last on purpose: after two days of building substance and practising the tools, this is where you discover whether your story holds together when you say it to someone who still has to be convinced.
Who you want to be as a leader, what you want for your team, and where you are taking your organisation.
The Final Document
The Lab closes by consolidating your insights rather than adding new ones, culminating in a single, powerful leadership roadmap to take home. This document seamlessly pulls three vital layers together into one clear vision: who you want to be as a leader, what you expect and desire for your team, and where you are taking your organisation. Complete with your crucial first steps, it serves as an actionable guide to align your personal direction, empower your people, and drive your strategic goals forward.
Support Beyond the Lab
Each team member commits aloud to the group on the precise actions they will take - and stop taking - over the next two weeks, while openly identifying where they will need extra support. By voicing these concrete steps in front of their peers, the commitment moves from a passive document left to gather dust in a drawer into a shared, accountable call to action. The journey doesn’t end when your roadmap meets reality: you’ll remain supported and connected through a dedicated follow-up session and our vibrant alumni circle, ensuring you have the ongoing community and guidance needed as your plans unfold in the real world.
