With bridge][ability’s assistance the focus of the program became leadership and its constituent parts. This made things clear for all of the development team – we were developing a solution that would allow people to lead; we were not in the business of telling/teaching people how to recruit football players.
After detailed examination and analysis of the daily requirement of a TID department leader/ member, the planning team arrived at 4 areas that would need to be part of the solution:
Leadership and management.
Negotiation.
Financial.
Ethics.
Whilst these were the building blocks, there were many other supporting skills that would also be required:
Communication.
Analysis.
Management.
Resource allocation.
Influence.
Planning.
Decision making.
The solution.
The solution which the FA and bridge][ability arrived at delivered all that was required above and, due to the method used, produced results far beyond the scope of the original problem. In short the path the FA chose delivered genuine synergy.
So a modular approach was adopted, which saw 4 modules, each of 3 days delivered over an 18 month period. The models were leadership and management, negotiation, ethics and financial fair play; bridge][ability were asked to deliver both leadership and management and negotiation.
Following extensive research and program development, all four modules were subject to a pilot program that ran during the Autumn of 2014. The program went live in February 2015.
Leadership and management.
The leadership and management module was delivered over a four day period (3+1). A block of 3 days was followed by a single feedback day. There was a 3 month gap between the 2 sessions to allow research and course work to be completed.
The foundation phase of the initial 3 day period introduced the concept of what leadership and management are; their similarities and, most importantly, where they differ. Leadership is one of those subjects that everyone has an opinion on; leaders are the go-to group when blame needs to be apportioned – “I blame the government”; “the parents should do something about it”; “if the teachers took this seriously things would be different”. You get the idea. Therefore the start point needed to be a thorough understanding of what leadership is and isn’t.
Although seen as contentious by some onlookers, we wanted to expose attendees to a number of so-called leaders and examine if they do in fact lead. We wanted to challenge pre-conceptions and get them to do likewise. We asked them to consider that we inhabit a world that is full of job titles and appointments that confer leadership on people, but do they really lead? The Queen is the head of the Commonwealth and is the senior member of the Church of England, Justin Bieber has over 80m followers on twitter, Katy Perry is copied by millions around the world, but are they leaders? The debates that followed allowed the delegates to understand that leadership and management are more than a title or position, they are about doing something.