35-50 Participants

Leadership in Action is a unique learning opportunity designed for managers and executives seeking breakthroughs in their capacity to meet today’s challenges. The course promises to inspire and empower individuals engaged in implementing organizational changes requiring new clarity, commitment, and shifts in traditional ways of thinking and working. The course has been delivered to over 1,000 senior Public Service managers and executives and is based on over 30 years of research, insights and practice into the dynamics of human interactions and the nature of organizational culture, coaching and leadership.

The objectives of this course are:

• “You will have a clearer sense of your commitments and those of your organization, in a way that increases alignment, enrolls people in new possibilities, reduces waste and achieves measurable gains in individual and organizational effectiveness while implementing new practices.”
  
• “You will become more competent in generating and maintaining effective relationships, both professional and personal, resulting in increased levels of trust and accountability in the organization.”
  
• “You will expand your understanding of organizational and interpersonal dynamics (including moods and recurring patterns of behaviour and culture) in ways that enable you to empower yourself and others to achieve results.”
  “You will be able to help others expand their levels of responsibility and their capacity for new initiatives and action, resulting in people taking greater risks to produce results aligned with departmental vision and leadership.”
  
• “You will become a more effective manager and leader by understanding and adopting the proven principles of coaching and empowerment.”
  
• “If you take this program with a group of your own managers, you will begin to develop the kind of unity and team spirit that enable powerful working relationships necessary to achieve successful implementation of large-scale organizational changes”.

Leadership in Action is a proven, powerful results-oriented courses incorporating all of the material offered in other courses by Mr. Selman. This course is endorsed by the Association for Public Service Executives (APEX).

Cost per participant will be $2,500*. In-house programs for teams and projects are also available. Satisfaction guaranteed.

* For non-US currency, the amount is subject to exchange rate on date of processing.

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In addition to the above Foundation curriculum, we offer the following programs on a customized basis within organizations or for multiple organizations requiring breakthroughs in their capacity to coordinate action.

PASSING THE TORCH

Accelerating the Development of High-Potential Leaders

Organizations today face increasing uncertainty about their future. All aspects of business operations—from access to resources and new technologies to customer relationships and investor confidence—are influenced by constantly changing economic, social, environmental and political realities. Traditional planning strategies and conventional wisdom, both of which project the past into the future, are of only limited use when our collective future is increasingly unknowable. Thriving in this unknown future will require extraordinary leadership.

What’s needed now—more than ever before—is for companies to develop and empower people as leaders who can create the future, rather than simply ‘cope’ with the realities of today. What’s needed is a generation of leaders who can create possibilities where none have existed before, who can inspire and empower others in action and consistently achieve breakthroughs.

As the Boomer generation begins to retire, the pool of leaders is falling short of the demand for effective leadership. Companies must look at ways of fast-tracking younger generations to assume responsibilities for which their predecessors had years of experience. Preparing someone to lead is not simply a matter of ‘learning the ropes’, transferring information about best practices, and embracing the corporate history.

Tomorrow’s leaders won’t succeed because of their ‘knowledge’. They will succeed by being a stand for the future they envision. They will demonstrate the key principles of responsible leadership: good judgment, open-mindedness, inclusiveness, long-term thinking, and an unshakable commitment to authentic communication, empowerment, innovation and collaboration. And they will inspire individuals to make extraordinary commitments, and then lead them to achieve breakthroughs.

The Passing the Torch program is designed to develop promising executives and managers as leaders who can embody and teach the key principles of responsible leadership to others. The program moves beyond mentoring (which is usually unstructured or based on transferring information and ‘tips’) to engage senior leaders in transferring their perspectives, insights and competencies—the best of ‘who they are’—to their younger colleagues through coaching and collaboration. Younger executives and managers focus not on gathering knowledge, but on mastering ‘being a leader of leaders’ in this increasingly complex, globally connected world.

The full six-month program includes three learning modules , project work, action learning groups and leadership coaching. A customized five-day program (excluding project work, learning groups and coaching) is also offered to organizations with a minimum of 30 registered participants.

Senior executives who have successfully completed Paracomm's Mastery of Coaching or Leadership, Legacy & Learning 2010 programs may apply to participate in a streamlined version of Passing the Torch (with reduced in-class time and registration fee).

View the complete Passing the Torch program details and curriculum online.

Download the Passing the Torch program brochure (PDF, 224kb).

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MASTERY OF COACHING / MASTERY OF LEADERSHIP

The Mastery of Coaching program has been offered by Jim Selman since 1991 and is the core curriculum for a two- year accredited college level degree. We have renamed the program as Mastery of Leadership to emphasize our focus on the leadership dimensions of this paradigm. The program will be six sessions over the better part of a year. You will be certified as a competent coach having completed the program. To date 57 senior officials in the Public Service of Canada as well as private sector executives have completed the Mastery program.

The first two sessions are a deeper inquiry into the distinctions we introduce in the five-day Leadership in Action course and are designed to achieve a profound and sustainable personal transformation. The second two sessions will be focused on leadership and coaching in action and the ‘application’ of these ideas in the service of others. Finally, we will be doing work to practice new competencies, including conversations with people outside the course. In the final analysis, all ‘mastery’ is about mastery of ‘self” and focusing all of one’s creative power and energy toward whatever vision or commitments we have in the world.

In addition, you will be required as part of your participation in the program to have a “breakthrough project” that will become a laboratory for your learning, as well as provide real value for the organization and/or the larger communities in which you live. You will have ample personal and project coaching available to you during and between scheduled sessions. The program costs $20,000*.

* For non-US currency, the amount is subject to exchange rate on date of processing.

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ADVANCED COURSES / OPTIONAL“APPLICATION” COURSES

Each of the above ADVANCED courses is part of an integrated suite of courses and will be designed to be consistent with our “ontological paradigm”. The advanced courses require prior participation in Leadership in Action and will all have objectives consistent with the stated themes. Specifically:

Advanced Course #1 — Presentation and Leadership – Building Identity
will have the objective of producing a personal breakthroughs and empowerment of the individual sufficient for the participants to self-generate and be responsible for the context(s) within which they are working into the future. All of us coordinate our commitments in relationship to our own identity in the world and the identities of others. In our conventional thinking, these identities are a product of our public persona and are psychologically fixed (personalities) and rarely change. This leads to an objectification of human beings. This course will offer alternative interpretations and practices for breaking through historical habits and patterns and generate more authentic expression of oneself. There will be observable and measurable results for each individual participant. The course will involve pre-work, an interview with one of the course instructors, quantification of participants’ objectives for participating and a built-in evaluation and feedback mechanism as part of the design. A major feature of this design will be the student’s articulation of the priority needs for breakthroughs in their own departments and the creation of and commitment to a detailed action plan for addressing those needs after the course.

Advanced Course #2 – Communication and Commitment will have the objective of engaging the participants in building powerful networks as appropriate to accomplishing a vision. We will deconstruct our conventional wisdom about communication as an ‘information exchange’ process, inquire deeply into the nature of knowledge, ‘knowledge workers’ and ‘learning’. We will offer a new paradigm of communication based on commitment and action. This course will promise breakthroughs in results related to the commitments that participants bring to the course and their requests for coaching.

Advanced Course #3 – The Leadership Laboratory is an opportunity for participants to have in-depth practice in doing coaching, as well as in specific competencies of coaching relating to enrollment, reading the future, building relationships, dealing with breakdowns, formulating plans ‘from the future’ and designing powerful action-driven projects. We will have one instructor/facilitator for every 5 participants and much of the work will be done in small group break-out sessions in the context of the larger course. One feature of this course is a pre-course conversation with the participant and the participant’s “boss” with respect to what results the organization would need to see as a consequence of course. This is also a course that participants can repeat often since it is not content-driven, but is truly a 'work' shop. A modified version of this course will also be recommended as a bi-annual requirement for maintaining individual proficiency for those wishing to be ‘certified’ by ParaComm Partners International as master coaches.

Advanced Course #4 – Leadership and Innovation is a new program and new offer of ParaComm Partners International designed to develop each participant’s capacity to innovate. The course is based on original research conducted by Mr. Selman over the past 11 years relating to how people learn to innovate. A pre-publication of Mr. Selman’s new article on this subject titled “Leadership and Innovation: Relating to Circumstances and Change” is available. This course is particularly relevant to both public and private sector organizations insofar as the capacity for innovation is recognized as one of the primary distinguishing characteristics in our rapidly changing global economy.

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