The Leadership Foundation has appointed Paul Gentle as Programme Director for three key open programmes: Head of Department, Preparing for Senior Strategic Leadership and Senior Strategic Leadership, with a remit to expand capacity over the next four years. He is also the lead contact for the Leadership Foundation in south-west England, where he is based.
Previously Paul was dean of international education at University College Plymouth St Mark and St John (Marjon) where his responsibilities included the role of director of regional affairs, enabling Paul to take a lead in building capacity in engaging academic staff in activity with business and the community. Prior to this Paul was based at the University of Central Lancashire for 11 years, where he was head of the department of languages and international studies, and faculty project development manager.
A Leadership Foundation Fellowship in 2005 provided the funding for a series of activities designed to boost organisational learning at Marjon, including an internal Change Academy event.
Paul describes himself as being passionately committed to working with universities to build internal capacity for evaluating the impact of their leadership development activity.
He recently completed a doctoral thesis on using Action Learning Sets to support organisational cultures at middle management level in higher education, and hopes to apply some of the learning from this work in his new post.