Leadership Foundation

Management Development Resources

• MDR Events for 2013

What are the LF Management Development Resources?

The LF Management Development Resources (MDRs) are a set of resource materials provided by the Leadership Foundation to member institutions for use as training resources. These materials have been designed with detailed facilitator notes so that you can deliver the programmes in your own institution. There are six Resources:

1. Managing effective performance
   Performance management for professional services staff has sometimes been more developed than for academic staff, but it continues to be a challenging issue for many managers. This resource pack has many practical insights into ways in which a manager can support others to maintain and improve their performance, including: An overview of effective performance management; Effective performance management – strategies and tactics; How to make those ‘difficult conversations’ productive and positive; How to manage under performance; Leading an effective performance review meeting; and Setting objectives.
2. Managing change in higher education
   Explores a wide range of change management tools and techniques that are applied to the higher education context. The kind of themes and issues covered in this resource pack include: The change drivers impacting on your organisation; Understanding the University’s culture; Assessing change readiness; Planning for change; Turning resistance into commitment; Making change happen; and Roles in times of change.
3. Emotional intelligence, personal impact and personal effectiveness
   This resource is the one most closely aligned with personal effectiveness. There is now plenty of material that contributes to the way that the individual can be developed; this Resource draws together a number of important stands in the arena of personal development: Introduction to Emotional Intelligence; Developing self awareness; Understanding personal effectiveness; Empathic communications; and Impact and influence.
4. Lean management – doing more with less
   Developed for the LF by Cardiff University, this resource explores a new and emerging set of tools and techniques that explore how a higher education provider can make its processes more Lean and efficient. This resource contains materials that look in detail in a very practical way at a number of Lean approaches: Developing lean awareness; The importance of the customer in becoming Lean; Understanding value streams; Focusing on customer demands; and Continuous improvement.
5. The current higher education context
   This programme focuses on the factors that are impacting on the way that higher education is developing. There are so many major factors that are currently forcing higher education providers to change the way that they deliver their services and relate to the student, including student finance and Government policy. This is of course, a fast moving subject, and while the information is correct at the time of going to press, we recognise that it will date fairly quickly. The Leadership Foundation intends to update this information periodically, keeping it as accurate as best we can and these updates will be available to members only, on the Leadership Foundation website.
6. Commercial skills for academics and researchers (available September 2012)

   Academics now routinely need to include ‘pathway to impact’ statements in grant applications and to evidence the actual impact of their research. Universities are now well-stocked with ‘knowledge transfer’ professionals able to advise and guide - but they will always be heavily outnumbered by researchers. Therefore responsibility for arguing and ensuring impact will increasingly become a core part of the academic role. The thinking behind these ‘knowledge transfer’ modules is that the core skills and insights needed to achieve impact are easily appreciated by academics – and that the resulting impact is likely to be deeper and more enriching when researchers play a leading role in the ‘process’ alongside knowledge transfer colleagues. 

Who are the target audience?

The proposed target audience for you to deliver these materials to are middle managers, both academic and professional services, beneath the level of head of department or head of service.

What is in the LF Management Development Resources?

Each of the six titles in this series contains 5 or 6 modules each – these have been designed as half day modules. You can use the materials to design your own workshops – lasting from just half a day to a full two and a half or three days.

Each resource contains copies of all of the materials that you will need. You will be provided with hard copy and there is an accompanying CD which you can use to create copies of all of the materials for your own workshops.

How easy are the LF Management Development Resources to use?

All the resources have been written by experienced facilitators. In order to ensure that they are used to their full effect we have provided seven free two day training workshops around the UK so member institutions could send their own facilitators to hear about the resources and learn how to optimise their use. If you missed this free training we can arrange a training course in-house if required. Please contact Sweta Purohit to discuss how we can help you.