CIPFA Directors Materclass
In keeping with professional development, managers are increasingly required to provide a wide range of skills that may differ considerably from their experience or professional qualification.
Senior and technical managers face the challenges of future trends and a focus on broader skill profiles for senior and technical managers.
The opportnity for this group of senior finance managers lay in their ability to gauge their own current profiles accurately, envisage where to boost under-utilised skills, appreciate the views senior colleagues and clients hold and to work with them for successful business outcomes.
Event Detail
Date: 1st November 2007
Venue: The Park Hotel, Kilmarnock
Format: Facilitated Masterclass event incorporating Brain Dominance personal mapping. Plenary sessions, breakout groups, pair work and an experiential activity component
Guests: 40 senior management participants.
Duration: Half day
Objectives
The main aims of this event were to provide opportunities for the participants to explore responses to the following questions:
- How do we get into finding out and engaging with what’s going on in the organisation?
- How do we question and challenge assumptions and assertions from colleagues and other stakeholders?
- How can we shift the perception of being “no-men/women” and become perceived as proactive and transformational?
Outline
During the afternoon working with Maximillion facilitators, participants were invited to map their current personal approaches to business opportunities, practise new ways of planning to conduct vital interviews and be part of negotiating successful outcomes that their clients can buy into!
The programme contained some personal mapping inputs and a series of practical activities that helped participants to identify beneficial approaches to business opportunities that highlight the key skills to be practised for success.
Key general skills included;
- Analysis of others
- Influencing
- Negotiating
- Seeing the ‘big picture’
- Planning for success
- Creative visioning
Programme
- Introductions & briefing for afternoon
- ‘Where am I?’ – ‘Where are you?’ – mapping activity to identify personal thinking and planning styles
- ‘Influencing through insights’- structured conversations
- Does Structure support what we do? – can we use our knowledge of organisational structures to affect outcomes? Practical activity
- Relating structures to how we manage developments
- Using highlighted key skills within individual work examples
Outcomes, Benefits & Feedback
Project sponsor Charles Armstrong, Director of Finance at Aberdeenshire Council rated all ellements of the event as ‘delighted’ through our online feedback survey.