Leadership Development Programmes

Our leadership development programmes are designed and delivered using principles derived from our 20 years of experience and the best of evidence based research. These principles help ensure that the programmes we design with you deliver both new personal skills and capability and deliver successful business improvement projects.

Our Programme Principles

Delivery partners pay an annual licence fee for accreditation, training, access to the OPDC training materials, quality auditing and customer feedback analysis.
Delivery partner consultants must attend training delivered by OPDC to become accredited
Delivery partners agree not to alter OPDC materials and training methodologies
All delegates attending OPDC programmes via delivery partners must be registered on the OPDC delegate portal for programme communications and feedback
OPDC retain the right to attend training programmes provided by delivery partners for quality assurance purposes
OPDC provides programme feedback analysis to delivery partners to support quality assurance and trainer development

Successful leadership development and business improvement go hand in hand

The research evidence shows that most leadership development programmes fail to create more effective leadership. Equally, it shows that the vast majority of business improvement and change programmes fail to achieve their objectives.

Our approach is successful because it has been developed to overcome the systemic reasons of business improvement and personal development failure. At the heart of this success is a recognition that integrating leadership development with activities and projects to improve organisational performance is the key. By doing that, personal development is grounded in the specific realities and context faced by each delegate. This means that the learning can be applied and its impact seen day-to-day. And, as the learning is applied to real and present business problems and opportunities, its value is applied directly to improving business performance.

A defining aspect of our leadership programmes is the importance we place on building awareness and critical behaviours as a foundation. That’s not to say that we don’t provide delegates with an understanding of leadership tools and techniques as well as business process models. But unlike many other leadership programmes, we give delegates more ability to bring these to life by giving them an understanding how their behaviour impacts others’ perceptions and performance. It’s gaining this understanding that gives our programmes the edge and increases their value.

Flexible Programme Structure

Our integrated leadership development and business improvement programmes are delivered in a variety of formats to fit with your needs and constraints. For example:

Multi-module programmes
Intensive programmes
Topic focused programmes

All programmes are built on our programme principles and provide learning across the important building blocks to effective leadership. However, programmes are each tailored to reflect the seniority, experience, market needs and specific skill gaps of the learning group.

For more information on how programmes are created to meet each business need or to discuss how we could create a leadership and business development programme for your business contact us.

We use the real and live problems and issues faced by delegates as the basis for learning. Unlike many leadership development programmes, we rarely use ‘off-the-shelf’ case studies; because by their nature they can’t simulate the specifics of each delegate’s day-to-day reality
We use role play and interaction extensively. Adults are typically very poor at retaining classroom teaching and far better at learning by doing, so role play is a powerful tool. It’s also true that discussion and debate are powerful instruments for learning – so we use them extensively too.

We emphasise influencing and engagement skills. The number one reason for the failure of business improvement and change is an inability to persuade people that a new way of doing things is worth adopting. Our programmes give delegates the skills they need to be far more influential with internal stakeholders, customers and suppliers.
We address a significant organisational challenge or opportunity as a way to enable delegates to practice and hone their new skills. Leadership development training is a major investment, so our programmes are designed to ensure that the investment is paid back quickly by applying new skills and behaviours to real organisational problems. This approach has the added benefit of achieving senior management support and helping delegates raise their profile as leaders in the organisation