Aurora Leadership Development Programme

The Welcome and Introduction session is an integral part of the programme. It will give participants an opportunity to meet their fellow Aurorans and start forming relationships crucial for their development. We will discuss how the Aurora journey will unfold throughout the year and offer some practical information about the online delivery platforms used on Aurora. The delegates will hear from an inspirational speaker who will share her experience of being a woman leader. They will also be invited to reflect on their individual objectives for taking part in Aurora.

Identity, Impact and Voice will launch participants into their leadership journey by asking them ‘what makes you, you’ and focusing on the people who have inspired them. We will also discuss how their identity impacts their leadership in positive ways. Lastly, we will be thinking about what it means to be on the receiving end of each participant, how they show up and how they might flex their communication style to have a greater impact on all those around them.

Core Leadership is all about you – who you are, what matters to you, and how to mobilise the tools in your REAL leadership toolbox. Working together, supporting each other, we explore purpose and values and what these mean for leaders. Articulating the what and the why of your leadership brings clarity about you and what you represent. Sharing our stories and experiences, we explore leadership in HE, further developing your network.

The first of these two sessions will be hosted by Advance HE, and the delegates will be introduced to the peer-to-peer support process of Action Learning Sets (ALS). This is a widely used and reliable model for helping people form supportive groups, develop their listening and communication skills and solve their own issues within their career. Following an introduction to the process of ALS, delegates will be allocated to groups of 4–5 from a mixture of institutions and areas of higher education, where they will spend the duration of the session developing those skills through an experiential learning process.

This development day invites delegates to look at their individual leadership against the backdrop of their institution’s culture and politics. They will be invited to assess their emotional intelligence and personal influence, and emerge with an enhanced ability to amplify the profile they want to nurture. They will be encouraged to think about building coalitions, developing networks and making lasting, mutually supportive connections.

Leadership is really tested when the environment is challenging or when there are no easy solutions. A leader’s ability to be heard and their courage to speak up are essential in this context. This day will look at how the tools of adaptive leadership could enhance the delegate’s performance and success, as well as enable them to reflect on the leader that they want to be in the future.

Your Future in HE is to serve as the ultimate day of development, providing ample opportunities for Aurorans to engage, network, and connect with one another in person. This includes meeting and catching up with their respective action learning set groups.

For this final session, delegates reconvene and host their own Action Learning Set group online, where they continue to support each other using the ALS process, further developing their communication and listening skills. They host this session themselves and it is with the same group they joined on Action Learning Set 1.