Unlikely Leaders – A Leadership Programme inspired by The Hunger Project

by Mary Johnson

We know from the great feedback we’ve received from our latest Think Tank on Collaborative Leadership that you were as inspired as we were by the work The Hunger Project is doing. Beyond the inspiration gained from this great cause, there are some powerful lessons on leadership that we can all apply to our everyday lives.

I’ve been working with Lisa Gunnery to take these experiences and learning into a new leadership programme to unlock the power we all possess to influence the direction and success of our organisations - whether we have ‘the title’ or not.

The programme is called Unlikely Leaders and as the title suggests, this isn’t your usual training event. Instead, it is based on the project’s experience of how leadership manifests itself every day through working with their village partners in India, Africa and Latin America. For example, they have seen uneducated women, both old and young and who are at the bottom of society’s pecking order, develop their own leadership to build healthy, sustainable communities for their children and grandchildren.

Our ethos at Beyond Performance is to create real and sustained performance and we believe this programme will achieve that. We will do this by:

• Including participants without leadership titles and bringing out those key leadership qualities in everyone
• Developing a growth mind-set and identifying our self-imposed or role-related limitations
• Embracing the diversity of our workforce to stimulate different perspectives and insights producing creativity and innovation
• Focusing on the individual’s leadership style and leveraging our social needs through learning how to build collaborative teams and a future-focused culture
• Developing leaders who develop other leaders by letting go of their ego and helping peers to step up

If you would like to know more, contact Mary on mary@beyondperformance.co.nz or phone her on 021 336 949.