SPEAKER (American): We have a lot of information to cover in a short amount of time, so let’s get started. First of all, welcome to this year’s Executive Leadership Course. Our university has been offering this six-week intensive program to professionals for around eight years now. We draw in around 150 participants per year, and have received great feedback overall. So I’m confident that you are going to have a very rewarding and enjoyable experience while you’re here with us.
For your orientation today, I want to give you an overview of the program schedule, week by week. Week one starts tomorrow, and it is going to be a warm-up week. You’ll spend most of your time listening to our faculty and program organizers talk about the purpose of the course and give valuable insights into effective leadership. We will also have three special speakers coming in who are renowned leaders in the private and public sector. Uh, two are executives at private corporations and one from the government. But I’m not going to tell you who they are. It’s more fun if it’s a surprise.
You’re also going to have a personal leadership assessment done. That’s, uh, that’ll take place tomorrow, I believe. Each of you will spend four hours in the morning with a consultant who will assess your strengths and weaknesses as a leader. That will help us tailor the program to your specific needs. Um, you’ll also be getting to know each other in the first week. We’ll do some ice breaking and you’ll spend a couple of days working on a group project. But don’t worry. It’s nothing serious. Just a small research project on management approaches that you will present to the rest of the participants at the end of the week.
Then in week two we start getting into different leadership themes. Week two’s theme is integrative thinking. We look at how to take in multiple perspectives while staying grounded in your own. We also learn how to see both the big picture and the small details all at once. You’ll explore all of this in small-group workshops and large-group discussions. There will also be quite a lot of readings this week, so plenty of down time to get through those. I highly recommend that you don’t fall behind, as there won’t be time for catch up later.
Then we spend the next two weeks…that’s weeks three and four…on communication. Research shows that good leaders are people who know how to communicate effectively. They know how to express ideas, how to be persuasive, and most importantly, how to listen so that others feel heard. For this theme we have an expert in this field coming to spend the bulk of those two weeks with you. He will give some lectures, but will also facilitate individual and group exercises such as role-plays. Being a good communicator takes practice, so be ready to have a very interactive couple of weeks.