We have received some very clear and good feedback from participants:
Before the Programme
- What challenges were you facing before joining Aspire?
Juggling a heavy workload in a complex growing organisation, leading an under-resourced team with some specific performance issues within it. These aspects made it rather difficult to give proper focus to longer term strategic issues and to play an effective role in he senior Exec team on those.
- What motivated you to sign up?
All of the senior Exec team were encouraged to participate
Your Experience
- What was the most valuable part of the programme for you?
Face to face interface and building relationships with senior leaders of (my organisation’s) Partner organisations.
Having bandwidth and guidance from the Aspire team to think about my own leadership style – the bits that worked well and those areas I could develop further.
Holding the main session as a residential overnight helped hugely in developing relationships and trust with peers both inside and outside the organisation
- What insights or mindset shifts did you experience?
Nothing instant but I do feel the programme gave me confidence to interface and challenge senior colleagues more effectively. The programme also helped me evaluate my personal brand more clearly and to be more ready to display vulnerabilities
- What stood out about the facilitation or learning environment
Good framing of key objectives and likely outcomes from Sarah, Rob and the facilitation team. I found the 1-1 follow ups after the main course very helpful and these enabled me to build on my key learnings from the residential programme. Learning Sets were also a feature of the programme – this worked well for a while (during Covid) but the group then fizzled out so I would encourage these to be time limited (eg 12m).
Impact
- What changes have you made as a result of the programme?
In the period since participating in the programme I feel I became a more rounded and decisive leader and more focussed on developing and growing the team around me. The Aspire programme definitely helped me in getting to that point.
- What impact has this had on you, your team or your organisation?
See previous question
- Can you share a specific example?
In One Sentence
If you were recommending Aspire to another leader, what would you say?
I would strongly encourage you to consider joining this. Its now over 6 years since I participated in the programme and am very pleased I did as much for the intangible benefits as for the tangible ones.
