Local Leader Summit 2, JCI Norway

This weekend I got the honor to speak to around 20 of the local JCI leaders in Norway. It was a lot of fun!

It is very interesting to learn about what is going on in other local and national JCI organisations, and great to see how much we have in common and how we can learn from each other.

I like the concept of the local leader summits, it allows the local leaders to network, learn from each other and share success stories. We don't have anything similar in the UK, but it is a concept I'd love to introduce to JCI UK. Many other national organisations have something similar and I would have loved to have it as a local president.

In my workshop I started by presenting JCI London, how we have developed, what we are doing that is working, and what we are struggling with. We then worked on the JCI mission and vision, practiced our elevator pitches, then we brainstormed solutions for some of the issues the local presidents feel the organisation is facing. We had so much to discuss with lots of great input, so we didn't get as far into the last exercise as I would have liked, but you live and learn and this was the first time I had 3 hours to give a workshop, and 3 hours turned out to be both quite long and too short.

As a thank you gift I got a book on the history of JCI Norway from the beginning to 1979. It is interesting to see how we are not only similar across borders, but across generations, and how we have been facing and working on the same issues since the beginning. Interesting - and quite a bit frustrating.

Thank you JCI Norway for inviting me and for making me feel welcome!

Leadership Academy

I love creating things, I love organising things. Love, love, love how the ideas, inspirations and inputs come together and take shape.

My latest project is the JCI London Leadership Academy, its my Presidential Project for JCI London.

Why a leadership academy? In JCI London (and in JCI in general) we talk a lot about leadership development, but we don't do much about it. We give people opportunities to develop leadership skills in action, we throw teams and projects at them, but we don't do much to support them or develop them, and that's where this new Academy comes in. And its not something new, most JCI organisations - local as well as national, has some sort of leadership training or academy, its honestly us here in London that are slow....

And the pieces for this academy are coming together beautifully. I have secured 4 brilliant speakers - 2 from within JCI London and 2 from the outside. Location has been booked, dinner has been booked, tickets have gone on sale, logo has been designed, work book is being designed...yay!

So what will happen? 
The academy is process based, not speaker based, so the speakers and program is designed to work together to create a process of learning and development in the participants (but that doesn't mean we won't have brilliant speakers...)
The first evening, Friday, we'll start with looking at the concepts of leadership - before we start learning about leadership we need to know what we mean, break down the big words. We'll look at power, values and behaviours, explore and challenge what we think leadership is and what we think about it.
Saturday will be a practical day. We'll explore our personal leadership brand and style, learn about how to use our networks and resources strategically, how to build support for ideas and who our "customers" are as leaders. Then in the afternoon the participants will be split into teams that will go out on the streets of London to take on leadership in action to succeed in a challenge that will get gradually harder...then we'll have a nice dinner where National President Lesley Young will share with us her thoughts on leadership.
Sunday we'll learn about communication skills as leader, how to communicate our brand, and finally look at career development how to define our brand and how to get there.

Speakers:
Simon Bucknall
Oxana Andreeva
Tony Friede
Joe Howard
 

Preparing for LS2

I've been invited to speak at JCI Norway's second leadership meeting of the year, LS2. Yay! I love getting invitations to speak!

I'm going to give a 3 hour workshop to the local presidents and deputies in Norway about membership growth, engagement and impact. I am really looking forward to meeting them all and working with them. We're talking a lot about these things in London and the UK, and its always great getting other perspectives on things.