 This course will help you develop the skills of an effective leader. It will be of benefit to leaders and managers of organisations that are struggling to change the world.
It is part of Learning for Change, an integrated collection of courses developed by Fahamu in conjunction with the University of Oxford.
Learning for Change pioneers a unique and innovative approach to learning. Using CDROMs, workshops and a learning community mediated by email, these courses will help you build capacity with minimum disruption to your own work. Each course includes practical projects that will benefit your organisation directly.
Every participant who successfully completes a course will be awarded a certificate from the University of Oxford.
Objectives
The objective of the course is to help you develop the skills of leadership in a challenging and fast-changing environment.
When you have completed this course, you will be able to:
- Understand the function of leadership in activist and advocacy organisations
- Identify your organisation’s mission in context
- Develop a clear strategy
- Translate your strategy into clear objectives
- Manage people, systems and processes more effectively
- Create and maintain more effective relationships with other organisations and individuals in your working environment.
LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT FOR CHANGE
This course starts and ends with you. You will be a more effective leader – and a more effective manager – if what you learn is directly related to your current experience and context.
Your task as a leader is to help your organisation make a difference. How do you do this? Obviously, through the work your organisation does.
So your organisation needs to know what it is aiming to do and how to do it. Planning, monitoring and evaluation are clearly important; but of equal importance are structure and clear managerial relationships.
In the end, leadership means making a difference through other people.
Some of those people are working for you. Others are working with you. Your job as leader is to make the organisation as effective a place as possible for people to work; and as effective as possible a partner - with communities, other organisations, government, and the state.
One of those people, of course, is you. We don’t neglect the need to manage yourself: to build your own skills and aptitudes.
None of this is possible without resources. Finance doesn’t figure largely on this course; other courses, on fundraising and financial management, cover those areas in depth.
In this course, we look at the essence of leadership: developing your organisation’s mission, its structure and the people who work in it.
Structure and outline
The course is structured so that you will build up the knowledge and skills you need as you progress through the course.
Introduction
- Understanding leadership
- Understanding leadership and management in activist organisations
- The purpose of leadership and management
Leadership in context
- Leadership and management in activist organisations
- Context
- Understanding the context
- Understanding the NGO sector
- Reading the context
Creating a strategy
- Understanding your purpose
- Organisational culture and values
- Strategic direction and purpose
- Putting your purpose into practice
Planning and monitoring
- Strategic planning
- Operational planning
- Reflecting on performance
Managing people
- Building people-centred organisations
- Allocating work
- Finding the right people
- Developing staff
- Building effective staff
- Managing conflict in your organisation
- Helping staff cope with human rights work
Choosing and using organisational structures and systems
- Understanding organisational governance
- Choosing the right organisational structure
- Choosing the right organisational systems
- Managing meetings
- Managing structures and systems
Leadership and law
- Meeting legal requirements
- Developing and using constitutions
- Developing and using policies
Managing resources
- Managing relationships
- Understanding relationships with others
- Managing voluntary relationships
- Managing accountability relationships
- Communicating with others
Managing yourself
- Role definition
- Time management
- Stress management
The activities
We have included many practical activities and exercises. Where we think you might want to check your answers, we have included our answers on the CDROM.
The assignments
There are two assignments on the CDROM. You will need to send these to your tutor. The assignments will count towards your final mark. You will be given a chance to do each assignment again if you did not manage it well the first time.
The workshop
The workshop will help you to develop some of the skills that are hard to develop with a CDROM, such as interviewing and dealing with conflict. It will also help you with anything you don’t understand whilst you work through the CDROM. To get the best from this workshop, you need to have worked through the whole of this CDROM.
The project
After the workshop, you will do a project in your organisation. The project will be of direct benefit to you and your organisation. You will be given the project instructions on the last day of the workshop.
The email group
You are not doing this course on your own, though it may sometimes feel like it. You are encouraged to communicate by email with the rest of the group doing this course. Some learning activities are specifically marked for email discussion, but feel free to communicate with the group on any other exercises.
Email discussions will be copied to the tutor, but not assessed or moderated. Your tutor will not give automatic feedback unless you specifically ask for it. But he or she will give you feedback or advice on the planning and execution of assignments.
Assessments
In the pre-workshop phase you will be expected to:
- Complete the learning activity and where requested mail your answers to the email group and your tutor
- Complete and submit your answers to all assessments.
This will constitute half of your total assessment.
In the post-workshop phase, you will complete a project at your organization, which will constitute half of your total assessment.
Based on the above assessments, you will be awarded a certificate of completion from the University of Oxford and Fahamu.
This course was originally developed with the financial support of the European Union, the British Department for International Development, and the Canadian International Development Research Centre.
| 
