Why the time is NOW for Professional Leadership Development for DE&I Professionals

Charlotte Sweeney OBE talks about her motivation and rationale behind an exciting, unique, and practical new leadership programme in partnership with Cambridge Cubed.

Supporting DE&I Professionals to be successful in their roles
Over the last decade, the requirement for all organisations, across all sectors and countries, to embed diversity and inclusion into their business strategy, has increased significantly. This has been amplified further recently due to the global pandemic and the surge of the Black Lives Matter movement. In short, clients, stakeholders, and investors are quite rightly placing organisations under the spotlight and are seeking demonstrable success. Employees are not sitting back and waiting for change to happen, they are increasingly demanding it.

The knock-on effect is that the role of the D&I professional within an organisation is escalating. In my experience, DE&I professionals are increasingly expected to operate at an executive and senior leadership level to successfully bring about measurable results and transformation. The current challenge is that many DE&I specialists just aren’t getting the professional development or support to enable them to achieve these outcomes, especially within a short timescale.

Our mission is to bridge this gap so our industry colleagues can create sustainable and impactful change within their own organisations.

Three key leadership skills you can expect to develop through the programme:

1. Personal impact – developing self-awareness of your own leadership style and cognitive diversity; understanding and harnessing personal resilience and wellbeing towards creating and implementing successful DE&I strategies.
2. Team impact – learning how to appreciate and harness cognitive and behavioural diversity in your teams; exploring team work with your fellow participants through shared learning of best practice and co-coaching.
3. Organisational impact – learning the essential elements of change leadership and the importance of this, including the tools for cultivating psychological safety; building the capability to shift the thinking of DE&I as ‘initiative driven’ to a pervasive systemic programme of cultural change.

High impact and interactive training
Our aim forthe programme is to be an innovative and high impact development experience for our attendees. Kicking off in March with an introductory call and then progressing from April through to  October, the programme is delivered remotely and is extremely interactive, designed by highly experienced experts and practitioners from DE&I and leadership development. It also allows our participants access to ongoing development resources, coaching sessions, mentoring circles as well as LIVE sessions from experts driving DE&I change in organisations.

Interested in honing your DE&I leadership skills?
The DE&I Professional Leadership Programme prepares DE&I professionals operating across any sector, to step up to your leadership challenges and potential.We're interviewing right now for our programme participants and speaking to existing, new and aspirant senior DE&I Professionals.

So, if you’re highly motivated and want to build and develop your leadership skills to successfully navigate your organisation’s DE&I transformation, then please do get in touch to talk to us at info@charlottesweeney.com and liz@charlottesweeney.com.

To see the programme brochure and the application form, take a look at the Leadership Programme page on the website.

Image © Andrey Popov | Dreamstime.com