Einir Hinson’s experience

I’d been in leadership and management for a long time and felt I was competent as a manager, but I don’t think I fully understood the difference between management and leadership. I also experienced quite a big failure at work within the past year, however it encouraged me to adopt a growth mindset and pivot into the next chapter of my career.

I’d been researching quite a lot of leadership and development courses on LinkedIn, spoke to other senior managers and looked at courses from other universities and I got sign posted a lot to the Manchester Leadership Development Programme. I got in touch with the team to speak about my learning style as I’m dyslexic and prefer learning face to face. The mix of classroom learning with professionals from a range of different industries sounded like it fitted what I was looking for, so I applied.

I wanted to develop my strategic leadership qualities and my knowledge on implementing innovation within business. The Hogan personality questionnaire has been really insightful in terms of learning where your strengths and weaknesses are and identifying areas to develop. We also learnt about effective team working and how to implement that within your service which I found really interesting.

The programme has been transformational for me personally. It really brings together the breadth of knowledge into one platform and equips you with the skills, competencies and confidence to perform at a high level.

Project development is huge in any public sector organisation, so putting all my project management skills I’ve learnt as part of the programme into practice on new bids has been great in order to deliver these projects successfully. 

We had a service day within my current organisation just after I completed the programme where we discussed the organisational objectives, goals, values, priorities and challenges over the next 12 months. I think if I hadn’t just been on the programme, I would have struggled with some of the exercises we did. However, because the tools that I’d learnt were still so fresh in my head, I felt really prepared and it was hugely successful day where we did a 360-degree evaluation of our whole service and shared it with the team who felt really passionate about it.

I found the coaching sessions really helpful as it enabled me to reflect on the learnings from the programme. They also helped me to consider what my career pathway might be going forward and think about what my goals, challenges and strengths were. The work-based projects are also really helpful as they allowed us to get back into our workplaces and think about how we could put what we’d learnt into practice. It was also great to be immersed with lots of different leaders from all over the world!

This is a great opportunity to invest in yourself and it’s probably the best investment you’ll ever make! My biggest advice would be to make sure you think about what your work-based project will be to ensure that it’s something you feel passionate about and can make a huge difference to your organisation. Be sure to also engage in the ongoing webinars that take place after the programme as they are a great way to keep in touch with other delegates from the programme.