Leading a Leadership Workshop for Young Women Graduates

I had the privilege of leading a Young Women in Leadership workshop on behalf of Graduate Women International (GWI), during their triennial conference in Cape Town this past August. The company I work for, DRA, generously sponsored my time and expenses as a contribution towards Women's Month, which we celebrate every August in South Africa.

How did I get involved?

The past President of GWI, an old friend, had cajoled, persuaded and outright nagged me into doing the workshop, but she actually didn’t have to work as hard as she thought to convince me – I thrive on meeting active young people looking to make the world a better place, and am happy to give back to the STEM world if it means a brighter future for a few young women. It turned out this group consisted of some 17 young women mostly in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) academic or nascent private sector career tracks from around the world, so – sweet spot!

By the way, many of us have started to call this space STEEM - Science, Technology, Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Math. No doubt it aligns with Steemit's own core values.

Who were the participants?

The group included young women from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Panama, Russia, the United States, Austria, New Zealand, Australia and (yes!) even from South Africa, where I live, all in their late twenties to mid thirties, and most at pivotal times in their careers when leadership training could help equip them to take the bold choices they need to take to realise their leadership potential. I'm now trying to convince them to become Steemians and would love your help!

The young women at dinner after the workshop - the only photo I have which captures most of the group together, so you're getting this one first

The workshop programme

I based the day's programme on excellent material prepared by the GWI, which incorporated the following exercises:

• Stand By Your Quote
• Lost at Sea
• Water Bottle Maze
• Problem Solving and Creative Thinking (with Bruno Mars)

We closed out the workshop with a variation on the original programme - we covered vision driven strategy and planning, and how it relates to governance (and vice versa).

Stand By Your Quote

“Stand by your Quote” was about getting the women to reflect on where they are in their personal leadership journey. It was also a terrific way for us all to get to know each other and for me to get a sense of what the group dynamics might be. Much better than the usual go around the room and say a little bit about yourself!

A couple of my favourite quotes from the 40 or so we'd picked from around the world:

"You don't need a title to be a leader." (multiple attributions)

“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.” (Malala Yousafzai)

“We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.” (Arianna Huffington)

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” Warren Bennis

More recently, at the launch of the King IV^TM governance framework in Sandton last Tuesday, one of the keynote speakers, Reuel Khoza, turned the thinking around: "Governance is leadership in practice". I'll give you some feedback on the launch in a separate post.

Lost at Sea

“Lost at Sea” was a tricky one – it purported to be a an exercise in intelligently figuring out what you would need if you were lost at sea, but in reality it was an exercise in communication, collaboration and – yup – leadership. Won't give anything away.

Water Bottle Maze

The “Water Bottle Maze” was hysterical – and a real learning experience for me as well as the women. By the time we got to this exercise we all knew each other a bit and the atmosphere was happy and fun-charged. My able assistant and I prepared a maze of water bottles on the floor, divided the women into 3 groups which then each picked a leader, and the objective was for each team member, one by one, to get from one end of the maze to the other by the leader shouting instructions on which way to go to avoid hitting one of the bottles. First team to get all members to the finish line “wins”.

By now you would have picked up that there was a catch, cause too easy, right? Indeed, two catches. One, the maze walker is blindfolded. Two, the leader cannot use any words which we would normally use to denote direction. They had to come up with, and remember, a code for each team. I won’t tell you about the winning team’s code, but it was brilliant and the leader was visionary to have thought it up. This was an exercise in trust and clarity of communication and we all learned (while laughing so hard we cramped up) the importance of clear, simple communication when asking people to go where they haven’t gone before.

Problem Solving and Creative Thinking

“Problem Solving and Creative Thinking” was one of those after lunch exercises where people have to move or they’ll get dozy and fall asleep. We decided to use a catchy song by Bruno Mars on my assistant’s phone (Uptown Funk) to get everyone moving and in the mood.

And then we would sit down again, post boogie-ing.

Again, I won’t go into the detail, but suffice to say this exercise is a bit like crowdsourcing wisdom in how to handle difficult people at work. We were all pleasantly surprised by the range of responses to some wicked problems, and the interesting consensus on most (nobody had time to peek at others’ answers – this is a pressure exercise), but also how divergent at times people’s views were and how we were able to learn from the divergence as well as the consensus.

Problem Solving and Creative Thinking (when the music had stopped and the group was thinking through all the answers written)

Vision Driven Strategy and Planning...and how it relates to Governance

By the afternoon tea break, my young charges were beginning to flag, so I decided to ditch the last formal exercise and give the women a lightning fast talk on “Vision Driven Strategy and Planning”…since they kept asking me about how they could help their organisations become more strategically driven. I gave them a quick overview of visualising getting to the top of the mountain (Kilimanjaro, for example) with stakeholders as a way of developing a shared vision of the future, using the Six Capitals framework as a way of articulating the value to be found in that future state, then planning to get to the future state from the present state.

We talked about the difference between an input-driven approach to strategy (er, doesn’t work, because taking one step in any particular direction doesn’t mean you have any idea where you’re going) versus an outcomes based approach where key stakeholders have a voice in designing the shared future. The sharp-eyed among you will have seen the link to the King outcomes-based approach to governance.

Analogy of the day: sailing around the world. You know which ports you want to stop in, so you set sail for those and you plan to get to each of those ports with enough resources so you don’t starve or dehydrate to death and arrive healthy and happy. You might have to make adjustments along the way as you encounter storms, but if you’ve done your research well you have a pretty good idea of what the conditions are going to be en route and where you should be by when along the way. It helps if the crew is in the know on the plan.

The unsurprising conclusion was that many organisations don’t communicate that end goal, it’s not shared, performance towards achieving the goal isn’t monitored on the basis of facts and evidence, and the haphazard results don’t help the organisation succeed. The women left with a renewed sense that keeping their eyes on long term goals – personal, professional and organisational – will help them in their leadership journey.

Day's End

We all seemed to feel at the end of the workshop that we'd travelled a tremendous distance together in a short time. I'm waiting for the final evaluation from GWI and will share it with you - maybe you can attract other young women into doing the programme.

Some of the group proudly holding their certificates of participation at the end of the day

The US, Ghana and Zimbabwe proudly represented!

So what did I get out of it? A bit surprisingly for me, some powerful new friendships and a renewed appreciation for the challenges and hurdles young people are facing in their career journey. I wasn't surprised by the wisdom these lovely people have already collected along the way.

Many of the workshop participants have joined in a WhatsApp group in which they support each other in their GWI activities (and it’s a fun group - we're learning about the seasons and life in St Petersburg, Moscow and Hong Kong among other places), as well as in a Facebook group that also posts their leadership journey stories. Some of these young women are destined to have a powerful impact in their ecosystems. I’m looking forward to seeing where they go. In the meantime, it’s humbling and enriching to watch just how much and how well they support each other.

Some of the workshop participants, bonded and exhausted, at the end of the day

Persuading the Group to get on Steemit

It's unfortunate that I can't yet tag them on Steemit! I'm working on them through the WhatsApp group to consider getting on the platform. I’m keen for them to get into Steemit so their voices can be heard beyond their organisations and GWI – what a terrific global platform Steemit could be to help women articulate their value and contributions in business, academia and life.

Steemians, if you say something inviting to these GWI women, I will post it on the WhatsApp group to boost the idea they should become active Steemians themselves!