Barry Johnston

Cutting through the noise about leadership

When you work within a large organisation, you are exposed to a lot of noise – a multitude of soundbites – about what leadership is, or should be. It’s rare that you have the opportunity to step back and really reflect on what leadership means to you.

I went into the Achieving Leadership Excellence programme at LSE looking to contextualise my leadership experience within a more structured framework. I wanted to get a sense check on my own leadership style and approaches, and delve deeper into the kinds of tools and capabilities I needed to develop in order to advance my leadership credentials. It was a rare opportunity to take stock.

LSE appealed to me for a raft of reasons: the school’s reputation, location, the calibre of its faculty and the specifics of the programme content. What I hadn’t expected, was to come face to face with from such a breadth of different industries. Within my cohort, we were a very diverse group: politicians, business owners, executives from multinationals, all of us facing a broad spectrum of challenges. What made the learning experience so rich was finding the common ground within the diversity. LSE faculty did an expert job in driving the group dynamic and ensuring that we remained fully engaged throughout our five days on campus in London. It was a great opportunity to experience and share different perspectives – it’s something you rarely find in internal training or development programmes.

The five days conclude with very candid, one-to-one feedback session with the tutor, where you contrast pre-programme feedback on your leadership from peers with the insights, discoveries and takeaways you generate over the week. I’d come into the programme with a degree of scepticism about how much I would realistically be able to achieve in a short time, but my experience was really eye-opening. Faculty are very personable and take a genuine and individualised interest in your development. And talking it through with my tutor, I was able to pinpoint some actionable learnings for me as a leader – for instance the imperative to remain authentic to yourself.

For young leaders, there is a challenge in today’s environment to maintain confidence and flexibility while managing constant change. Perhaps more than ever, our EQ matters more than our IQ. We’re navigating disruption at unprecedented speed, and leading a new generation who bring with them fresh needs and expectations. The Achieving Leadership Excellence programme gave me a solid framework to help build and sustain confidence, remaining true to my authentic self, as I navigate this changing environment.

I would recommend the programme to any leader looking to cut through the noise, stereotypes and the soundbites, and lead the future with assurance and purpose.