Leadership Skills

Beacons have provided opportunities for managers to learn about and develop their leadership skills for more than 20 years. During our programmes, managers learn about leadership from fellow participants, as well from our experience of organisations ranging from IT to bread making and right across the public sector.

Our leadership programmes focus particularly on the difference between leadership and management. For many managers and team leaders this distinction is unimportant and unfamiliar. Management processes, such as organising people and controlling how resources are being used, are quite familiar...but setting out a direction and making changes happen are less comfortable and familiar.

Leadership implies movement, change, aligning people and taking people somewhere new.

Our programmes can include some of the management skills of problem solving, planning and organising the present work of others. There's more detail about this on our management training pages. However our main emphasis is practical and readily learnt techniques to improve direction setting, aligning and motivating people in a continuously changing environment

For many, one of the first steps in leadership is a better understanding of individual strengths and weaknesses and how they impact on and affect the behaviour of other people. You may find our 360 Feedback pages offer a powerful and interesting way to achieve this.

We offer two leadership programmes, both of which can be completely tailored to the needs of your organisation and the individual participants taking part:

Leadership in Action

We offer leadership training with a practical, partially outdoor flavour through our popular Leadership in Action Course which we first ran in 1981 - the particular part of the country where we ran it gave us our company name! Today Leadership in Action runs at The Speech House in the Forest of Dean, either in-house or as a public programme involving participants from several organisations.

Leadership-Plus

If you are interested in jointly designing and developing a longer, more comprehensive and work-based management development programme, we have had great success with the Beacons Leadership Plus programme, which is based on your precise requirements in terms of numbers, competencies or skills, duration and of course budget.