Developing your Leadership as a Process

Welcome to your course and to your track on leading with sense. With FutureLearn, we have organised a series of tracks to help you develop your leadership as a process. You will see that there are four tracks that will be available, the first one being at an initial level to start developing yourself as a leader, becoming a leader. Then in a more intermediate level, you will grow your leadership and anchor your style of leadership by working and understanding better what kind of leader you are and how you can grow as a leader. The third track will go even further in an advanced level in your mastery of leadership so that you can apply your leadership skills to organisations.

And finally, the last track will be the mastering of your leadership skills so that you can apply it to different situations, contexts, or people. For each of these tracks, who will have four courses that will help you and guide you through the different steps. And we’ll have different activities and engage you in your development. What we really rely on is the important point and the fact that relationships create or destroy value. So leadership for us means relational leadership because relational competence determines performance. And performance is what you are about. The high level of relational competence is based on lasting relationships of trust. And trust is a key word in our development.

With the savoir-relier methodology, we will train you to produce lasting and performing trust. The world needs sense. The world needs sense. This is so important for you to keep that sentence in mind because everything that we will be working on in this tracks is about sense. So to consider yourself in this perspective, you just have to look at what we’re going through right now, the COVID pandemic. We know that crises and moments that are hard tend to make us close in on ourselves when in fact what is so important is that we try to relate, connect ourselves, and create those social connections that are so valuable and so important. The point is, how do we develop those skills?

How do we grow as more capable of improving your relational competence and improving the world around us? This is what these leadership tracks are about because you cannot operate alone. And you need to move from your egosystem, the one that tends to close you on yourself, to an ecosystem where all the bubbles of relationships that you have, your circle of family, for example, or friends or your work circle, that need to connect with one another and for which you need to operate your skills and your competence of relational development. In developing your leadership, we have developed this method called the savoir-relier, which is based on the understanding of the fact that we are relational beings.

So savoir is a French word that means to know. It also means knowledge. And the relier means to connect, to bind, or by extension to rely on. And we know how important reliability is. So what matters in this approach with the savoir-relier is to transform your internal and external tensions into positive relationships so that you can engage in projects. So the savoir-relier methodology will produce individual and interpersonal trust to help you grow and influence the world with a positive impact. So the method itself relies on getting for you to better understand yourself, to work on you as a person, but also to better open up to others. And your relationship to yourself is not just you.

It’s one other person, a group, and society. And as you move towards the different steps of the courses, you will grow this trust. And you will engage in acts of responsibility, which is what leadership is about, being responsible for your acts and for how you engage people with you. So in this expert track, you will find videos. You will find moments of reflection. And you will find exercises that engage you in practise that is, on the one hand, written in the platform but also interactive exercises with people that you will decide to work with. We hope you enjoy the track and you enjoy our different activities.

And as a first practise, you can go to your next step in the articles and discussions, and use the comments section to answer some questions, and start discussing with other learners, and share your experience in leadership development, and discover what others are going through in answering the same questions and discussing the same issues together. We look forward to guiding you and step by step moving on to our first course in our first track.