Dr Paul Wood : WORKSHOP FACILITATION
Paul is regularly commissioned to design or co-design bespoke leadership and organizational developmental programs for his clients. Adaptive leadership and vertical development are core principles that underpin Paul’s approach to program design. In this respect Paul doesn’t conceptualize “leadership” as a function of designated authority, but rather the ability to create followership and influence through one’s own behavior. This recognizes the need to grow participants as leaders rather than simply give them more tools. More specifically, to grow their capacity to effectively lead through ambiguity, change, challenge, and assist others to maintain wellbeing and peak performance in the face of constantly changing needs and requirements.
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For public and state sector clients Paul’s program design will explicitly link to core elements of the Public Service Commission’s (PSC) Leadership Success Profile (LSP), which forms the foundation for effective leadership in the public sector. Paul is a member of the Leadership Development Centre (LDC)’s development panel, which through a process of the greatest rigour was selected to provide leadership development services for the public sector. Paul is also part of the All of Government development provider panel for leadership services. Paul regularly co-designs LSP based programs with other panel members for the LDC.
Recent examples of LSP linked Programs Paul co-designed and facilitates:
Senior Emerging Leaders Program
The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) Senior Emerging Leaders Program is designed and facilitated by Paul to build competencies across a number of crucial areas to prepare participants to advance into executive positions. This includes strengthening Crown and Maori relationships, building cultural competence, decision making under pressure, and inclusive leadership.
Successful Leaders Program
The Treasury’s Senior Leaders Program was designed for leaders of leaders within the central agencies of government. It was the first leadership progam explicitly co-designed on the basis of the SSC’s Leadership Success Profile. Due to its acclaim and success it is now more broadly available within the public sector.
Leading the Oranga Tamariki Way
This Program was co-designed to accelerate Oranga Tamariki’s leadership strategy. It was designed to be conversation rather than content led, based on experiential and action based learning methods, encouraging leaders to take responsibility for their own learning, and providing proactive and reactive support to make this easy, building a community of learners in each cohort, and setting expectations for risk taking, experimentation and the practise of leadership.
Recent examples of private sector programs Paul designed and facilitates:
Mental Fitness
Lyttelton Port Company commissioned Paul to design and facilitate a four part Leading for Mental Fitness workshop series for its leaders and a three part Building Mental Fitness workshop series for general staff. Net Promoter Scores from attending participants have been world class and systemic changes in how leaders promote wellbeing, resilience, and safety have been implemented.
Accountability and Aspiration
Chapman Tripp’s Anti-bullying and harassment program. This program was designed to create buy-in for every member of the Chapman Tripp community to actively and deliberate identify and manage the behaviours that can reduce the civility of their workplace and to more deliberately demonstrate those behaviours that make CT the best possible place to work. This was intended to take the CT culture from great to fantastic and reduce the likelihood that bullying and harassment would occur. What constitutes bullying and harassment was also explored, as where options and points of contact should someone be concerned that they had witnessed or experienced this behaviour.
AMP Adaptive Leadership Program: Mobilising Oneself and Others to Tackle Tough Challenges and Flourish
This program was designed to enhance leaders’ capacity to effectively lead through VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). The program focused on understanding the journey of personal, professional, and organisational growth; and how to cultivate the ingredients and attributes required to accelerate this process. It also explored leading through change, creating a learning culture, and facilitating high performance across individuals and teams. Workshops were delivered in half-day bites to enable real-world practice and implementation of learnings in-between workshops. Participants also completed pre and post-activities and met with learning buddies to further solidify learning.
Standardised Workshops
Paul is an expert in human psychology who is passionate about assisting people to develop the “soft skills” required to live better and more productive lives. Based on this passion and expertise Paul has designed and regularly delivers a number of standardized workshop offerings. The most sought after of these are:
Mental Fitness
This program helps participants more proactively and successfully build and maintain their capacity to remain effective under stress and pressure (i.e., mental toughness/grit), recover afterwards (resilience), and proactively increase the general spring in their step (wellbeing). Techniques taught include those used by the Special Forces community and amongst elite athletes.
Managing Neurodivergence
This workshop creates insights into how to effectively manage and unlock the potential of staff with neurodivergence. It explores what neurodivergence is, how to have conversations with staff you suspect might be neurodivergent, and ways to lead such staff that reduce barriers for themselves and colleagues while allowing them to play to their strengths.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence equips participants to more accurately and effectively recognize, understand, and manage their own and other people’s emotions. Research has shown time and time again that such emotional agility is the single biggest enabler or barrier to leadership performance and progression. This workshop teachers readily implemented techniques to effectively increase all areas of emotional intelligence.
The Coach Approach for Leaders
This workshop upskills leaders to effectively coach their staff in both formal and informal settings. The workshop looks at how coaching is different and similar to other leadership approaches (e.g., mentoring, managing, leading), it outlines common applied coaching models, how to behave with a coach approach, how to determine whether coaching is the right approach with a staff member, and the psychology of goals and motivation to increase participants ability to assist staff take ownership for their development and achieve their goals.
The Art of Feedback
This program helps participants create learning cultures where feedback is business as usual for continuous improvement. The program focuses on different types of feedback, how to mitigate the psychological triggers that stop feedback from being effective, how to have courageous conversations, and effectively manage one’s own and others emotions during feedback.
Influence like the CIA and FBI
This workshop is a must for those success depends on their ability to effectively influence and maintain relationships with others. This workshop teaches insights into human motivation and behaviour used by both the CIA and FBI. In this workshop you will learn about universal human drivers and how to apply simple techniques to better understand, connect with, and influence others.
