“We are still very much bogged down in the idea of leaders as great individuals and people that are set apart from the group. By putting leaders on a pedestal and treating them as special and different, we lose what is really special about leadership which is that it’s the best of us, and we, everybody, is a part of great leadership.” –Prof Alex Haslam.
As carefully pointed out above by the UK professor of psychology that anyone holding the belief that leaders are set of special beings is wrong, Lagos Business School, the Pan-Atlantic University, in partnership with Ford Foundation, is setting the pace, in making the best out of promising individuals, with their ongoing hosting of young African non-profit leaders in a leadership and management training programme in Lagos –the state of excellence.
According to a report on Vanguard, the training is intended to integrate best practices into the nonprofit sector with its focus on developing the core areas of management, including funding structures, strategic planning, policy and legal issues, organizational development, staff and volunteer management, risk management, among others.
To facilitate this, the programme will operate in 4 segments over a 24-month period with a target to have 50 participants per run. The Lagos Business School with her partner, hence, projects to have at least 200 participants by the end of the two-year stipulated period. The idea behind this is to expose and help participants build skills that are universal and capable of sustaining the development of their individual pet organizations. In delivering on this end, the programme, according to Dr. Ijeoma Nwagwu, Faculty, Lagos Business School, will, therefore, combine online takes on a highly practical, experiential and interactive approach.
Dr. Ijeoma Nwagwu also highlighted that the programme will cut across various aspects of nonprofit management, and will strategically examine leadership effectiveness, business fundamentals, and social innovation. She revealed that the interest of the business school is to push participants around professionalism with the aim that they will adopt advanced leadership skills and expertise to transform whatever foundation they already had.
“The certificate programme aims to give young nonprofit leaders a platform on which to think about their work in a professional way and develop tangible leadership skills and knowledge around governance, structures, and processes that will enable them to build global organizations that would outlast the founders.”
She added that: “in many parts of the world, social enterprises are emerging to generate greater impact” affirming that “individuals and groups of people are identifying social problems and using principles and practices of business to drive impact and achieve results.”
On the completion of the programme, the facilitation will not only prompt participants to think about leadership from a completely new perspective but also train these set of young Africans to become more effective leaders, learn the fundamentals of running a sustainable organisation, and understand the dynamics of social innovation – the new space in which they are now creating change.
