–by Iolanda Di Bernardo and Hareem Khan
WLA’s Leading Edge program is designed to help women in their first leading position to develop their leadership skills, enabling the transition of aspiring and early-career female managers into confident, capable and motivated leaders.
Throughout the six-month course participants are presented with topics including
- elements of a successful team / personal styles
- interpersonal communication and effective feedback
- peer-coaching (mentoring) exercises
- four doors of change.
Between two full-day workshops, participants complete modules (short, pre-recorded lectures, complemented by extra reading material) at their own pace, with online workshops every fortnight building on the knowledge acquired. At the end of the course, participants are invited to join the Alumni community.
FLEET Research Fellow Dr Iolanda di Bernardo, School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University
Iolanda: “It is not a minor commitment in terms of time, and while one of the biggest advantages could be building a network, it would not necessarily be a ‘useful’ professional network for someone in Academia.”
“However, even if the main target of the course is not the average early-career researcher, there are useful takeaways: even if you’re not leading a team you’re still leading yourself.”
“I found the lesson on how to be a good ‘coach’ (or mentor) particularly useful: eg, that when providing guidance it’s easy to just give advice and opinions, but it’s much more useful for the mentee if you help them get to the solution by themselves, as this helps them grow.”
Previously a FLEET PhD student at RMIT, Dr Hareem Khan is now at CSIRO
Hareem: “I participated with the intention to strengthen my leadership skills in preparation for future leadership roles I intend to hold.”
“It was fantastic to meet so many inspirational women in the full day workshop. They were from a wide variety of backgrounds and were all either already leaders hoping to enhance their skills or aspiring to become so in their respective fields. “
“This course also had a major component on leading in times of change, which was particularly useful for the current COVID-19 situation! In such circumstances, being a good leader or colleague entails understanding how people respond to change, and we were introduced to concepts such as the SARAH reactions and ABCDE models to better understand this and to respond positively.”
“I particularly enjoyed the case scenario discussions around different topics: with different groups of participants, we got to hear many different views, meeting everyone at some point. I also enjoyed the WAP Application project run in parallel to the workshops, which tested all the skills and tools that we were learning.”
“In the presentations module it was eye-opening to learn that all great speakers practice and aren’t necessarily born that way! They had to work very hard.”
“Overall, this course was a great experience for me and I now have a long list of thought-provoking books I want to read, TED talks I want to watch, and inspirational women leaders to look up to !”