I recently joined the Oxford Women’s Leadership programme to give myself space to reflect with a group of peers to sharpen my professional impact.
In our first week, we spent time examining key experiences that have challenged, awoken and shaped us as leaders, and I found myself musing on some of the hardest, most confusing times in my life and my career, as well as on some of the positive and encouraging events.
The process has already helped me grow in self-awareness and draw on knowledge about what I bring to the table, something that had been present but dormant.
This experience has fuelled my excitement about Sport England’s refreshed leadership offer – the Leading the Movement programme.
Re-thinking leadership
Over the next four years, we’ve committed to invest £5 million of National Lottery funding to support leaders to prioritise tackling inequalities within sport and physical activity participation.
I believe that this investment into coaching, mentoring and training is one of the most important investments we can make into our sector.
And this is because what we need most, as leaders operating in an increasingly complex world, is the ability to hold up a mirror to ourselves and our organisations to see where we might be contributing to the structures that hold inequity in place.
Change has to start with us and we can’t change until we’ve taken time to sharpen our understanding of our strengths and areas of growth, and until we make some intentional changes to build on our existing body of experience.
But what do we mean by ‘leaders’?
Having worked in community-led settings, I’m acutely aware that at first glance, leadership as we know it can feel exclusive, but Leading the Movement is aiming to buck that trend.