SAL-INSEAD Legal Leadership Programme 2024

18 April 2024 

8.00am - 8.30am: Registration 

8.30am - 9.00am: Programme Introduction

9.00am - 1.00pm: Leadership Challenges and Transitions 

2.00pm - 6.00pm: Team Dynamics and Team Decision Making 

19 April 2024 

8.00am - 8.30am: Registration 

8.30am - 12.30pm: Leadership Decision-Making

2.00pm - 6.00pm: Leading Organisational Change

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Leadership Challenges and Transitions

We start the programme with an introduction session to make sure everyone is aligned on ‘Why are we here and what can we expect”? We will also discuss the different roles or ‘personas’ participants may have as they come into the programme. Through the discussion of key leadership challenges that participants experience, we can tailor the rest of the sessions based on participants’ needs. After the introduction, we will begin addressing the challenge of transitioning to leadership roles — individually and in one’s organization. Leading effectively requires the capacity to “grow” with one’s organization, adapt flexibly to the changing demands of the company and its task environment, and continue to develop and learn. Importantly, it requires one to master the psychology of power in leadership— the ability to navigate organizational landscapes and lead without formal authority. The ability to do so will help leaders generate value for the organization, their teams, and themselves. We will also discuss about positive workplace culture. How do legal leaders develop a culture that fosters personal and professional growth and psychological safety. Another prevalent issue leaders face today, which we will explore, is how to mentor and lead younger team members (e.g. Gen-Z). Understand their psychology and motivations will help leaders better manage and nurture such talent.

Team Dynamics and Team Decision Making 

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. - Helen Keller
The ability to lead teams and collaborate across business units is fundamental for leaders. Leaders need to be able to draw on the expertise, experience, and insights from diverse individuals to find cutting-edge solutions to overcome the complex challenges in today’s business world. It involves being able to find ways to make teams with diverse expertise work effectively by minimizing interpersonal conflict while simultaneously leveraging the abilities and opinions of the team and its members. Accomplishing both requires that we develop the ability to deal with both the content and the process of collaborative teamwork, and to navigate the difficulties that working in intense work groups inevitably entails.

In this session we will use a team decision-making exercise as a basis for allowing us to explore how groups that are made up of individuals from diverse functions, expertise and backgrounds typically function, and what are some of the common pitfalls of working in such collaborative group situations. This will lead to a discussion on strategies and techniques for optimizing group performance, how to empower others in your group, how to lead by example, and how to align individual and group objectives.

Leadership Decision-Making

To make complex decision through ambiguity, leaders need to engage in critical thinking to make sure that the data they are using is relevant and of high quality. Doing so is particularly challenging when projects are characterized by uncertainty about how to make decisions. Leaders often underperform when they must solve complex problems that deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, andrisk. Facing such situations causes several predictable problems, including ignoring quality indicators of data, using incomplete or missing data to make decisions, make decisions on data which are easier to remember (but not necessarily correct), or make decisions without confidence (or too much confidence).

This session will build on our previous session by addressing how leaders can avoid these problems as they are trying to make the best decisions to lead and navigate an ecosystem with different stakeholders. To evaluate how we do this, we will first complete a decision-making exercise. We will then use this exercies to discuss predictable problems when making decisions under uncertainty and incomplete information, and how leaders can achieve their goals by creating a process that helps them structure the decision-making process. In doing so, we will focus specifically  on the role that biases play in our decision making and how to eliminate these.