During a visit to the College, the African Leadership University’s School of Wildlife Conservation (SOWC) made an offer to the College’s senior staff to attend their Xcelerator Training for Conservation Professionals.
Xcelerator is a six-month part-time leadership programme run by ALX that turns managers into high impact leaders and empowers them to fast track their growth. It synthesises the African Leadership Group’s 14 years of leadership expertise and applies its proven transformational leadership model to deliver four foundations of impactful leadership: self leadership, people leadership, commercial leadership and strategic leadership.
Xcelerator participants are taken through a six-phase module over 12 days of in-person intensives. They will be equipped with tools and frameworks to use in their organisations, undergo leadership challenges to directly apply their learning to real projects, and perform leadership diagnostics to best evaluate their performances.
This requires that the participants have two contact days a month, which they have to budget for in terms of travel and accommodation at one of the training centres, in this case Johannesburg.
Two of our staff members applied and were awarded part bursaries from ALX, namely Mr Christopher Kafoteka and Ms. Marilize van der Walt. The first contact session on 5 September, 2019 was led by some of the South African ALX trainers, Maxine Dorkin, Brian Chivere and Mr. Seth Trudeau.
The message was clear and practical from the point of entering through the venue doors at the SPACES on 5th Street, Sandton: Time and energy is the only resources one really has.
“The first contact session with our peers was in the form of introductions as one would usually do in meetings but this time with a difference. There were no immediate round robin introductions…no, our first activity was one had to build something that you could use to explain who you are to the others, and we only had 10 minutes!!! Brian opened the floor by saying ‘Hi Everyone, we are going to get right into it’ and then he turned around, hit the count down time clock on the screen to start counting down and gave the order to run to the table with all sort of things to make or build your own profile of yourself… You can just imagine what came out,” said Marilize.
“And so each session was presented in a way that one had to do something practical to engage with the people around you. Not one dull moment!”, she added.
The first session was on Self Leadership and one’s goals in relation to time and energy spent, and then being back in one’s normal setting having to apply what one has learnt.
Two major topics during the first contact session; which were emotional intelligence (EI) and profiles of success, attracted the attention of the SAWC two participants. Both Chris and Marilize concluded that in order to have the capacity to be aware of a situation and to be in control, one really needs to take a step back. This requires some thought about a situation and then handling it by taking into consideration what impact your reaction would have on the other party.
This was one of the first steps to building a profile of success, with different success profiles that include; the people developer, the business builder, the goal achiever, the big picture thinker, not forgetting the new initiative driver. A better understanding of these profiles will properly pave the way for the six month journey on the Xcelerator Leadership programme.
For more information on this dynamic course it can be viewed here https://www.alx.app/xcelerator/.
