News

Having leadership skills is essential for a modern workforce in order to build effective teams, negotiate, motivate staff, create and manage innovative projects and look after your own wellbeingthroughout the process. However, learning leadership skills can be a challenge. Many people do not get access to leadership training until they are in positions of management, which means that junior members of the work force can be held back by a lack of skills. Or people may pay for their own leadership training which is often expensive, and therefore not accessible to people from all backgrounds. Our project sought to remedy this by providing a 12-week programme of leadership skills development for the Erasmus+ alumni network.

We have brought together 63 Alumni from across OCEANS, ESN, EMA, garagERASMUS, WBAA and ASAF to participate in this interactive online training, which is provided by Gemma Perkins from The Self Leadership Initiative. So far, we have been learning about how to embed emotional intelligence in one’s leadership style, to motivate people, manage time, build empathetic teams based on personality typing, facilitate change and to manage stress and burnout. As well as the main training programme, each participant is also receiving a 1:1 coaching session to help them explore a leadership challenge or topic of their choice. These have included things like career transitions, preparing for a difficult conversation and managing their community action projects. 

 

We were also delighted that alongside the training we were able to hear from two external guest speakers who shared their practical insights about what it means to be a leader:

 

• Jean Lambert had a 20-year career in the European Parliament and shared lots of wisdom about motivating teams, goal setting in the political sphere and bringing people on board with your vision. 

 

• Bodil Agasøster is a product manager for data management at Sikt. Despite working in a technical role, she shared the importance of empathy, listening skills and aligning with stakeholders needs and goals in order to successfully implement projects. 

 

You can watch the recordings of the two leadership interviews on the OCEANS youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@TheOceansNetwork-

 

We are very pleased that this project is building the capacity of our members and allowing alumni from across different Erasmus organisations to meet each other and share their experiences. The training element will come to a close on 20th July and all participants will receive their final coaching sessions by 12th August.

 

Zinsou Cosme ODJO

Cameroon, Yaoundé, 13th of July 2023