A Summer Camp for Professionals to Boost Their Leadership Skills
Lifelong learning is a must in an ever-changing world. Still, it can be difficult for busy professionals to dedicate time to learning outside of their daily activities. With this in mind, Solvay Brussels School is organising the second edition of its flexible Leadership Summer Camp - a series of “à la carte” workshops taking place during the Summer. Interview with Valérie Vangeel, Academic Director.
What does "being a leader" mean today?
Whereas integrity can be defined as "doing the right thing even when nobody is watching", leadership involves doing the right thing even when everybody is watching. This has a double meaning:
- The first one is that being a leader means being able to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life, and inspire others to do the same. It is about to take action rather than just “watch” or complain. So it’s not a job title, it’s a way of life.
- The second meaning is that those who take up that challenge will eventually often end up leading individuals, teams or organisations. And when they do this, they are under public scrutiny and pressure… people are “watching”.
How do leaders manage this responsibility?
Leading requires a combination of innate drive and carefully cultivated skills.
For many of us, leadership has to be, up to some degree, innate. But since everybody will end up not only "watching" but looking to you, to understand how you expect people to behave, to treat each other, to be decisive,… it is important to continuously develop and grow your capabilities and skills to become even better at it.
Thus, a successful leader must be a lifelong learner: one who continuously challenges the status quo and more specifically challenges his or her status quo by acquiring new skills, seeking out new ideas, and embracing new challenges.
How can the Leadership Summer Camp contribute to this?
Our goal is to help professionals, managers and leaders to further develop their skills and enhance their expertise. To be able to do so, our workshops span the entire leadership spectrum, from individual leadership to leading others and teams – all the way up to organisational leadership. As such, all types of professional profiles can find the topics that tackle their specific challenges.
Because we know how busy professionals can be, our “à la carte” schedule allows them to follow a single workshop or take advantage of our special offers for a more comprehensive three- or five-day programme covering multiple workshops. This flexible approach is very important to us, because it allows our participants to follow trainings that they wouldn't be able to attend in other settings.
So, regardless of age, experience or background, the Leadership Summer Camp is a unique opportunity for all professionals to use the calmness of the summer to immerse themselves in leadership topics in a great learning environment - and be better prepared to tackle new challenges with confidence.