David Broadhead has a wide range of clients, ranging from the NHS to micro start-ups. What they have in common is a desire and a need to improve their management and leadership capabilities. “They are people that are professionally qualified in other areas, but not in management and leadership skills,” says David. “People come to us with the realization that there is more to management and leadership than just fumbling their way through.”
Once a person has completed one of David’s courses, they should have a very different mindset and set of management and leadership capabilities from when they embarked on the course. “We want to inspire people, change their attitudes and change their attitudes to learning,” he says. “We want to put them on a different path.” No more fumbling their way through.
David’s company, Partners in Management, is a Chartered Management Institute Approved Centre, operating in a very similar way to a business school. For the past 17 years, it has designed and delivered accredited and nationally recognised leadership and management development programmes up to masters level. Most of the people who sign up have a degree (50%), with 25% already having a masters qualification or PHD and 25% possessing a qualification of some sort in an unrelated subject.
Partners In Management’s flagship programme is its seven day ‘21st Century Leaders’ course, a programme that has a heavy focus on intrapreneurship. What is intrapreneurship? It’s a combination of entrepreneurship and leadership, two critical capabilities in the modern world of work.
Intrapreneurship is something that David is passionate about and has been for a long time. It has been a core focus of Partners in Management since 2009. In fact, David says his organisation was the lead, the pioneer of intrapreneurship. “We spread the message.”
According to David, the starting point with the ‘21st Century Leaders’ course is establishing how the role of leaders has changed over the past few years. “The approach of the past is not what is needed now. Leadership has changed from being commander to coach. We no longer lead from a position of knowledge and excellence.”
Roughly 40 leaders go through David’s courses each year, meeting on average one day a month for six months. The groups are small – normally eight but up to 12 people, maximum. It’s very much an action learning approach. “We throw ideas into the melting pot. People have to learn new ideas and concepts.”
Being at the helm of a small business, David knows how important it is to ensure course costs and demands are manageable. “We appreciate the pressures that people are under in terms of time and costs.”
Technology can of course assist here. David plans to start exploring ways that Partners in Management could offer distance learning programmes. “Technology has a big part to play in assisting the facilitated approach. We don’t do it yet, but are looking at it.”
At the moment, David is focusing on putting all the course materials online. That’s where Noddlepod comes in. David had been wanting to find a way to have content easily available online and had got in a Moodle expert to work with lacking. Then, by “a strange quirk of fate, I had a call out of the blue from Ollie”. It just so happened that Ollie, who David had not previously worked with, was on a sales trip close to David’s offices in Huddersfield. “We had a long chat and I thought ‘This is the answer to our problem’. It was a quirky coincidence, but then some things happen in life that seem random.”
Partners in Management is still in beta phase with Noddlepod. It has explored it with a test group and received very positive results, but has not rolled it out with all users yet. That will happen once work has finished on a new programme.
One of the things that David really likes about Noddlepod is that he anticipates it giving his company the edge over some of its competitors. “We will have a facility that other providers don’t have. It gives us the opportunity to support in-house facilitation programmes and support business learning in the future.”
David thinks there are several qualities necessary to be successful as a small, independent business. “You have to have a vision, be prepared for failures and successes. You have to experiment, evolve your programmes and have resilience.”
He is at the early stage of the learning curve with Noddlepod, but is very hopeful that it will be a good one, helping him to take his vision forward.
Read more about David Broadhead here.