Leadership Impact Festival 2024

Why a festival? In the tradition of a 'fe-stə-vəl', the Leadership Impact Festival by the Henley Centre for Leadership (LIFT@HCL) is about celebrating together as a growing community and hearing diverse voices of resourceful and eye-opening insights from practitioners, alumni, business leaders and our own research at the Henley Centre for Leadership. With this we help shape sustainable positive relationships in our community. This leadership festival is also about deeply deliberating and co-creating tangible insights and outputs for leadership and leadership development practice in business and society.

See what we heard from attendees at our 2023 Festival:

"Challenge to take more decisive action. And a public commitment to follow through on delivery of that."

"Feeling part of something exciting and re-energising the value and importance of leadership."

Why 'leading sustainably in stormy weather'? Our work at the Henley Centre for Leadership and the debates in our last Festival surfaced tensions faced in daily leadership experiences and strategic decision-making when delivering services, products and social and ecological contributions. On one hand organisations aspire to be human-centric and purpose-rich, which allows people, businesses, and society to sustainably thrive and perform, whilst on the other hand organisations face permanently accelerated demands and performance pressure, eroding resource bases and extreme events or other shocks.

This year's festival therefore focuses on not if, but how we can bring these two realities together. To address what we coin as 'leading sustainably in stormy weather', we bring together topics too often addressed in separation and left in silos. Instead, we think and practice leadership as a multifaceted and integrative capability to address the big questions.

Our Festival programme therefore connects and bridges diverse leadership facets and practices such as:

• Leadership for thriving and likewise performing people, businesses and society - what are the practicalities and how do we get there?
• Leading sustainably and the challenge and potential of technologies such as artificial intelligence;
• Leadership for the mastery of the climate emergency as organisations engage in their core activities;
• Leading sustainably for equity, diversity, equality and inclusion when a business is under commercial pressure and not only in fair weather;
• Your own thoughts and contributions to the day.

To help you find an integrative take on this pressing overall theme we pursue generative questions. What can organisations focus on? What can leadership add, practically? What about getting to a leadership mindset that every action has integrative sustainable outcomes? What are hurdles in successful leadership practices we can learn from?

Having these topics at the Festival and joining them with your rich experience enables you to address those demands more holistically. Our co-creative festival design assists your leadership practice and your organisation's leadership capability to sustain being purpose-rich and performing organisations, whatever the economic or socio-political weather has in store.

Why impact? At the Henley Centre for Leadership, we are convinced that we do not have the luxury anymore to run gatherings like these without leaving a strong footprint. When we say 'leading sustainably for good', this must also apply to the Festival.

Sustainability in a foundational understanding means 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' (1987, United Nations Brundtland Commission). Hence, this gathering should not use add further risks for the future regarding technology, equity, inequalities or climate. The Festival will be generative and create more than we invested for a range of aspects, which we thus pay forward to the future of leadership. Impact is the route to that ambition.

How impact comes about: what you, we, your organisation and your wider networks take away?

These Festivals are part of an ongoing journey. Attendees are co-creators of the Festival outcomes. They join, immerse themselves, work and become contributors and ambassadors for Festival insights and outputs. We focus on tangible and rich learning and outputs. We inspire each other and work on the leadership of individual participants and their organisations.

The design puts clear ideas and practices into personal contexts, considering leadership transformation projects, successful leadership cases or nudging personal leadership mindsets and behaviours. We also seek pledges, tangible commitments, post-Festival projects and future collaborations. We pursue attendees' ownership of post-Festival leadership action and impact for organisational and societal issues to guarantee sustained post-Festival activities, impact and momentum.

Individual attendees from the 2023 Festival took away serval key insights:

"High quality new relationships with people who genuinely care about better leadership."

"Clarity on how I want to show up as a leader."

"The ability to 'decompress' from the hustle."

And for organisations? From the 2023 Festival attendees initiated international learning collaborations and programmes. Participants formed “connections from across the attendees to connect with to improve my organisation.” Others committed to convince their organizations to implement stress and well-being focussed assessment and interventions into some departments.

Who will you join? As a contributor from 2023 put it: "We are all in this together - in spite of our disparate ages (possibly from 17 to 70), backgrounds, private/public sector, etc, we all deal with the same leadership questions and challenges."

To break typical leadership echo chambers, we curate different voices to cross-pollinate. As contributors and ambassadors of the Festival, you will meet and work with practitioners, academics, thought and action leaders, policy people or boundary spanners and their leadership insights. We welcome people from everywhere in organisations: executives, managers, informal leaders, development experts, change-makers, alumni and students.

This Festival is for you. Come, join and make the difference you want to see!

Places are limited, so book now through our online store. The ticket options are listed below:

- Early bird tickets, £300 per person (available up to 15 April 2024)

- Henley Business School alumni tickets, £335 per person (available from 16 April 2024)

- General tickets, £370 per person (available from 16 April 2024)

The Festival will begin with an optional pre-event evening reception at 7:30pm on 5 June for those arriving in the evening. The full schedule for the Leadership Impact Festival 2024 on 6 June 2024 is as follows:

8:30am - Arrival and Registration

9:00am - Welcome and Setting the Scene, led by Professor Bernd Vogel

9:30am - Opening the Horizon and Facing Hard Facts on 'Leading Sustainably in Stormy Weather', led by Helene Murphy and Jamie Crummie

10:45am - Morning Break

11:05am - Participant Practices Deep Dive: 'Leading Sustainably in Stormy Weather', led by Professor Bernd Vogel

12:50pm - Lunch

2:00pm - 'Leading Sustainably in Stormy Weather'? A Panel on Motivation? In the Way? What Works? Led by Jenny Gardner, Frank Kellenberg and Haffsa Rizwani

3:20pm - Afternoon Break

3:40pm - From Festival Attendee to Activist: Noticing, Learning, Embedding and Partnering Sustainably Going Forward, led by Professor Toki Wright and Professor Bernd Vogel

5:00pm - Voices, Impact and Footprint, Farewell and See You Soon, led by Professor Bernd Vogel

5:30pm - Festival Reception

6:30pm - End

Each of the above talks and panels will feature audience interactions, co-creation, participant work and enlightenment.

Speakers

Professor Bernd Vogel, Professor in Leadership, Founding Director of Henley Centre for Leadership UK and Henley Centre for Leadership Africa and Research Division Lead at Henley Business School, University of Reading

Christoph Raudonat, Chair of the International Alumni Board at Henley Business School, University of Reading, and Management Consultant

Helene Murphy, Henley Business School alumna and former Chief People Officer with Unite Students and Formula

Jamie Crummie, Co-Founder of Too Good To Go

Jane Hollinshead, Chief People Officer at Canary Wharf Group plc

Frank Kellenberg, Vice President and Global Head of Culture and Inclusion at Sandoz

Haffsa Rizwani, PhD student at Henley Business School, University of Reading, and diversity, equity and inclusion expert

Professor Toki Wright, Chair of Berklee College of Music's Professional Music Department and MC, producer, writer, radio host, arts diplomat and community organiser

Jenny Gardner, Senior Director of Future Capabilities, Innovation Strategy and Portfolio at Digital Battlespace Solutions, Saab