University of Edinburgh
“I enjoyed the experience overall and am still thinking about some of the ideas and concepts it introduced. This course absolutely gets inside your head and I believe this will translate into long-term utility.”
“Greater understanding on leadership and personal implications. More selfawareness and increased self-confidence. It’s always useful to step back a little and raise your line of sight.”
“A much better understanding of leadership in the University context, and an insight into my own personality and aptitude for this”
Which parts of the workshop were the most useful to you?
• Critical incidents, discussions of management theory and ideas – good to think through and analyse various leadership issues and to consider different approaches.
• Simply discussing issues with other colleagues at this level, but sometimes with different perspectives (e.g. different parts of the University)
• The Nigel game was fascinating, but I think came form the premise that we would all become trapped in hierarchies given a chance. Not sure this is true, but it certainly gave us all food for thought.
• The case studies (critical incidents), which allowed me to see how real problems can arise and may be handled.
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The discussions about people’s working relationship problems were most useful
What have you gained from participating in this workshop?
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Time to reflect on leadership and to stand back from day-to-day issues that tend to cloud one's judgment.
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Increase awareness of how to react in certain situations
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More confidence in more own leadership capabilities and an appreciation that many others have similar (if not worse) working difficulties

What would you like to achieve or change as a result of participating in this workshop?
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Apply some of tools learned
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Would like to take time out each year to spend a few hours thinking in these terms.
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Being able to lead my group, division institute etc more efficiently
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Greater assertiveness in dealing with senior colleagues
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To be more reflective before acting.
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Work better with academic colleagues through better empathy with their approach.
What did you feel about the balance between theoretical inputs from the facilitator, discussions, practical work?
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Liked the balance, the course was very reactive so felt tailored to our group’s requirements.
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Good facilitator and good discussions – some more theory and some memorable guiding principles would have been good
To what extent was this workshop a good use of your time (rate out of 5, where 5 = excellent investment of my time and 1 = complete waste of my time)
5 (x5)
4 (x4)
3.5 (x2)
Any other comments
Not for the faint-hearted but was useful despite being periodically very uncomfortable
Very worthwhile course – I would highly recommend it to all academics
Excellent and thought provoking, and time spent problem-solving with other colleagues was great.
This course far exceeded my expectations; I will strongly recommend it to my colleagues, junior and senior.
As an administrator (member of staff), valuable opportunity to increase my insight into academic approaches to leadership.