Programmes

This page preserves the archived catalogue of Banff Executive Leadership Inc. It is a record of what the practice ran during its working life. Nothing here is scheduled, priced or available, and no dates, fees or registration details are carried forward.

How the programmes were designed

The practice ran both public and customized programmes, in board governance and in executive leadership practices. Its stated design philosophy was short and unusually specific about what it was trying to avoid.

Design rested on ongoing competency-based research and on active learning approaches, and the stated purpose of both was to keep the development work practical and up to date. The competency research meant the curriculum was derived from what senior people were observed to actually do well or badly, gathered through focus groups, interviews and participant feedback over many years, rather than from a model borrowed from a textbook. The active learning commitment meant that a session was built around doing the work, in simulation, live case and structured peer comparison, rather than around hearing about it.

The test the practice set itself followed from that. Participants were expected to take home tools, models and insight they could apply to their own circumstances and put to work right away. It is a demanding standard, and it is deliberately narrower than the usual claim made for executive education. It rules out material that is interesting but not portable, and it puts the burden of proof on the week after the programme rather than on the programme itself.

Board governance

Two offerings ran under the governance heading.

• Improving Board Governance: The Real Work of Governance. The practice's principal board programme, covering the role of the board compared with management, best practices in governance, the principal governance models, evaluation of board effectiveness, and the trust, risk and communication material that determines whether any of it holds. The full curriculum is recorded on the board governance page.
• Governance for Civic Councils, Commissions and Boards. A separate offering for the public and quasi-public governing bodies whose circumstances differ enough from a corporate board to warrant their own room: police commissions, library boards, economic development and tourism bureaus, and transit commissions among them. These bodies govern under statute, in public, and often with elected members alongside appointed ones, which changes the practical shape of almost every governance question. Conflict of interest, confidentiality, the boundary with administration, and accountability to a public rather than to a membership all behave differently.

Executive leadership

Four offerings ran under the executive heading.

• Expert Government Relations and Best Practices. Government structures and processes treated as systems to be understood rather than obstacles to be lobbied, covering civil service and political processes separately, who actually influences government and by what route, and the construction of a durable public affairs strategy.
• Enhancing Executive Leadership and Strategy. The core executive programme: systems and network thinking, strategic thinking and implementation, personal style and profile assessment, ethical leadership, and financial and risk management, taught through live cases on complex strategic problems.
• Collaborative Leadership. Team leadership, empowerment, delegation and direction, accountability mechanisms, and the practical work of leading across alliances, partnerships and joint ventures where formal authority does not reach.
• Creativity and Innovation Leadership. Building the organizational conditions in which new ideas survive, assessing an organization's real innovation processes, and restoring the creative capacity of executives who have spent years optimizing what already exists.

The reasoning behind the executive side, and why it was aimed only at people already running organizations, is set out on the executive leadership page.

What sat alongside the programmes

Public and customized programmes were only part of the work. Individual and team coaching ran alongside them, and strategic retreat facilitation and keynote work took the practice into clients' own settings. The largest body of output, and the reason this domain is worth preserving at all, was neither a programme nor an engagement but a publication: the Leadership Acumen archive holds the practitioner articles the practice published on governance and executive leadership over roughly sixteen years.

Directors comparing this archived curriculum against current standards will find the formal reference points at the G20/OECD Principles of Corporate Governance and, for Canadian incorporation and director duties, at Corporations Canada.