How can someone blind from birth influence how a working relationship develops through body language and response? How do people with a physical impairment react to different leadership behaviours? How do leaders with long-term health conditions begin the process of transforming their behaviours to turn them into the leader that they want to become?

The brief

Design and deliver masterclass workshops for leadership conferences in London, Edinburgh and York for disabled people in leadership positions, or aspiring to leadership. Do something different. Also contribute to design and thinking for pre-event materials to promote the transfer of learning from the entire conference.

The solution

A 75-minute leadership Masterclass that helped participants to begin the process of transforming their leadership behaviours...

Take a blank mask, help yourself to a range of materials, and create a face that represents your aspects of your leadership behaviours. Use textures, colours, words, images, to convey meaning.

Once the mask is completed, get feedback from a partner about what they see in your mask. Use this feedback to reflect on what aspects of your leadership behaviours you want to transform, and how you can start this process of transformation.

Why it worked

Mask making is a creative and challenging process that accesses deep within the sub-conscious to represent aspects of ourselves and our behaviours. In this instance, it involved exploring and expressing leadership strengths and leadership behaviours.

The exercise gave participants feedback on their leadership strengths, how others might perceive them as leaders and gave focus to the areas of leadership behaviours they wanted to change.

The participants had a range of abilities and disabilities, for example visual and physical impairment, learning disability or mental health problems. The activity was flexible, allowing everybody to express themselves in their own way.

What the client thought

“Excellent, the feedback has been very positive.

The Wizards were a fun team to work with and enabled us to explore issues in a dynamic and creative way.

The mask making helped us gain confidence in taking the kind of risks we need to explore ourselves as individuals in order to develop as an organisation. That is important because the public sector is risk averse. By working with the Wizards, we are being challenging and different. We need to take risks. There is no reason why a disabled person can’t be a leader.”

Michael Brothers
Head of Leadership Strategy
Disability Rights Commission

And the impact longer term?

Leadership is about being self aware, knowing where our strengths are and how we use them. Transforming our leadership behaviours is a complex and intensely personal journey.

Using creative approaches such as this helps leaders to travel that journey and gives signposts for which road to take

“We have a responsibility to maximise our behaviour in such a way as to get the best response from others. We are currently discussing a potential follow up session with the Wizards to explore this challenge and to bring out leadership potential.”

Michael Brothers
Head of Leadership Strategy
Disability Rights Commission

Notes

If you would like to receive a copy of a conference paper on using mask making in personal development, please request it via the contact page.

For more information about DRC’s work with aspiring and active disabled leaders, please visit www.drc-gb.org or call Kathryn Cooper on 0207 543 7047.