LSBU shortlisted for Times Higher Education awards
LSBU short-listed for Times Higher Education (THE) awards for Leadership Development and Widening Participation and Outreach InitiativeLondon South Bank University (LSBU) has this month (6 September) been short-listed for two Times Higher Education (THE) awards for Outstanding Contribution to Leadership Development and Widening Participation and Outreach Initiative of the Year.
The success in leadership development was made possible by the University’s in-house Operational Development (OD) team taking a proactive approach to embedding staff leadership training across the executive and other staff teams. A grant from the government’s Teaching Investment Fund was instrumental in aiding the participation and outreach success of LSBU’s InventEUrs engineering team.
The OD team chose to partner this year with international people development and business psychology consultancy, JCA Global, to support a programme of cultural transformation across the University with the aim of engaging, inspiring and empowering staff to create a culture of accountability and openness to change and innovation.
The results are already positive with the University seeing a five per cent increase in confidence in leadership indicated by responses to LSBU’s employee engagement survey.
Dr Markos Koumaditis, Acting Director of People and Organisational Development at LSBU said: “I’m really pleased to hear that we’ve been shortlisted for a THE award for outstanding contribution to leadership development.
“We have all worked very hard this year to embed leadership principles and values through a programme of leadership training which was rolled out across all staff teams.
"The first stage of the process was about getting to know ourselves and understand who we are, as a leadership team - particularly as there were a lot of new people in the team. We then looked at the kind of leadership style that we expected our staff to demonstrate.
“There is now much stronger sense that, because of the training programme, the University staff as a whole have managed to develop stronger leadership attributes.”
Adnan Bajwa, Head of Organisational Development and Engagement at LSBU, said: “Emotional intelligence training has really helped me to press pause and really think about where I am, what I need and what the people I lead and work with need. The JCA tools gave me useful and actionable feedback on my strengths as well as potential blind spots. And the new Leadership Academy has provided us with an opportunity to help develop these areas.”
Commenting on the School of Engineering’s success in relation to widening participation and outreach in LSBU, Safia Barikzai, Associate Professor in LSBU’s School of Engineering said: “Following this award, I am very much looking forward to the new academic year, especially our planned academic enrichment activities for our Multi-Academy-Trust schools.”
There is already evidence of positive results for the business arising from this transformation programme and culture change. The positioning of LSBU in Higher Education league tables has improved substantially, and the University is intent on progressing further as the enhanced leadership culture becomes more embedded.
Read more about the Times Higher Education awards here.