'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – a tool to increase personal effectiveness and facilitate your personal leadership journey’

This workshop will provide a framework for medical leaders to increase their effectiveness. The aim is to increase self awareness and through new insight, facilitate the participant’s personal leadership journey of self discovery and development. Leadership effectiveness is defined by our values and implies having moral courage and integrity, without acquiring these critical interpersonal character components, there cannot be competence in social skills such as communication, negotiating, influencing, team working, decision making and situational awareness (Halligan, 2013). The workshop will explore the above values and interpersonal qualities/skills and will be based on Stephen Covey’s book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (one of the top ten most influential management books). The 7 Habits are based on an inside-out approach, the founding principle being “if you want to change the situation, you firstly have to change yourself” (Covey, 1992:18). The underpinning philosophy is that of principle-centred leadership which resonates with the type of leadership approach that is required post Francis (2013) namely an authentic, values-based, ethical approach. The 7 Habits aim to restore the character ethic, again a key challenge post Francis.