London Leadership Programme

The London Leadership Programme equips leaders to mobilise change across boundaries, bridge differences, and work collaboratively as a whole system.

The Backdrop

Leading in London is an opportunity and a challenge like few others. It is a place of contrasts and contradictions, where multiple realities converge. The legacy of Covid-19 continues to affect Londoners’ lives, while the cost of living crisis deepens existing inequalities. Pressures on communities and financial constraints on public services create a landscape that necessitates new ways of thinking and acting. 

Recognising that transformative change requires more than technical expertise, the programme sets out to nurture leaders who are curious, adaptive, and capable of navigating uncertainty. It brings together a cohort of people with diverse perspectives and experiences from across London’s boroughs, the Greater London Authority, the City of London Corporation and London Councils to build the skills and confidence needed to lead across the system.

We have been privileged to design and deliver four cohorts of the programme, each time evolving our approach to reflect London’s shifting environment and the needs of participants. Our role has been to create the conditions for deep learning and shared exploration in a space where leaders can stretch their thinking, test new ideas, and support one another. The ambition has always been clear: to develop a diverse community of leaders, build trusted relationships, and shape a more connected, inclusive London.

What we did

This Programme’s delivery has centred on developing the leadership capabilities for participants in whatever their current or future role, in service of the people of London – as distinct from a traditional management programme or a fast track to executive-level promotion.

The design made the most of Collaborate’s own expertise and experience, that of the participants themselves, and what learning was possible to generate together through our discussions.

The six core day-long modules threaded systems change and adaptive leadership frameworks with live policy issues, supported by carefully curated readings and provocations that provided a foundation for each module.

The system challenge groups were central: small teams testing and applying new approaches to complex, real-world problems with the support of a local government chief executive sponsor, mentor from London Councils and group coach from Collaborate.

Conversations were further enriched by a wide mix of voices through contributions from local government and health system colleagues, from those in the voluntary and community, and private sectors, and others who lent their stories and ideas to helping ground learning in the lived realities of leadership across the city.

This combination of structured input, group work on real challenges and cross-sector dialogue distinguishes the programme; this is not a course to be passively consumed, but rather a shared endeavour and experiment with how to bring about change across London.

Impact and Learning

The importance of diversity of experience in the cohort as a catalyst for rich learning as shone through in this programme.

Bringing together people from different boroughs, roles, cultures and communities wasn’t just a nice to have – it was essential. It enabled deeper understanding of the conditions holding problems in place and prompted reflections on the agency people feel they have to make change from where they are positioned.

As one participant reflected: ‘There are lots of skilled and motivated people across London who want to create positive change, and we don’t need to wait for permission to try and act on that.’

Discussions about power dynamics – inside the cohort and in the world outside – have been among the most productive parts of the programme. The leaders on our programmes are keen to explore what power is, how it works, and how it can be used differently. Time and again, participants have grappled with how to share power, when to move back, and how to use their authority in service of change. From the first module, we were clear that this kind of learning cannot happen in a completely ‘safe space’. We asked participants to embrace friction and vulnerability as part of learning. We have experienced that this creates the conditions for an open yet respectful culture, where differences can be surfaced and worked with.

Reflective practice emerged as central to effective leadership. Across the cohorts, participants have shown how powerful it is to make the time to consider the big picture, recognising that leadership is not only about action but about making robust observations and interpretations about the complexity of their context to inform interventions. The system challenge groups became a testing ground for this, showing that when participants connect reflection with practice, they can work more adaptively and with more attentiveness to the interconnections across issues. In one participants’ words, ‘[All] system challenges are interlinked… the fundamentals remain the same.’

The experiential approach was central to enabling participants to not just learn about systems but learning as a system. Group dynamics formed and shifted over the modules, offering participants a live mirror of the wider systems they are trying to influence.

Across all four cohorts, when participants embraced complexity and difference, they practiced the change they aspire to make. This has been the heart of the programme’s impact.