Enabling Collective Leadership with Dr. Patrick O'Neill

Our Resilient Leadership Program, with signature sponsor Coast Capital Savings, kicked off this morning with an engaging and insightful session facilitated by Dr. Patrick O'Neill.

The Resilient Leadership Program is an initiative to support the leadership teams of our community-serving organizations through the COVID-19 pandemic. This week's session welcomed our participant organizations to the course and focussed on topics of leadership assessment, evaluation, and how we can come together as a team to achieve greatness.

Our session facilitator, Dr. Patrick O'Neill, is an organizational psychologist currently teaching leadership development and organizational design in the School of Business at Royal Roads University. Patrick's unique lived experience as an academic, community leader, and global citizen allows him to share his expertise in the art of storytelling and active collaboration.

The overarching and topical question of this session was this: How do we lead in the face of conflict and chaos? COVID-19 has had a profound effect on the way we lead. In order to unlock our full potential as a team, we must understand how to develop systems that support our collective purpose and create the space to utilize our full capacity as leaders.

A theme throughout the session was collaborative intelligence. Compared to individual capacity, teams have the potential to access diverse resources, and more of them. When teams are diverse, bound (stable and cohesive), and inspired by a collective purpose, there is the potential for synergy. You might be wondering what this term means...

Synergy is when the team develops a life of its own! It is a feeling and a process that emerges when we are fully absorbed in our generative and creative state. In Patrick’s words, it feels like “being carried and held by a wave.” Synergy is the manifestation of the systems that support collaborative intelligence. 

We extend our gratitude to Dr. Patrick O'Neill for this inspiring learning session, and to our signature sponsor Coast Capital Savings and the support from the City of Victoria in making the Resilient Leadership Program a reality. This program will continue to run for 8 weeks- and it is not too late to join! Next week we will open the session to the public, and you can find out more about that event here.

Learn more about the program by clicking here.