Common Purpose Courses
Youth Pre-career Early Career Established career
Late career Customised courses
Youth
Your Turn
A leadership course for young people. Your Turn challenges young people to think in new ways about the place where they live and the world around them, to examine how decisions are made and see how they can make change happen.
Your Turners examine topical current affairs, community issues and they go into professional environments; to chair meetings with their local MPs; to provide consultation advice to businesses and to ask hard hitting questions of community leaders. It is a unique, challenging and fast paced course which raises aspirations, increases confidence and opens minds, both for the young people and adults involved.
Pre-career
Frontrunner
Frontrunner helps university-age people, who have a track record of leading change, to set their sights even higher as they look ahead beyond full-time education. Participants visit a wide range of organisations and quiz leaders from many different walks of life. This gives future generations of leaders a rare opportunity to broaden their knowledge, plan their future and develop their leadership skills.
Early Career
Common Purpose International Navigator
An international leadership course for high potential, early career people from different backgrounds, sectors, countries and continents. Its local nature fulfills participants' wish to connect within their own community and its international reach stretches them far beyond it. It challenges participants to deal with complex problems and become leaders who can deliver results through building and leading collaboration when required.
Established career
Matrix
A leadership course for established leaders from all sectors and backgrounds based in a city (though a few Matrix courses cover a whole county).
Over 10-days, participants examine their locality and the world that surrounds it. They explore a range of real-life leadership challenges - based in anything from a prison to a casualty unit; a trading floor to a production plant - in small groups, learning constantly from each other, the contributors and the experience of operating in very unfamiliar situations.
The result is that participants develop an understanding of how their local area really works, the impact of their decisions and become more effective leaders at work,
and in society.
Meridian
A leadership course for established leaders from all sectors and backgrounds based in metropolitan areas. Meridian is currently offered across the UK and in six other countries. Participants often choose to do some of their modules in other locations and countries.
Spanning a five month period, Meridian offers a flexible modular format that means leaders can tailor it to meet their individual needs and to match their diaries.
The full group - drawn from all walks of life in the area - attends three full days together at the start, midpoint and end of the course. In between, each leader chooses from over 50 events to explore a huge range of real-life challenges - based in anything from a prison to a casualty unit; a trading floor to a production plant; a rehab centre to a radio station - in small groups, learning constantly from each other, the contributors and the experience of operating in very unfamiliar situations.
The result is that participants develop an understanding of how their area really works, the impact of their decisions and become more effective leaders at work and in wider society.
Profile
A fast-paced course for leaders who want a briefing on the place where they live or work. Participants use it as an introduction or an update. They are briefed on the important trends, key institutions and main players locally and hear firsthand from some of the leaders who are tackling local issues.
The broad range of leaders who attend Profile bring to the course their very diverse perspectives and this adds to the briefing.
Late career
What Next
What Next is a joint initiative between Oxford Said Business School and Common Purpose aimed at senior people in transition - most often from their formal career - who are looking for new and different leadership opportunities.
During the intensive residential course, participants review their skills and experience and explore the many options that exist for portfolio, non-executive and volunteer roles. Participants will discover how to access opportunities that best match their passions, talents and values.
20:20
20:20 has two central themes - wealth creation and governance - which are explored in the context of increasing globalisation. Through briefings from top business people, media, lobby groups, politicians, civil servants, economists and scientists, participants assess key economic, political, technological and social trends. They examine how governments operate and the realities of policy-making in the UK and Europe.
This forms the backdrop for participants to investigate how leaders deal with constantly changing situations that they cannot begin to control, stakeholders who are going in different directions, partners and systems they do not understand and timescales - far shorter or far longer - than they would like. They talk through, in small groups, how individual leaders maintain their balance, face up to their own biases and resist the instinct to over-focus. Participants get a practical understanding of the jump they need to make and how to do it, developing the skills needed to deliver complex change.
Customised courses
Common Purpose Customised courses are for organisations that need their leaders and teams to be better equipped to seek out and implement fresh, new ideas and creative innovations both in the workplace and beyond. Common Purpose works in partnership with organisations to create specially designed agendas to respond to the organisation's strategic objectives and culture.
