Impact

Lead the Change by Leading the People: a Community-Led Event by CONCORDIA Academia

This year, we introduced Community-Led Events – a new way to support our member organisations with the impact they want to create within their regions. CONCORDIA Academia was one of the selected organisations and the first one to implement their planned event earlier in May.  Here you can read their report on what it was about and how it went!

In CONCORDIA Academia we say that we like to dare greatly.

The Community-Led Events programme of the NGO Academy was for us such an opportunity. An opportunity to make the step on the regional stage and do what we like most – bring professionals in the social field together and challenge them to learn from the present and look to the future.

But first a few words about ourselves. As a center of excellence in training and professional development established in 2017 in Romania, CONCORDIA Academia offers social, educational & socio-medical specialists certified training programs for practitioners, managers, supervisors & HR strategists, as well as supervision, coaching, and consultancy services in organizational development to contribute to the capacity building at the individual, organizational, and therefore systemic level.

Strong believers in the power of networks and communities we decided to apply for NGO Academy support having in mind one of the most important challenges organizations face nowadays  – managing the fast-changing and often unpredictable context while growing their human capital. Not an easy task, better said responsibility.. do you agree?

Lead the Change by Leading People workshop was the result of this endeavor. The three days event was designed for professionals in leadership positions or strategic HR roles, interested in developing their skills and strategies to effectively manage their teams and organizations. It was organized between 9-11 of May 2023 in a beautiful countryside area promoting sustainable tourism in Sibiel, Sibiu County, almost in the heart of Romania. The workshop brought together a diverse group of NGO professionals from Albania, Austria, the Republic of Moldova & Romania. Over 18 professionals representing 16 organizations came from far and wide, with car sharing being the most used way of transportation.

Discussions covered hot strategic HR topics for both small and big organizations: effective leadership in its various dimensions and perspectives (self-leadership, servant leadership, situational leadership), staff recruitment and retention, induction, motivation and non-financial incentives, burnout, and self-care, future skills, and workplace learning.

The honest exchange allowed participants to discover how they can cleverly use the opportunity of workplace learning for organizational development and team motivation. Key future skills in the social field (2030 horizon) raised a lot of interest, all the more from the perspective of their transversality with the for-profit sector. Gig fluency, mastering communities, critical, systemic, design thinking, organizational ambidexterity, gamification, working with machines, and resilience have been long discussed.

Nevertheless,  self-care has been the most challenging and disputed topic by far. Participants acknowledged that leaders are deeply provoked by managing their well-being while also leading their teams. They shared experiences of feeling overwhelmed and burned out, which can negatively impact their ability to lead effectively. The discussion focused on the best strategies used to build an organizational culture oriented towards self-care and fostering smart practices of setting boundaries while nurturing professional and organizational performance.

The workshop proved to be a very good opportunity to connect professionals and find new solutions together: starting with car-sharing arrangements and ending with discovering new ways to foster continuous learning throughout professional life.

For us, in CONCORDIA Academia it was a great experience and an excellent chance to practice crisis management and flexibility, so this is also why we are looking forward to our next regional event in 2024. We hope you will join us!