Resources Article

Discover Diaries: Gemma Wright | Week One

In partnership with Clore Social, we’re delivering our pilot ‘Discover’ programme in Spring 2019: a four week online introduction to leadership. As part of this, we invited participants to keep ‘Discover Diaries’ – thoughts, insights and ‘notes to self’ about this new learning experience.

Gemma Wright: Week One

I was a mixture of excited and nervous going into the first week of the Clore Leadership Discover programme. My nerves were quickly allayed when I logged into the Slack programme and the other cultural leaders began introducing themselves; it seemed that everyone felt the same way!

My goals going into this first week were to learn, be challenged and to increase my confidence as a leader. I wanted to understand what type of leader I am and consider what type of leader I want to be, and the first week was set up to consider this further.

My key take-away from the first week was a greater sense of self. This came from considering the Clore Social Leaders’ Capabilities Framework. I could see that my strengths lay in collaboration and empowerment, yet I was less confident in changemaking.

It was enlightening to reflect on my strengths and weaknesses, and properly consider the barriers and opportunities around these. Things that I hadn’t expected came from this exercise – an example being that some of my greatest strengths are also my weaknesses.  

The main challenge during this first week has been time. Fitting the content of the course around my work calendar was unexpectedly difficult. I wanted to engage with the resources and tasks properly and as such I ended up completing week one on the Monday of the second week.

I found Caroline McHugh’s TED talk ‘The Art of Being Yourself’ inspiring; the way she described the four layers of understanding yourself as perception, persona, ego and self… or as she described our very own ‘Queendom’.

Moving into week two, I’m eager to understand what it means to be a leader in the context I work in and learning from this week I’ve built time into my diary to do it.

Read Gemma’s Week Two Discover Diary here.

By Gemma Wright, Head of Education, Camden Arts Centre

Themes Alumni Journeys Qualities of Leadership