United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Mar 2020
InterWorks facilitated Senior Emergency Leadership Programme (SELP) workshop from 7-12 March 2020 in Thies, Senegal. This workshop was the second running of this training design for the Senior Emergency Learning Programme, initiated in 2019. Under this approach, the 2019 cohort of 12 SELP Senior Emergency Corporate Roster (SCER) rosterees all participated in a policy review-oriented workshop in June 2019. The SELP training plan called for 4 of these 12 SCER members to attend each of the following 3 Workshops for Emergency Managers (WEM) events for Emergency Response Team (ERT) rosterees to conduct a 3-day field simulation with the WEM teams as their SCER-deployed Emergency Team Leaders (ETLs).
The simulated leadership exercise blended personal reflection on the participants’ own leadership profiles (using the Hogan assessment tool, reports, and coaching sessions) with; direct intervention in the WEM field simulation scenarios, simulated telephone calls and emails with counterparts, and face-to-face interactions with role players representing the higher level and more political aspects of the emergency response.
Simulated requests and demands from various stakeholders were initiated by a 5-person “SELP Control Room Team” of senior managers who agreed to assist in the exercise. This team played the roles of UNHCR Representative in country, Director of DESS, DIP, DER, UNHCR PI and international media, UN Resident Coordinator, local government representatives including the military, donors and other stakeholders using prepared prompts and individual follow-up messages dependent upon each ETL’s response or approach.
In preparation of the exercise, the SELP participants and members of the control room team were asked to take a suite of 3 proprietary Hogan personality and leadership surveys via an existing contract with May and Company which provides access to the Hogan Leadership Forecast Assessments, the UNHCR leadership competency-based interview, and the Hogan debriefing session.
After the simulated field exercise, the WEM/ ERT teams also debriefed their ETLs (SELPers) on how they experienced their leadership during the field simulation in small facilitated feedback sessions led by the control room team members.
Thank you very much! This was extremely useful and rich in terms of reflection and understanding the leadership style of UNHCR
– Workshop participant.
