Postgraduate Diploma in Public Leadership and Management

The Warwick Diploma in Public Leadership & Management
This 18-month course features six three-day residential taught modules, each followed by a 3,000 word essay. You will also write an 8,000 word dissertation.

Leadership, Networks & Public Value
Gain an overview of the whole spectrum of leadership strategies including technical and adaptive leadership and how to mobilise hierarchies, markets, and networks to create public value outcomes. Focus on the knowledge and skills involved in creating, managing, and maintaining inter-organisational relationships, networks, and partnerships at different stages in their life cycle. Consider when to collaborate and when to compete and the complex challenges involved in sustaining effective partnership working.

Complexity & Systems
Increasing complexity is manifest both in the speed of change that we face at work, and in the increasing interconnectedness of the issues that we manage. This is further exacerbated by the existence of multiple views and conflicting interests. Explore a number of the practical methodologies that have emerged within the operational research and systems fields in response to this complexity and uncertainty.

Service Delivery: Improvement & Performance
Focus on the knowledge and skills involved in designing, developing, and delivering programmes to foster and sustain processes of continuous improvement and innovation in public sector organisations and in public/ private/ voluntary sector partnerships. Develop and extend your understanding of current frameworks of performance management and measurement and gain a critical view of these in the public sector.

Change & Innovation
Managing organisational and cultural change is a central feature of public and voluntary services, deriving both from the central government agenda and from wider challenges and changes in society. Leaders must be able to steer and manage change, both in terms of structure and culture and in terms of continuous improvement and innovation. Explore these issues from both a theoretical and practical perspective, examining theories from the private and public sectors, and considering the implications for public and voluntary sector organisations. Examine different strategies of change and how to lead staff and customers through the emotional upheavals of change.

Strategy & Practice
Consider the knowledge and skills necessary to develop and sustain a clear strategic direction for organisations and inter¬organisational partnerships, joint ventures, and networks. Explore how to do this while also adapting to a continuously changing environment, and changing patterns of need and expectation from users, citizens, and communities. Learn how to ensure there is a strong link between the process of strategy making and everyday management in action.

Engagement with Communities
Explore the knowledge and skills necessary to lead and manage activities across the boundary between the public sector and the voluntary and neighbourhood community sectors. Learn how to consult
and engage with individual users, groups of users, neighbourhood community organisations, and other networks within civil society. Consider the challenges involved in the ‘personalisation’ of public service, and the dilemmas raised by the notion of more choice for users and consumers of public services.