Maintain your exemplary performance in your current role while developing the new skills and perspective you need to take on a top leadership role.
The Rising Public Leaders Programme is a six-day intensive programme bringing together a group of upcoming public leaders from a diverse array of countries. It will broaden your skills and provide you with the conceptual frameworks and practical tools you need to lead a public sector organisation successfully in a rapidly changing and deeply challenging world.
Offering insight from the world’s leading scholars and practitioners, and peer learning from your counterparts around the globe, this programme will help you move into the top leadership of a public-sector organisation in the next three to seven years.
The programme immerses participants in a multinational, multidisciplinary experience through which you gain skills and confidence in your management of people, technology, and organisational culture; your partnerships and negotiations with business entities and non-profits; and your navigation of challenges to personal and organisational integrity.
Learn through an intensive and engaging mix of pedagogical styles, including:
- Classroom discussions
- Simulations
- Practical exercises
- Group work
Participants will establish an ongoing connection with us and will become executive alumni of the Blavatnik School.
The Rising Public Leaders Programme aims to strengthen the skills that upcoming leaders need to build cultures of excellence, effectiveness, and integrity throughout the institutions they lead and across the public sector more widely.
Throughout the programme, participants work on skills and frameworks that are essential today across all branches and departments of government in any country or international institution.

Examine how leaders of public organisations communicate to best effect: internally, across government, and beyond. This requires an ability to listen and communicate with the clarity necessary to catch attention amid a jumble of competing messages around government. These sessions will leave you with a fresh understanding of the role of storytelling as a fundamental part of leadership.
You will explore the complex political, regulatory, and technological challenges leaders face, using a case study on the development of 5G technology. Also examine questions of cybersecurity, including threats newly enhanced by artificial intelligence. You will have the opportunity to dive deeper into a specific topic that is most relevant to you and your organisation.
Explore framing bias, confirmation bias, overconfidence bias, and sunk-cost bias, as well as examples of groupthink. You will consider the consequences for decision-making, and test some simple techniques to overcome these biases in individual and group decisions.
Understand the trends and cycles in organisational reform and what evidence there is to support strategies of radical reform or incremental improvement. You will look at the tools that different administrations use to improve performance, including target-setting, data generation and outsourcing.
Refresh and extend your familiarity with core concepts and expand your knowledge of more advanced negotiation tactics. Through interactive simulations, you will learn and practise specific analytical tools for conducting multi-stakeholder deliberations across international boundaries, with powerful commercial interests and multiple governments.
Build a moral language for understanding ethical challenges and have greater confidence in handling the pressures that public leaders inevitably face. Examine how difficult it can be to recognise integrity, understand the factors that cloud our ethical decisions, and appreciate the long-term damage to one’s leadership that can flow from a single misjudgement.
What a valuable six days that changed my way of thinking. This amazing and powerful programme broadened my view, and provided me with the effective tools and frameworks for communication and for building credibility. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to learn to be an inspiring leader and take steps forward to change the world.
I will never forget what I learned and got here. All of them will be my precious lifelong memory. All of the people I met here are part of my life. This is an amazing and outstanding programme which I highly recommend.
Meet the faculty
Our programmes immerse you in the intellectual culture of Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Its excellence and international profile rivals that of any university in the world, and the University has been educating global leaders for over 800 years.
Our residential programmes, as well as our fellowships, offer opportunities to explore the city and its famous colleges. Many include walking tours of the city’s most important historical and politically relevant places, as well as formal dinners in centuries-old Oxford dining halls. And you will get the best of both the old and the new by being based from the ultramodern award-winning Blavatnik School building.
Whether in residence or online, you will be tapping into the extraordinary depth and breadth of research excellence found at Oxford University, as well as its power to convene people from all over the world. All our executive programmes are led by a member of the Blavatnik School faculty, who are leading Oxford professors and associate professors.
This was one of the best learning and development experiences I’ve ever had. The topics were highly relevant to anyone in public service and there was also a huge range of learning methods employed. By the end of it you’ll be hugely energised and ready to take the learning home and apply it immediately.
This was an exceptional course, superbly organised and delivered by a high calibre team. It is rare to be given the time and opportunity to step back and reflect on what being a thoughtful leader really entails; and the course was significantly enriched by the experiences and contributions from its highly diverse cohort.
To express your interest in the programme or find out more, contact us at executive.admissions@bsg.ox.ac.uk.
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