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ELEVATE – From Managing Work to Leading Teams | Edition 3
ELEVATE – from Managing Work to Leading Teams targets experienced managers leading teams, projects, or programmes. It focuses on people management, decision-making, stakeholder engagement, and cross-silo collaboration. Participants learn to cultivate psychological safety, manage complexity, and sustain high performance.
The UN80 reform agenda and the UN 2.0 vision call for modernised operations and a results-driven culture centred on innovation, data, digital capacity, strategic foresight, and behavioural science. These reforms require not just operational shifts but a fundamental rethinking of leadership and management - leaders who can bridge strategy and implementation, build inclusive, high-performing teams, and lead decisively amid volatility and ambiguity.
In this context, effective leadership is mission-critical. It is not a discretionary investment but a core enabler of wellbeing, accountability, and operational impact. Resilient, principled leadership will carry the UN through today's challenges and prepare it for tomorrow's unknowns. Beyond technical skill, we need adaptive leaders who live our values - integrity, accountability, respect, and inclusion - especially when the pressure is greatest.
Roots to Results: The UNSSC Leadership and Management Pathway is UNSSC's response to these challenges - designed to equip UN personnel at every level with the leadership foundations, management skills, and strategic capability the moment demands. It represents a system-wide initiative developed in close collaboration with UN entities and the UN Secretariat.
The Pathway aims to strengthen leadership and management capacity across the UN while recognising that shared leadership principles must be applied flexibly across diverse mandates, governance arrangements, and organisational cultures.
Track II from the Pathway, ELEVATE – from Managing Work to Leading Teams is built for the most operationally demanding moment in a UN manager's career: the transition from managing work to leading people. It is designed for those who hold formal supervisory responsibility and must translate strategic direction into day-to-day team delivery.
Through this experience, participants develop a targeted set of leadership and management competencies essential for navigating the demands of executive roles in the UN. These include self-awareness, fostering psychological safety and inclusion, building team resilience, integrity, learning agility, managing people and performance for results, making effective and unbiased decisions, expanding strategic partnerships, and leading through organisational change.
Overall Learning Objective
- By the end of the programme, participants will have strengthened their leadership mindset and managerial skills, enabling them to better lead diverse teams, manage performance more effectively, and navigate change with increased clarity and confidence in the UN context.
Modular Learning Objectives
Upon successful completion of this programme, participants should be able to:
- Recognize their own and their team's responses to change, apply communication and leadership strategies that sustain trust and psychological safety during disruption and assess and adjust their approach to strengthen resilience at both individual and team levels.
- Foster inclusive, high-performing team environments by modelling psychological safety, addressing barriers to equity and inclusion - including bias, power imbalances and unacceptable behaviours - and cultivating cultures of openness, trust and accountability.
- Set clear goals, provide structured feedback, conduct difficult performance conversations, recognize and reinforce positive performance, and support continuous improvement and shared accountability across their team.
- Apply a structured and inclusive decision-making framework to make more sound choices in ambiguous, high-pressure or politically sensitive UN contexts.
- Identify and assess strategic partners, apply trust-building engagement strategies and more effectively navigate the power dynamics and cultural differences that shape effective partnership and collaboration.
ELEVATE – from Managing Work to Leading Teams integrates online and peer-supported learning, 360-degree leadership Assessments and executive coaching into a seven-week, immersive experience. Specifically, it includes:
- Five Micro-learning modules to build foundational insight.
- Five Interactive Webinars (120 min) featuring UN-specific case studies and live dialogue.
- Two 360-degree Assessments to benchmark and measure behavioural growth
- Two Individual Coaching Sessions and two Peer Coaching sessions to deepen reflection and accountability.
- Access to the UNSSC Learning Platform with curated frameworks, readings, and discussion spaces.
The full programme incorporates the following:
- 5 x curated Microlearning Activities (Module 1: Leading Teams Through Change, Module 2: Building Psychological Safety and Inclusion, Module 3: Managing Performance and Accountability, Module 4: Making Inclusive, Evidence-Based Decisions, Module 5: Partnering for Sustainable Impact)
- 5 x 120-minute Interactive Webinars
- 2 x 120-minute facilitated Peer Coaching Sessions
- 2 x 60-minute individual leadership coaching session with a certified coach
- 1 x “Foundational” 360‑degree Assessment (baseline) aligned to UN leadership competencies
- 1 x “Pulse” 360‑degree Assessment (six‑month follow‑up), supporting reflection and sustained behavioural change
- Access to a network/community of mid-senior level UN leaders and alumni
- Access to the dedicated UNSSC Learning Platform with curated resources, including:
- Recordings of all Interactive Webinars
- Curated activities, readings, tools, and videos related to the programme themes
- 360-assessment integration resources and goal-setting tools
- Peer Coaching framework and tools
- Practical step-by-step guidance for leadership application and follow-through
- UNSSC Certification
ELEVATE – from Managing Work to Leading Teams is designed for mid-senior level managers with formal supervisory or managerial responsibilities, including team leads, programme managers, or section chiefs - typically Professional Staff (P4/P5), and open to National Officers C–D (NOC–NOD) and Field Service staff (FS6/FS7) who hold equivalent people management responsibilities. The Track reflects the breadth of leadership functions across the UN System and recognises the essential contributions of personnel in diverse contractual and geographic contexts.
Participants are accountable for translating strategic direction into team-level outcomes, managing performance, and leading others through complexity. Exceptionally, other grades with significant managerial responsibilities may be considered.
ELEVATE – from Managing Work to Leading Teams is particularly suited for staff who are:
- Managing individuals or small teams and navigating diverse team dynamics
- Leading implementation of programmes, projects, or workstreams
- Supporting strategic planning, coordination, or technical delivery
- Seeking to strengthen people management, decision-making, and accountability skills.
ELEVATE – from Managing Work to Leading Teams has a per participant programme fee of USD 2,000, which covers an seven-week curated leadership development experience incorporating the elements specified under "Course contents".
