Seven ways to leverage your WIG membership | Article

Our goal is for WIG membership to feel more like a partnership than a traditional membership.  As a member, you are part of a community of leaders who believe in the power of cross-sector dialogue and collaboration as the driving force of change.  Together, we recognise that making Britain an attractive place to live and do business in is a shared endeavour that spans all sectors. 

To support you in this important role, we’ve included seven quick ways to maximise the opportunities available to you:

1. Share with your colleagues

Your WIG membership is corporate so there is no limit to the number of colleagues at your organisation who can tap into our membership benefits.  Feel free to circulate internally or pop on your intranet our one page overview summarising all that we offer.  To get started, your colleagues need to enter their work email address and create a password on our website and they’ll be all set to start booking our hybrid events, accessing our extensive resources library, mentoring platform and leadership and talent development opportunities.

2. Involve your senior leaders across the organisation

Supplementing our 120 free events on critical topics impacting the UK, are our roundtables aimed at specific job levels such as Heads of HR, L&D, Government Affairs and Sustainability.  These small and conversational roundtables are an excellent way for your senior leaders to share best practice and challenges on subjects of particular relevance to their job role, while gaining diverse perspectives from their peers across the sectors and building relationships with policy makers at the highest level.

We also have a suite of initiatives created specifically for strategic dialogue and knowledge exchange among CEOs, Permanent Secretaries and VCs. This includes dinners and roundtables on economic growth, attracting global investment and on creating long-term strategies, while also looking at the leadership capabilities and organisational resilience needed for positive change.   In partnership with the Cabinet Office, we run a cross-sector Exchange Leadership Programme for C-Suite leaders and Director Generals and facilitate bespoke mentoring between Permanent Secretaries and CEOs/Vice Chancellors offering Permanent Secretaries the opportunity to gain an understanding of how leadership challenges are approached outside of government and vice versa. 

3. Bake mentoring into personal development plans

Mentor Match, our online mentoring platform, is open and free to all employees at member organisations and you’re able to sign up as either a mentee or a mentor or both.   This intuitive, self-servicing platform provides you with an array of objectives to choose from based on what you’d like to gain from a mentoring partnership.  This ranges from upskilling on Whitehall and harnessing career progression to navigating a return to work following maternity leave or bolstering confidence or simply sharing experiences with someone with similar attributes or protected characteristics.  Where our members are really making the most of this benefit, is by baking it in their appraisal process and encouraging their employees to either be a mentor as a development opportunity or a mentee to gain support on areas identified in their performance management process.  

4. Lean into what’s working for others

To expedite key learnings across the sectors, we offer organisational raids: one day visits for a group of senior leaders from one organisation to another, providing an opportunity to understand first-hand how one organisation tackles a specific leadership challenge or transformation period. 

Do also take a look at our cross-sector leadership programmes and secondment opportunities, all designed to help you leverage outside perspectives, harness new ideas, expand your professional network and build forward-thinking partnerships.

5. Tell us what keeps you up at night

Each member organisation has their own WIG Relationship Manager who is always willing to meet to hear about your key areas of focus and particular policy areas or challenges where you may like to gain more clarity.  We feed your insights into our content production so that our strategic dialogue programme remains business critical. Having regular touch points also ensures that we’re plugging you into the most relevant opportunities with your peers. 

6. Take a deep dive

Do keep a look out for our deep dives into how policy is made, how the Civil Service functions, and how to engage with Whitehall via our Workings of Whitehall workshops.  We also run similar workshops on Workings of a General Election and Inside Treasury.  The deep dives continue into diversity and inclusion with our annual D&I Conference, and our flagship Annual Interview with the Cabinet Secretary for senior leaders which dives into the most pressing issues of the day.

7. Tap into a huge talent pool

You might not be aware that WIG is a specialist in cross-sector talent recruitment, offering inwards and outwards secondments and a placement service for Non-Executive Directors and Trustees.  We know that great boards are diverse boards in terms of thought, experience, abilities and backgrounds and we have a network of over 9,000 senior individuals from across the sectors for you to tap into.

Your one stop shop

We hope this has given you a flavour of the breadth and beauty of the WIG offer – that we can keep you and your wider organisation up to date and connected, making you better able to anticipate risk and capitalise on future opportunities – particularly important during this Election period.  We are here as your one stop shop for your entire organisation to broaden perspectives, stay up to date, future-proof stakeholder relationships, and enhance leadership capabilities and organisational resilience.  Please do reach out to the Membership team on [email protected] if you’d like support on any of the above.

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