Mandel Workshops for Senior Leadership
The workshops provide a fertile space for senior leaders from all sectors in Israel to re-examine their leadership perspectives, integrating personal, professional and ethical dimensions within a constantly changing reality.
Program FormatThree retreats over two months
DurationJoint continuation sessions offered to all groups that have completed the workshops
The workshops were established to address the unique challenges facing senior leaders in Israel, including a rapid pace of change and, in recent years, highly complex circumstances, significant disruption and systemic instability. These realities often create a sense of overload among senior figures, eroding their confidence in their ability to effect positive change. This can also lead to conflicts between their personal values and professional goals, generating a need to find new meaning in their work.
Senior leaders rarely have the opportunity to engage in in- depth reflection on the complex and shifting challenges they encounter - whether from personal, professional, or ethical perspectives. The workshops are therefore designed to offer these leaders a chance to step outside their hectic routines, even if only briefly and examine themselves as individuals and leaders from refreshing new perspectives.
Participants in the program are senior leaders from various sectors (public, private and nonprofit), as well as those straddling multiple sectors. All are action-oriented individuals committed to making a public contribution and seeking personal meaning. They hold positions of responsibility and authority and exert influence at a national level.
The workshops aim to provide participants with lenses that allow them to transcend familiar perspectives and discover new aspects of themselves and their worlds of practice. The contents of the workshops are based on leadership approaches that emphasize moral and social sensitivity, fairness and open partnership - promoting shared values and an orientation toward action for the common good.
Course of Studies
The workshops are designed to create a short and meaningful group process for each cohort, based on trust, sharing, authenticity and reciprocity. They challenge participants to break existing habits by having them engage in deep reflection, examine their core ideas and values and explore new possibilities for shaping the future. Participants gain hands-on experience deconstructing and reconstructing personal, conceptual and practical materials.
Each group meets for a series of three retreats over the course of two months, after which participants are invited to join joint sessions with members of previous workshop groups. To date, eight groups have been held, each comprising around 15 participants.
During these retreats, participants practice authentic reflection relating to less discussed, less comfortable and sometimes even unconceptualized aspects of themselves and their work. They are invited to deeply explore the connection between the personal and the professional, to clarify their guiding ideas and values and to study the interfaces between different fields of activity.
Through this process, the workshops provide a fertile space for senior leaders from all sectors in Israel to re-examine their leadership perspectives, integrating personal, professional and moral viewpoints.
Impact in the Field
Senior leaders who hav participated in the Workshops programs generate cumulative influence at the policy-making level and develop cross-sector collaborations. To date, 117 senior leaders have participated in the Lab, including: senior officials in the civil service (such as directors general and deputy directors general); legal professionals (for example, the legal advisor to the Tkuma Directorate, which oversees the reconstruction of areas in the North and South damaged by the war); health sector leaders (such as hospital directors); senior executives from leading private companies in Israel (such as Intel and Elbit); managers of large venture capital funds; and key figures in philanthropy (such as CEOs of foundations and nonprofits).
As a result of the program, participants are inspired to take action that reflects their moral worldview and deep sense of responsibility, contributing more intensely to Israeli society— whether in their current roles or by moving to new positions of influence.
Examples of participants in key positions include:
The former director general of the Labor Branch of the Ministry of Economy and Industry, who was recently appointed CEO of the Foundations Fund Initiative, which unites philanthropic funds to address needs in the North and south of the country on a large scale.
A senior officer in the IDF Education and Youth Corps.
The qadi of the Sharia Court of Appeals and director of the Sharia Religious Courts.
About the Institute
The Mandel Leadership Institute believes that vision-driven leadership, grounded in a broad and deeply rooted worldview, has the potential to contribute greatly to the flourishing of Israeli society, inspired by the values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Our fellows are people with proven leadership experience from the fields of education, culture, and society, from the public sector and civil society, from the IDF and the Haredi community, and from all regions and communities in Israel. Graduates of the Institute hold key positions in Israeli society and work to advance a just, inclusive, compassionate and democratic Israel.