Mark Taylor to help train cricket's next generation of leaders Enlisted as a mentor: Mark Taylor. Photo: Paul Broben While the Test team appears in good hands, with Michael Clarke having just led them to Ashes victory, Cricket Australia is moving to develop and improve the leadership skills of the next tier of male and female leaders. The program, which Fairfax Media first reported in October, will include Test middle-order batsman Steve Smith - rated by Ricky Ponting and Ian Chappell as a potential future Australian captain - and others, such as Aaron Finch, Alex Doolan, Tim Paine, Pat Cummins, Moises Henriques, Ashton Agar, Phil Hughes, Glenn Maxwell, James Pattinson, Alex Keath and Will Bosisto. Future captain?: Steve Smith is on the rise. Drawn up by CA's sports psychologist, Dr Michael Lloyd, the year-long initiative will begin with a two-day leadership workshop in February in Brisbane where Taylor will be closely involved with players nominated by their states and rubber-stamped by national selectors. Fairfax Media has seen a copy of the workshop agenda and it will keep the likes of Smith as busy as England's bowling did last week in Perth, where he was man of the match as Australia completed a 3-0 Ashes series win. The topics to be discussed include: "on and off-field pressures," "decision-making scrutiny," "different personality types," "identifying and resolving team conflict," "setting a vision and culture," the "over-confidence trap" and management of relationships with the "board, athletes, support staff, players, media, sponsors and public." During the program, players will also be given an emotional intelligence assessment and receive one-on-one feedback on the profiling data compiled about them. With seven of Australia's Test team aged 31 or above, Smith, 24, has emerged as a leading candidate to be a future captain after establishing himself in the side with two hundreds in his last four matches. Smith's grooming is already under way. This season he has led NSW for the first time and on Saturday night captained the Sydney Sixers to victory against the Thunder in the Big Bash League. He previously stood in as captain when the Sixers won the BBL title two summers ago. The leadership program is not specifically about finding Clarke's successor, CA stresses. "The pressures and demands of leading elite sporting teams are growing all the time, so it's important we work hard to equip our talented young cricketers with the necessary skills to succeed in this area," CA general manager of team performance Pat Howard said. This is not necessarily designed to identify the next Australian captain. The aim is to build a leadership culture within Australian cricket whereby we equip young players with the knowledge and man-management skills to positively impact future state and national teams. Over the years Australian cricket has been very lucky to have a number of outstanding leaders, and we'll be looking to expose our young players to their thoughts and insights as much as possible.