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Leadership and Management Development

…being a leader that creates real breakthroughs

Whether you are

  • A team leader or manager seeking to develop your own leadership skills.
  • A senior executive looking to develop your organisation’s leadership capacity throughout your leadership pipeline.
  • An HR professional seeking the best means for leadership development of your people.

The key leadership questions remain the same… How do we develop and exploit our true leadership potential in order to achieve ongoing positive breakthroughs at a personal level, and for our teams and organisation?

Research shows the single biggest impact upon the performance of teams and individuals is a result of the climate they work within, created by the leadership style and behaviours of their leader. Hence an organisation will only ever become as good as the quality of their leaders and managers – they can either be a catalyst to greatness, or a roadblock. Leaders are accountable for creating the conditions to enable people to contribute to their true personal potential.

For us, breakthrough leadership

  • Is having an impact, making a difference, leaving a legacy of change within the people we lead, systems and processes, culture, confidence and competence.
  • Is not a position, or a process you follow, or a collection of competencies.
  • Is being, thinking, and behaving with a leadership mindset.
  • Is an influence relationship …
    creating and maintaining effective relationships of trust with others such that we can influence them positively – relationships where they allow us to lead them.
  • Is a choice …
    Choosing to make a difference and have an impact, both throughout all aspects of your life, and every moment of it.
  • Is learnt, rather than being taught …
    Learnt through reflecting on and learning from life’s experiences (ours and others), a lifelong journey of personal learning, discovery, challenge, and growth.

We have to fill our management pipelines with people who can both manage and lead: are technically credible and can inspire, are good decision makers and can engage emotionally, have both IQ and EI, are good strategically and tactically, are forward looking and can connect people with the vision, can manage the current reality and lead change, and are totally trusted.

It has to be led from the top – and the bottom.

  • From the top – because experience clearly shows that few if any organisations achieve greatness without great leadership at the top.While we look to top leaders to provide the vision and strategic thinking necessary to ensure clear and successful direction, their most profound impact is to inspire and enable self-leadership to flourish throughout the organisation, and particularly with the managers
  • From the bottom – because if the single biggest impact on a person and team’s performance is their direct manager, and with 70 – 90% of staff in an organisation reporting to first line managers, then the impact of first line managers is huge.

While organisations depend upon the technical skills of their professional staff, it is their manager who will determine whether these are harnessed to their true potential, or not.

Leadership development needs to get beyond thinking it is about growing a long list of competencies, with the thought that if these are inherent, then great leadership will result, or that it is all about strategic thinking and good decision making.

Leadership development needs to firstly build a leadership mindset – an understanding that leadership and management’s primary focus is to create a culture and environment that inspires people to achieve to their true potential and deliver the desired organisational vision, results, and delighted customers – and what they may personally need to be to achieve this.

Leaders also need to know how to shift their mindset, values, time focus and skill sets as they transition up the management ladder, through higher and wider levels of accountability.

Systems Leadership

Given the speed of continual change in our modern society, and the demand for leaders to relate to and connect with wider and wider networks, the ability of leaders to cope is beyond their individual capacity. Leaders must develop their capacity to work systemically, to understand and relate to the wider systems at play, to build and leverage shared responsibility, to listen to what the larger whole is trying to convey to us, to collaborate and build shared leadership and accountability across tams and networks.

Effective relationships of influence, and how to listen, collaborate with, and leverage the systems created by them, is essential to leading effective change.

We offer a range of approaches for leadership development, to suit the needs of people at different levels of the organisation’s leadership pipeline and at different stages in their personal development:

  • Aspiring managers
  • First level managers and leaders
  • Managing managers
  • Senior executives

In all cases, during the learning process we focus on the development of the individual leader and manager – “you”:

  • Exploring, discovering, challenging, and growing yourself
  • Becoming the leader you seek to be
  • Identifying and releasing your true potential
  • Seeking your own personal breakthroughs
  • Understanding, from this, your contribution and accountabilities to your organisation and your people

It’s only from this that your organisation will in turn achieve its breakthroughs.

Learning Formats

Our key focus is to create learning experiences which lead to genuine personal breakthroughs and sustained behavior changes, so our leadership programmes:

  • make maximum use of our multi learning system approach including:
    • 360° Leadership Practices Surveys
    • Emotional Intelligence Survey
  • run over a period of time (we have seen very little sustained breakthrough from one-off workshops)
  • involve maximum interactive learning, reflection, challenge, self-discovery, pushing of comfort zones
  • are highly motivational and reinforcing, stretching and demanding yet encouraging and confirming

Our leadership development programmes with a major banking client were independently assessed as showing the highest levels of learning transfer and behaviour change recorded in New Zealand, and equal to the best worldwide .

Services offered:

  • Bespoke leadership and management development programmes for people at different levels in the organisation
  • One-on-one coaching and mentoring
  • 360° surveys and feedback:
    • Leadership Practices Survey
    • Emotional Intelligence Survey
    • Benchmarking
    • Leadership Styles Survey
    • Management Practices Survey
    • Coaching Practices Survey
  • Self-development assessment tools:
    • Myers Briggs
    • Herrmann Brain Dominance
    • Hogan Assessments
    • Influence Styles
    • Leadership Styles
    • Optimism
    • Change readiness index
  • Access to on-line articles, newsletters, e-forums

With over 7,000 managers in the database, these are the longest running and largest databases specific to leadership in New Zealand, enabling you to benchmark yourself against the norms.

Contact us for more information about particular programmes, or for us to design a programme for your specific needs.