“At its heart, leadership is about understanding human behaviour— what we do, how we do it and why we do it. Effective leaders meet needs; pay careful attention to group processes; calm anxieties, and arouse hopes and aspirations; know how to liberate human energy and inspire people to positive action. They harness and leverage the different and complex forces and dynamics at play in organizational functioning.”
​
Manfred Kets de Vries, Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organisational Change, INSEAD
“Psychological safety is defined as a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves. More specifically, when people have this at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution”
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor Leadership & Management, Harvard Business School
“Many CEOs focus on finding individual leaders who are great at their roles. Excellent CEOs focus more on the dynamic between the team,
the psychology of the team and how they work together.”
Carolyn Dewar, McKinsey senior partner, Co-author of CEO Excellence
“The most important thing that leaders do is create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the negative extent to which this happening”.
​
Edgar Schein. Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management.
Business theorist and psychologist. Foundational researcher of organizational behavior.
Leadership Consulting & Team Development
Our/ my consulting work is focused on helping businesses with opportunities or challenges related to leadership coaching, team coaching, mentorship, change management, behavioral insights, and performance motivation. This includes:
​
-
Developing holistic leadership and management capability. Leading, with consciousness and authenticity. ​Developing deeper self-awareness, better listening skills, growth mindsets, and enabling personal agency.
​
-
Assisting leadership teams with the critical aspects of people, and organizational behavior related to change and turnaround processes.
​​
-
Understanding and creating the foundation, for trust and psychological safety. Embodied psychologically, physiologically and biochemically, trust is a critical component for high-performance and for fostering full team engagement.
​
-
Building insights into intrinsic performance motivation. While extrinsic motivation is beneficial, intrinsic motivation forms the fundamental basis of performance.
​
-
Facilitating deeply transformative leadership and team retreats.
​
How I/ we work
​
Assignment dependent, this work is either undertaken alone, or in collaboration with a trusted network of associates. Our clients have included large listed corporates, SME's, multi-nationals and NGO's.
​
My/ our consulting approach is normally undertaken at two levels:
​
Phase 1: Needs analysis with a report of the findings.
Phase 2: Workshop the findings and recommendation.
​
We closely work with leaders, managers and their teams, in a way that engages their minds, hands, and hearts to achieve your objectives. We collaborate best with individuals who are genuinely committed to their goals. We authentically engage, feel comfortable asking the tough questions, and take the necessary steps to objectives.
​
Important change implementation lessons.
In the pursuit of delivering sustainable change and/ or growth, I have observed the following:
​
-
Engagement always precedes performance. The importance of understanding individual team member motivations, the ecosystem, minimizing both power distance and hierarchical disconnect, is very often underestimated.
​
-
Where psychological safety and trust exist in teams, performance accelerates, robust decisions are made, and innovation thrives. Although it sounds simple, the value of trust is often overlooked, leaving businesses challenged in these aspects.
​​
-
Alignment and culture are incredibly important for delivering sustained performance. The magic is found in our ability to align our teams, create a common value system, improve our quality of effort, enhance engagement, and wisely allocate our energy. Peter Drucker's often-quoted words "culture eats strategy for breakfast" have yet to be proven wrong. Simple, but not easy.
​
-
Teams and markets are made up of unique, diverse, complex, and dynamic individuals. Plans, systems, and processes are linear, tangible, and measurable; thus leaders tend to gravitate their attention towards these. While important, people still deliver the final performance.
​
-
Strategy development must be owned by the business. When leadership, and/ or their teams do not own the strategy and vision, they often fail to deliver as expected.
​
-
Every business has two flows of information - that which is spoken and what is unspoken. Ambiguity arises when leadership does not frequently, simply, and clearly communicate with all stakeholders. Until we bring awareness to our innate biases and cognitive distortions, we are likely to experience disconnects.
​​​​
What is our next step?
​
If what you read resonates, or you would like to find out more, lets set up a discovery call. Click here, and let's schedule a conversation.
​