Developing your leaders
Organisational leadership is tough – there’s no two ways about it. The responsibility, the workload and often, the loneliness, can combine to make leadership roles more difficult than they need to be.
Organisations rightly expect a lot from their leaders. Role-modelling the values, making tough decisions, setting the pace, inspiring employees and leading through change. This is why it’s important to understand that leadership isn’t simply a more senior version of middle management.
Leadership can have an enormous impact on the success of an organisation. Similarly, leadership can take its toll on leaders – but it doesn’t need to.
Why leadership development matters
We expect a lot of our leaders! Strategic thinking, effective role-modelling, taking tough decisions, setting and reaching stretching goals, and turning a mission into tactical action each day. That’s just scratching the surface!
So if we’re going to place such a diverse set of demands on their to-do lists, let’s ensure we provide them with the resources they need to do a great job. This is where high quality leadership development comes in.
Rather than swooping in with support once leaders have hit the buffers and need professional help, we advocate preventative support to ensure they avoid burnout and can leverage their skills to best effect.
Leadership development can act as an inoculation against the pressures of the job, the impact of change, and the extra-organisational context that can disrupt even the best-laid plans. Well-designed and implemented leadership development can support new leaders as they step into role, and existing leaders as they pick up more responsibility. Leadership development that’s designed with the organisational context in mind means it addresses the skills, knowledge and personal attributes you require. Not what the latest fad suggests you need.
Well-crafted leadership development addresses both strengths and development needs, includes intra-personal as well as inter-personal skills and abilities, and ensures that a sustainable style of decision-making and behaviour is reinforced at every turn.
Performance challenges faced by leaders
Fundamentally, the provision of quality, evidence-based leadership development contributes to individual and organisational success. And while it’s difficult to perform at your best if your wellbeing is suffering, even the healthiest of leaders may find their performance threatened by their ways of thinking and behaving.
With carefully crafted development support, aspiring and existing leaders can side-step common pitfalls that come with progression and increased levels of responsibility.
These include, but are not limited to:
- Failure to delegate effectively, which can lead to overwhelm and its impact
- Ineffective relationship management, leading to erosion of trust
- Career derailment through over-played strengths, meaning organisational exit
- Failure to adjust to seniority, leaving leaders thinking and operating tactically
- Failure to read context, behaving inflexibly and on ‘autopilot’
- Inability to handle complexity, giving rise to avoidance and delay
- Failure to develop others, creating a succession ‘bottleneck’ and loss of talent
All have serious implications for leadership performance and sustainability in post. And given the responsibilities of leaders, implications for organisational effectiveness and success. Performance issues like those we list above can take time to manifest and even longer to be addressed if leaders don’t receive feedback or get access to professional development.
What is 'sustainable leadership'?
Firstly, it’s important to clarify that this isn’t another new model of leadership or silver bullet for your leadership challenges. We propose this instead as an overarching ethos of leadership, which should be interpreted and applied with your organisational context in mind.
When we refer to sustainable leadership, we explore what leaders think, feel and do, all through the lens of sustainability. The impact they have on their own wellbeing and performance, the wellbeing and performance of those around them, their impact on the effectiveness of the organisation, and the impact of their decisions on society more broadly.
Sustainable leadership is all about moving from a focus on surviving the week or quarter, to a more considered approach that values people, productivity and performance. It’s about creating an intentional pace of work that doesn’t sacrifice wellbeing for short-term gains. it’s about investing in wellbeing to boost performance.
Our approach to leadership development
Leadership development, from our perspective, is both a strategic investment and a strategic imperative. It is not just about teaching people how to manage others, although that is undoubtedly an outcome. It is about helping leaders grow the self-awareness, emotional intelligence, contextual sensitivity and critical thinking skills needed to lead with purpose, alignment and integrity whilst maintaining the wellbeing of themselves and their teams. It is ensuring that leaders are developed through continuous learning, feedback, experience, and reflection throughout their careers.
Done well, leadership development is a systemic organisational intervention. It helps individuals unlock their potential, supports healthier team dynamics, drives better decision-making, and builds a stronger culture. It also ensures a pipeline of capable leaders who can navigate uncertainty, adapt to change, and inspire others along the way.
But it has to be intentional – rooted in real-world challenges, aligned with organisational purpose, strategy and values. It needs to be supported through coaching and mentoring and through the practices that drive accountability – such as OKRs/goal setting and performance management.
Investing in leadership development isn’t just about performance – it’s about shaping environments where people thrive, innovation flourishes, and long-term success becomes possible.
We design our leadership development solutions with the client’s context and strategy in mind. We don’t do ‘off the shelf’ training, nor do we recycle truisms from the distant past of leadership theory. As scientists, we emphasise putting the scientific evidence to work, creating solutions and interventions that actually have a positive impact.
Regardless of the context, we ensure our leadership development solutions are built around three key pillars – each of which makes a unique contribution to leadership impact and success:
Contextual awareness
This gives aspiring and existing leaders an awareness of the central importance of context when it comes to decision-making and interacting with others. Whether that’s the present moment or the wider economic landscape, they’ll understand the importance of systemic thinking and showing up in the moment with intention.
Intra-personal skills
These include the key components of self-awareness and self-knowledge. Values, personality, motivators, and yes, fears, worries and self-doubt. But also how to overcome limiting beliefs and to focus on what really matters. We help leaders learn how to overcome discomfort and cultivate a better relationship with their own mind.
Inter-personal skills
This is all about helping leaders to interact with those around them in a way that supports positive relationships, collaboration, psychological safety and high performance. With a constant theme of the sustainability and impact of how they communicate with and lead others.
What makes leadership development effective?
Our experience working with leaders has taught us the importance of designing leadership development interventions that are relevant, practical and impactful. They need to represent a good investment of leaders’ time and attention. This means creating programmes that include:
- Self-directed online learning, through specially-created video and text-based content
- Live interactive workshops to explore the concepts and skills
- Real-world application of the programme contents
- Intentional and guided reflection on how they are applying what they're learning
- One-to-one coaching to support self-awareness and application of skills
- Addressing over-played strengths, to avoid leadership derailment
- Evidence-based models, skills and approaches
- A focus on wellbeing, coping and self-care to support health and resilience
Organisational contexts where we can help
You’re considering leadership development options
If you’re looking at introducing leadership development for the first time – or the first time in a while – we can help you avoid the most common pitfalls, design activities and interventions based on your needs, and bring the science of leadership to life through evidence-based tools and techniques.
You have an established leadership development pathway
If you already have a selection of leadership development activities in place, we can help you evaluate their suitability for your present context and strategic direction.
We can audit their effectiveness and alignment against your strategy. And should you identify gaps in your leadership proposition, we can contribute targeted modules
The wellbeing of your leaders is a priority
Whether you want to address wellbeing proactively, or you’re already aware of a need to support leaders’ wellbeing, we can provide structured training and coaching support to help your leaders engage in the self-care and coping activities that contribute to a sustainable approach. Where wellbeing is already a presenting issue, we can provide stress management support and help leaders develop the psychological flexibility that boosts wellbeing and performance.
How we can help
Leadership Coaching
We can provide one-to-one coaching for aspiring and existing leaders to help them develop a more sustainable approach to work. Many leaders lack an opportunity to discuss their hopes and fears openly with and objective other. We're happy to provide this, but also use evidence-based coaching methods to improve leaders' performance and wellbeing. We have helped leaders globally increase their self-awareness, cope better with stress, improve their resilience and maximise the performance of their direct reports.
Coaching provides an excellent context in which to discuss development needs, as it includes an opportunity for leaders to be honest and vulnerable that's usually missing from their own organisational context.
We provide support, but also hold leaders accountable for the commitments they make. And as we don't work for them, our coaches can be as challenging and honest as the situation requires!
Development programmes
We can create a bespoke leadership development programme, or make topic-specific contributions to your existing programme. Our past programmes have helped leaders:
- Understand the impact they have on those around them
- Identify and focus on their key priorities
- Build their psychological safety and resilience
- Create an climate of psychological safety and trust at the very top of the organisation
- Coach and develop their direct reports
- Build self-care and self-compassion into their leadership toolkit
- Navigate organisational change with intention and a sustainability mindset
Find out more
Get in touch today to find out more about our approach to leadership development and how we can help you support your leaders to be their best selves everyday. And download our white paper on Sustainable Leadership below.