Leadership Development

Organisations across industries have been investing in women's leadership development for two decades. The pipeline programs, mentoring initiatives, sponsorship schemes and women's networks are now well-established features of the corporate landscape. Progress has been made. And yet the representation of women at the most senior levels of most organisations continues to fall significantly short of parity and the rate of change remains slower than both the investment and the i

The multigenerational workplace is not a future trend. It is the present reality for most managers leading knowledge workers today. Teams that include Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z colleagues are no longer unusual. They are the norm. And yet most management development continues to treat leadership as though the people being led share broadly similar assumptions about work, authority, feedback, career and what good leadership actually looks like. Wh

Training and coaching are not interchangeable. This is not simply a structural distinction, a matter of one happening in groups and the other in pairs. It is a distinction in what each intervention is capable of producing and, therefore, when each is the right tool for the development work at hand. What Training Does Well Training excels at building knowledge and introducing frameworks. A well-designed Leadership Development program can give participants a shared vocabulary f

360 degree feedback is one of the most widely used tools in developing leaders. It is also one of the most frequently misunderstood, both in what it is designed to measure and in how the results it generates should be used. The value of a 360 is not in the receiving of the data. It is in what the leader and their organisation do with it next. What a 360 Actually Measures A 360 degree feedback process gathers structured input from a leader's working relationships across multip

The move from individual contributor to manager is one of the most significant transitions a professional career can produce. It is also, in most organisations, one of the least well-supported. Considerable effort goes into identifying high-performing individuals and promoting them into people leadership roles. Proportionately less goes into preparing them for what the role actually requires, which is not more of the same excellent individual work, but an entirely different s

Executive Presence is one of those qualities that most leaders have heard of, many aspire to have and relatively few can define with precision. The good news is that it is not a fixed trait — it is not reserved for a particular personality type or communication style. It is a capacity that can be built, and the Insights Discovery framework offers a valuable lens for that development.

Organisations continue to struggle with a fundamental question: what kind of leader does this particular organisation, with these particular people, facing these particular challenges, actually need? The answer is almost always less about a model and more about a quality. Two qualities, to be precise: authenticity and consciousness.