Deeper LEADERSHIP

We need leaders...

...not in love with money, but in love with justice,

not in love with publicity, but in love with humanity.

- Dr Martin Luther King Jnr

Campaign for Deeper Leaders

We passionately believe that organisations, communities and nations are in desperate need of deeper leaders. Leaders that are less ego-driven, more eco-driven; less self-centred, more centred-selves. Leaders that look beyond the numbers to consider whether they and their organisations are contributing to a kinder, fairer and more sustainable world. It's what customers and other key stakeholders increasingly expect and will increasingly demand. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that the most profitable companies are not necessarily the most profit-oriented, nor those focused on maximising return to shareholders, but those centred on an external and meaningful purpose.

Whether we are working with individual leaders or developing the leadership abilities of larger groups, we help people become deeper leaders by becoming more purposeful - the best leaders of themselves first. We help them think strategically about their lives as a whole, as a route towards becoming the best leaders of others, of organisations and of communities.

Seven characteristics of Deeper Leaders

Deeper Leaders are:

Rooted in their values, principles and purpose
- knowing what matters most, with a sense of direction and where they stand on key issues. They lead with ethical and moral clarity, proven in crises
Growing in self-awareness
- of their ‘light’ and their ‘shadow’ and their impact on others
Humble and curious
- always listening, learning, seeking dialogue, knowing that their wisdom and understanding is never complete
Discovering, and expressing, their 'Voice'
- living out their unique contribution, with a growing awareness of the difference only they can make, and a sense of the legacy they want to leave
Enabling the leadership of others
- helping others find and express their 'Voice' at work and in the wider world
Striving to lead with love
- holding love as a universal human need that enables others to make their best contribution, while accepting that sometimes love must be tough
Globally responsible
- seeking to lead their lives and their organisations as active contributors to a fairer, kinder and more sustainable world

We believe these are the qualities that enable your leaders to get the best from others and lead your organisation to sustainable success. If you agree, then you've come to the right place for your leadership development needs. If you're not sure, let's start a conversation...

Click on the links below to find about how we work to develop deeper leaders at three levels:

Executive Coaching

Leadership Development Programmes

Building Leadership Communities

Executive Coaching - depth, breadth and flex

Depth

Each member of the Deeper Leaders Collective has between 15 and 30 years' experience of coaching leaders up to and including Chief Executive. We are able to work at a deep, personal level on issues such as wellbeing, balance, career choices, challenging workplace relationships and personal purpose.

Breadth

As well as being able to work at a deep personal level, we have also all worked at an organisational level to facilitate change. This means that we bring a 'whole system' perspective to our coaching, able to act as supporters and collaborators in change projects, bringing in the latest thinking on organisational change in complex environments.

Flex

As coaches, we are not wedded to one coaching model, but will draw upon helping strategies from a range of therapeutic approaches such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Gestalt as well as Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), and a variety of psychometrics and diagnostic tools. This means we are able to adapt our styles to the individual needs of the leader being coached.

We will work with you to identify the best coach for your needs and begin with a pre-coaching questionnaire to ensure both coach and coachee have a clear sense of what success would look like at the end of a programme of coaching. We will then use a Coaching Review Form towards the end of a programme to capture the progress made against the original objectives.

Anchor 1

Anchor 2

Leadership Development

Clients come to us with a variety of needs that may suggest a wider leadership development programme beyond an indvidual or a team may be needed. Such challenges include:

a need to establish a shared leadership culture - a common understanding of what it means to lead and manage well in your context
a need to 'professionalise' leadership and management in an organisation where technical or academic expertise is central, and academic or technical experts need to step up to lead and manage
a need for middle managers to think and act more strategically and responsively to a changing operating environment
a need to reinforce core values or behaviours in a leadership population so that they are able to model those behaviours and values to those they lead
a need to break down silos and work more collaboratively across functional boundaries

Diagnosis and design
When a client asks us to run a leadership and management development programme, we always start with a diagnostic and insight-gathering stage. This will give us a clearer picture of what you are hoping a programme will help you achieve, as well as identifying the key drivers and inhibitors that are helping or hindering that change in the wider organisational system.

Often other organisational elements will need to shift as well, beyond the behaviour of your target group. We will draw these to your attention, as we become aware of them, and help you develop wider strategies that will support the change you want to see. This may include pointing out to the top team what they need to do differently if they are to see a shift lower down. If we honestly believe that a leadership programme will not deliver the outcomes you require, we will tell you. As seasoned practitioners, we want to focus our energies on working with clients where we can make a real difference. At the end of the day, we are far more interested in delivering great outcomes for you, rather than simply delivering a programme.

Our programmes will be truly bespoke for your organisation, based on our diagnostic work, and geared towards your unique and developing context. However, you may be interested in some of the themes that clients often find helpful in addressing their need:

Authentic Leadership
Relational Leadership
Emotionally Intelligent Leadership
Purpose-driven Leadership
Resilient Leadership

Strategic Leadership
The Expert as Leader
Leading with Agility
Globally Responsible Leadership

Anchor 3

Building Leadership Communities

It is our belief that you need the ability for people to step up and lead at all levels of your organisation, and that ability starts with an individual's choices. Through courageous choices of their attitude and focus, individuals can show leadership without being in a formally recognised leadership position. As an individual steps into their power and changes what they can in line with their organisation's goals, rather than moaning about what they can't change, a leader is born.

It is also our belief that relying on individual 'heroic' leaders to lead us in the complex and uncertain context of the 21st century will lead to disappointment. We see leadership as a team sport. Only as leaders work together in a collaborative way, and collectively own the solutions, can they solve the toughest problems and meet the toughest challenges.

There is also great merit in working with the 'whole system' of your organisation, helping everyone to see the bigger picture and the interdependencies, both internal and external, that need to be working well if you are to realise your potential as a high-performing organisation.

For this reason, we are helping our clients with increasing regularity to engage the whole leadership and management population in tackling some key strategic challenges together. This may be part of a wider leadership programme or completely separate. Here are some of the contexts we have helped groups of 50-100 managers to work together, using a variety of large group methods:

A professional services firm - to catalyse more collaborative working amongst partners and associates and identify cross-selling opportunities to deliver their corporate plan.
A large university - at the end of a leadership development programme to agree projects amongst its top 100 managers that would help progress a high-performance culture and achieve its global ambitions.
An international aid organisation - generating ideas on how it could build a high-trust culture.
An Asian airport group – getting all cohorts together at the end of a leadership programme to consider how they could step up to more dynamic style of leadership moving forward
A large HR function serving two police forces – how it could provide a more joined up service
A government agency – how it could work more collaboratively to achieve its goals
A global insurance provider - identifying and tackling the biggest challenges to achieving its ambitious vision.

We are also starting to use some of these large group engagement methods in helping local communities tackle some of the biggest social challenges they are facing. We are able to draw together a wide diversity of stakeholders into a space where they can engage in meaningful dialogue towards some practical solutions.