COURAGEOUS LEADERSHIP

“Compassion, dignity and equity are innate values that are present and activated in radical transformational leadership.”

- Monica Sharma

Individual coaching

I support leaders through one-on-one and group coaching to build self-awareness, see new perspectives, refine their approach, and gain action-confidence to lead bold change.

Contact me

Approach

I use the Co-Active Coaching model and the Inner Development Goals framework to support you in achieving your objectives.

This might include:

Understand your blind spots and break through unhelpful patterns in order to increase your impact, empowerment and effectiveness.
Strengthen your self-awareness, presence, and emotional intelligence so you interact in non-reactive ways with intention, insight, and influence.
Build your capacity to engage, support and motivate your team so you are more in sync and able to respond to what’s needed, advance your goals, and mobilise change.
Understand your deeper motivations and values that drive your contributions and positive impact, so you are fulfilled and inspired by your work.

“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”

- Bill O'Brien,

former CEO Hanover Insurance

Transformational Leadership programme

Customised Leadership Programme

I can design and deliver a customised leadership programme for your organisation to help you adapt to complex challenges, achieve your strategy, and transform your organisation. This can increase your teams’ capacity to collaborate, innovate new solutions, and expand effectiveness.

French

The Transformational Leadership programme is also available in French, co-hosted with Dialogue en Intelligence Collective.

Inner and Outer Capacities

I help participants build inner skills such as self-awareness, relation-building and systems thinking as well as outer skills such as collaboration, action-learning, and leading change in order to build capacity to facilitate needed shifts.

I’ve been engaged in leadership development over the last decade for UN agencies, UN Global Compact companies, and social & environmental changemakers.

Approach

I am currently using the Theory U process and Inner Development Goals framework because they create conditions for deeper transformation of individual leaders, a shift in mindset in the organisation, and an increased positive impact of the organisation to achieve and expand outcomes, including:

Enhance personal leadership and ability to engage and mobilise in teams
Increase collaboration, engagement, and innovation across the organisation
Enhancing participants’ inner capacities of self-awareness, sense-making, and action-confidence
Building outer capacities of relational strength, collaboration, and systems leadership
Work toward cross-cutting priorities in a collaborative, innovative and adaptive way
Support implementation and evolution of the organisation’s strategy
Strengthen skills to tackle complex problems with diverse stakeholders with a systems approach
Expand ability to create organisational or systems transformation, shifting mindsets and paradigms

Objectives and outcomes tailored to the programme could be outlined in a theory of change diagram as shown in an example below.

My experience in courageous leadership

Strength and resilience of the human spirit

The Leadership for Results programme I helped deliver in Ghana is probably one of my favourites. We worked with 75 leaders across sectors (business, government, social impact, UN) to build collaborative solutions for climate adaptation. These leaders were facing economic, social and environmental challenges, due to climate change, that they could not resolve within their own organisations or sectors.

We helped them build capacity to collaborate with each other and discover breakthrough solutions to challenging situations. It was a very humbling and touching experience as we helped them build skills:

to listen deeply with compassion, dignity and fairness;
to expand their inner listening, confidence, wisdom and intuition;
to see the big picture, think strategically, and lead change;
and, to take small steps toward courageous, concrete action to generate prosperity, establish new patterns, and achieve results.

Our programme addressed underlying issues of equality, empowerment, and power dynamics that created a blind spot and unpreparedness for dramatic climate shifts. While it engaged a relatively small number of leaders, it was reinforced by subsequent programmes and supports and eventually led to a national climate change adaptation strategy.

From my engagement in designing and delivering these leadership programmes and coaching in a wide variety of context, I have learned about the strength and resilience of the human spirit; about the power of intention, integrity and connection; and how a small group of people who have the audacity to make positive change happen can transform their world by creating new patterns, forging deeper relationships, and seeing the best in each other.

After our team finished, the programme continued with local facilitators to support long-term change and local ownership of the empowerment and results.

Summary of leadership programmes

Co-designed a leadership development programme for executives in sustainability – Scotland
Leadership development and innovation in climate adaptation across sectors with 75 UN partners – Ghana
Led a group of United Nations staff and consultants to design and deliver 7 four-month, cross-agency, transformational leadership programmes in New York, Geneva, Addis Ababa and online in French and English: 140 participants across 26 UN entities and 24 countries developed 28 innovation initiatives ranging from eDiplomacy to increased hiring of women.
Co-facilitated a week-long UN Women Transformative Leadership programme for 50 women leaders in the Government of Afghanistan, including ministers, elected officials, and senior staff.
Designed and facilitated leadership programmes in Spanish and English, over a two-year period, that helped companies in the Americas achieve their business goals by creating a more engaged, proactive, and aligned workforce. Clients included member companies of the United Nations Global Compact.
Digitally adapted a leadership programmes quickly for new country contexts and business realities. Co-designed tailored programmes based on the needs of the organisation and participants in order to best help a broad audience transformed their leadership style, work more effectively in relationship, see the broader strategic context, and lead change in a different way.