Hewsons Authentic Leadership Development Cycle™

Leadership is different than management.

Leaders create futures, managers manage the fulfilment of those futures.

An Authentic Leader is a person of vision. They impact the context in which people are working by replacing business as usual with new thinking whilst never losing sight of the value that trust plays in making new futures happen.

Leadership is not a fixed thing. It’s a way of being that can gets expressed through communication and action in a multitude of ways but at the core it is about conversations. Often people have a picture of what leadership is and find themselves not matching up to that picture. Our view is that leadership is possible for anyone if they are committed to attaining it, it can be learnt and should be a discovery of a person’s individual self-expression rather than adhering to some kind of picture of what leadership is or should be.

The intent of our Authentic Leadership Development Cycle™ is that individuals and teams move from focus on self to awareness of the impact they have on others, and to gain a level of mastery in initiating and participating in critical conversations to create new and exciting futures for themselves and their organisations built on trust and accountability. A facility for having these conversation also enables them to navigate the inevitable challenges that will arise in achieving the desired futures.

You're in Good Company

Awareness

Uncovering or expanding our awareness of what motivates our choices, behaviours, conversations and actions is the first step in effecting real and sustainable change. Many people have never given this any kind of consideration, others have but have yet to discover the kind of insights that produce sustainable change. It is difficult to find blind spots on your own because the very nature of them ensures they remain hidden from your view! We provide an environment that allows people to become highly aware of the blind spots they have and the way in which those blind spots are impacting their performance at work and life.

One of the biggest areas of life in which blind spots live is communication – providing a huge opportunity for breakthrough given it’s criticality in all areas of life! Many assume they have a full understanding of how to communicate and what the principles for effective communication are. Based on the powerful work in this area by Fernando Flores, we help people to see communication, speaking and listening, not just as a process of broadcasting information but as the access to creating action and results.

Responsibility

The next critical step in the development cycle is exploring the impact one’s choices, behaviours, conversations and actions have on others as well as performance and taking responsibility for that impact. Hewsons allows people to safely explore and consider how they are positively and negatively contributing to their managers, peers, colleagues and staff. Bridging the gap between what is known and what is done, they learn new ways of thinking about how to produce extraordinary results through the building and maintaining of trusting, collaborative and creative relationships.

With an elevated awareness of the true power of communication, many leaders need to learn the extent to which they need to be responsible for both what they say and how they say it – as well as HOW they listen.

Choice

Having seen what is and is not effective this next step naturally arises from the previous two. Once a person becomes aware of the choices they are unconsciously making and why, and then takes responsibility for those that are ineffective, they are able to make wise choices that allow for much more effective conversations and results. Choice is also allied with decision making. Leaders are often faced with complex and challenging situations involving multiple inputs and ideas. At the end of the day they need to choose, to take a stand, and to be ready to take accountability for the outcomes of their choices.

Action

Insight alone is of little benefit, identifying an available choice without taking action on it leaves us stuck in the old cycle. Until one takes action nothing has fundamentally changed. As a result of having greater awareness of what there is to be responsible for and the choices that are now in front of them, people see what actions they need to take and the benefits of doing so for themselves and others, and they take them. Many times that action involves addressing relationships and can include taking on the difficult conversations they have been avoiding as well as developing effective structures for tracking and managing the conversations required for exceptional delivery.

It is the ongoing progress through each step in this cycle within the context of developing the capacity to create and manage effective conversations that allows for real accountability, that is applied to all Hewsons coaching service offerings.