edge+stretch Leadership practice
We don’t divorce Leadership Development from Leadership Practice: that’s why we actually make a difference.
We work with organisations to develop leadership practice. That means designing interventions that pay attention to the context in which they work and, crucially, focuses on what it means to develop your practice as a leader.
Models and theories are secondary to bringing the reality of your workplace challenges into a space where you can inquire into what it means to lead in your organisation. That is the 'work proper'.
Conventional approaches to leadership development don’t work (often).
We design development experiences that are grounded in the lived reality of what it means to lead in organisations in the 21st century, not off-the-shelf, hermetically-sealed, sheep dip learning experiences.
A number of us have substantial experience of designing and delivering programmes for clients, often run at beautiful institutional locations and hotels, or on site at clients’ offices.
What they have in common is that they make the assumption that a few days in a well-facilitated and designed bubble, is enough. It is often useful, rarely sufficient, because it divorces the leader’s development from the context in which their leadership takes place.
We know, because we have run programmes like that.
We do what really works.
Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester describe learning in 21st century organisations and leadership as being a function of four things:
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Learning to know;
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Learning to be;
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Learning to be together;
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Learning to do.
We agree, and would add one more:
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Learning to organize.
We design interventions that weave in the reality of participants' day-to-day life in the workplace, their real leadership and change challenges, strategic decisions, questions about structure, interpersonal issues, concerns about how they show up and the influence they are (or are not) having...and more.
These typically consist of inquiry-based, action research- flavoured learning experiences, where theory is used to illuminate rather than impress.
Find out more about our work with organisations:
'Developing yourself as a leader' means paying attention to how you practice
leadership in your context.
“Much of the oft-repeated conventional wisdom about leadership is based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science.”
Jeffrey Pfeffer
