Your presence gives you your edge as a leader.

You are a leader with presence!

Your presence gives you your edge as a leader.

You are a leader with presence!

Your people experience your leadership every day. They experience it via your technical expertise; your position; your authority. Your leadership is coloured by the information or data that you take in from your context and environment; and by every action you generate as a leader. 

And your people experience your leadership through your presence. Leadership presence can seem like a nebulous thing; hard to quantify, measure or assess?

The Leadership Presence Self Assessment allows you to observe, and to make visible these experiential aspects of your leadership. 

Your presence illuminates how you experience yourself, AND how others experience you.  It resonates in how you listen, speak, be authentic; how you show respect, thrive, contract; and how you show-up, focus and innovate. 

As a leader you're leading people and change. And you need to understand your own matrix of leverage points. Leverage points at which you can influence your people and influence change in alignment with the shifting context. 

Recognition and understanding allow you to create or generate paradigm or mindset shifts in yourself and in others. Moving beyond fixed viewpoint, outdated, deep-set beliefs about how the world used to work. 

Its including new, emerging data so that you can develop awareness about where those old paradigms are failing; you, your team; or the world around you. Open mindedness allows you to discover or identify new paradigms – and adjust your vision; amend your thinking and  develop new ways of being. As these adjustments change how you think and respond they also grow your presence. And change your frames or stories about the world. 

Every domain of presence has a place. You can consciously explore each one. Bringing each into sharp focus, as you learn how to operate with confidence within those new paradigms. Your open presence keeps expanding to accommodate the bigger worldviews you are developing.

As you operate from these learning edges of your presence your effective network grows - you connect with other individuals with influence; change agents who are also curious, and open-minded. You consciously choose to spend your time wisely. You have moved beyond the closed mindset world of limitation and reaction.There’s a lot of freedom in this approach! 

You can set aside fixed topic expertise anchored in the past and how things used to be (pre pandemic for example). You can stay flexible and awake to emerging patterns and to shifts in the context. You can include the understanding that no one paradigm is ‘the truth’; and see a range of worldviews. You can respond, with flexibility and agility as the context changes.

The Leaders with Presence process delivers a vertical development experience, which challenges your cognitive and emotional capacities and grows your understanding of yourself. Vertical learning wisdom recognises that you move through levels of maturity as a  human,  and as a leader. And that vertical learning experiences will include Heat Experiences + Colliding Perspectives + Elevated Sense Making. This ‘recipe’ will set up optimal conditions to stretch you to the next level.    

A Heat Experience sees you stepping beyond your comfort zone, into complex, new situations which disrupt your habitual ways of thinking. Your unique heat-experience is designed , in a real-life setting, to challenge your usual ways of being and leading. You will feel stretch and discomfort. With adequate support this experience will facilitate your cognitive and emotional development by nudging your existing assumptions and beliefs. In a heat experiment/experience you can become more resilient, adaptable, and effective as an innovative leader.

When designing your heat experience you will welcome some Colliding Perspectives - which encourage you in approaching new situations with openness, curiosity and respect for different perspectives. Chosen well these colliding perspectives will expose you, and your leadership practices to diverse worldviews, opposing opinions, and unfamiliar discourse. Building in your intention to be open to these differing perspectives + allowing time and space for reflection, allows you to develop bolder and more nuanced stories, frameworks and beliefs - growing your understanding of the world and how it works.

The time and space you take to reflect on what you are learning, and how you can apply it, builds your capacity for Elevated Sense Making. You will integrate your discoveries and insights, your understandings; as you learn your cognitive processing becomes more advanced. Your exposure to diverse viewpoints, complex challenges and new experiences enables you to make meaning, or see a clear picture, of challenging, complex and ambiguous situations. The synthesis of those colliding perspectives weaves in your understanding of the existence and interrogation of multiple perspectives into balance or coherence. Now you can make better decisions, adapt to change and thrive in navigating our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. Sometimes it is as simple as allowing there to be tensions in the context - not trying to make them ‘disappear’ by pretending they do not exist. Uncomfortable - but a real aspect of many complex situations.    

A crucial factor in supporting your vertical development as a leader is your growing ability to deal with difficult emotions. Diving into challenging, potentially emotional situations brings disruption. In your well designed heat experiences you will have opportunities to receive this data (emotional responses) just like all the other data. Now you can make sense of it, take action through it, including regular and deep reflection in your leadership practice, which generates new meanings, allowing meaning to keep evolving for transformed results. 

Leaders with Presence invites you to step boldly into your personal and ongoing learning journey; to back yourself as you keep evolving and transforming; to respond, with authenticity and flexibility to the ever evolving context; to make very good use of all of the emerging data.

How can you best design your own unique, effective Heat Experience?

Start with our Leaders with Presence self-assessment

1)      You can begin your process by undertaking your own reflection on your leaders with presence self-assessment. Take some time to reflect on your results and ask yourself the following questions:

What surprises me about my highest 3 scores?
What gives rise to these higher scores?
What surprises me about my lower 3 scores?
What gives rise to those scores?
What kind of leader do I want to be?
What work am I willing and able to do to get there?

What help do I need?

 2)      If you’re wanting to raise the temperature…

 Transformation = Heat Experiences + Colliding Perspectives + Elevated Sense-Making

Raise the temperature further with the support of a coach who can support you navigate your Heat Experiences, Colliding Perspectives and synthesise and Elevate your Sense Making to step into a new view of your world.

To support take your learnings to a deeper level we can offer you the assistance from an ICF qualified coach – to both debrief your results and take to a deeper level. Please email us at leaderswithpresence@gmail.com and we can explore options with you.

To support take your learnings to a deeper level we can offer you the assistance from an ICF qualified coach – to both debrief your results and take to a deeper level. Please email us at leaderswithpresence@gmail.com and we can explore options with you.