Care2Lead Australia brings a wealth of experience in leadership development, backed by research and evidence. Research shows that leadership is, fundamentally, a psychological contract. Our approach can therefore be summed up by the maxim “who you are is how you lead”. This means that we take a whole person approach,treating people as adults on their individual development journeys. We believe that people only truly develop leadership maturity and flexibilityby engaging in and learning from challenging experiences, hence experiential learning is central to our approach.

There are three key stages to our approach to developing your organisation’s leadership capability:

• Assessment (taking stock of where I am now)
• Challenge (undertaking experiences that encourage new thinking and behaviour change)
• Support (leveraging sources of support to sustain your learning and growth)

ASSESSMENT

The assessment stage involves identifying where you are currently situated in relation to the challenges you face. We use two proven tools for this:

Transformations

Transformations is a flexible, user-friendly tool for individuals and groups to facilitate self-understanding, coaching, leadership development and culture development. Transformations creates self-insight and dialogue about the stages and processes of human development, in a way that is both engaging and reflective, playful as well as serious.

The Transformationstool is a deck of cards, available in either hard copy or digital formats.It comprises 84 Life Logic cards plus 50 Catalyst cards which use unique labelled drawings to illustrate the seven transformations of increasing human maturity from youth onward. The Life Logic cards help people reflect on the kinds of thinking and actions that guide their lives. These range from less complex early stages to more complex later stages.The Catalyst cards help people to reflect on the processes that influence life transformations, such as work, mentoring, accidents, love, and so on. This serves to identify what kinds of things in life might be helping or hindering people’s further development.

Map individual life journeys and group historiesto date. The aim is to illustrate “from here to there in your life,” selecting cards in the following sequence: Where are you coming from (the past)? Who are you now in your life? Who are you becoming, or what are your aspirations for the future?

Kolb Experiential Learning Profile

The Kolb experiential learning cycle is based on over 50 years of research and comprises aholistic model of learning through experience. The cycle comprises four stages: experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting. Individuals, however, differ in their preferences for the four phases of learning. Their preferences are related to many factors: culture, personality type, life experiences, educational specialization, career choice, current job priorities and genetic makeup. The Kolb Experiential Learning Profile identifies individual and team learning preferences and provides recommendations on how to become a more flexible, integrated and intentional learner. Experiential learning thus becomes the vehicle for addressing dilemmasand transitions and leads to higher stages of maturity and development.

CHALLENGE

Becoming a more effective leader involves taking on challenges outside of your leadership “comfort zone” which stretch you as a person. Developmental opportunities occur whenleaders face the challenges that arise from the dilemmas, paradoxes, complexities and competing priorities inherent in leadership roles.

These challenges can provide leaders with novel and intense learning experiences, stretching their minds and their growth. Experiences such as these create a sense of imbalance and psychological disorientation by challenging the way the leader currently makes sense of the world andby requiring skills and perspectives not currently available to them.

Experiences that involvenovelty and intensity provide the greatest opportunity for stretch growth.Novel experiences are those which involve broader, higherormore holistic responsibility, a different job context or greater ambiguity, or the need to develop different relationships or expertise. Intensity derives from the experience having greater time pressure, higher visibility, more business-critical impact or more significant change implications and greater risk.

SUPPORT

Development is an iterative process. For development to be sustained over time, challenging learning experiences need to be balanced by effective support for leaders. Challenging experiences are usually accompanied by strong and often negative emotions, such as fear, confusion and anxiety.These emotions can give rise to psychological resistance and impede growth if left unaddressed.

Such a learning space provides a safe zone that normalises the discomfort that can arise from uncomfortable emotions associated with stretch development.We encourage leaders to balance uncomfortable emotions with curiosity about those emotions. This enables leaders to view their experiences from different perspectives rather than responding in habitual and comfortable ways. In this way, leaders can leverage the insights to be gained from their challenging experiences.

Through this coaching support we help leaders make room for new perspectives to emerge. These new perspectives provide the platform for experimenting with and exploring new behaviours – a process of intentional experiencingand deliberate practice that provides the basis for effective ongoing learning and development.