what we do

With this in mind, our work has been developed specifically for leaders, teams and organisations:

• Seeking a team-based approach to organisational performance, particularly as it relates to senior management, executive leadership teams and boards.
• New teams forming, or established teams looking for a lift in momentum, motivation and performance.
  Navigating change, complexity and ambiguity, and believe courageous, purposeful and confident leadership drives progress and achieves strategic outcomes.
• Committed to developing leaders with the capacity to inspire and institutionalise trust and are prepared to embrace expectations and personally model performance standards.
• Not comfortable with the status quo, and willing to challenge assumptions, disrupt default thinking by asking better and more compelling questions, and introduce original ways of thinking in relation to developing leaders.
• Ready to fast-track emerging leaders for greater responsibility.
• Provide leaders with the opportunity to create their leadership style, leveraging their unique characteristics and skills as a means of building personal leadership authenticity, belief and resilience.
  Ensure accountability for team-based outcomes.

All of our work at designCEO builds on the core philosophy that people, teams and organisations do not rise to the level of their ambition, they fall to the standard of their systems.

And what is the most critical system?

It is your talent system, the right people in the right roles, starting with your leaders.

It’s for this reason the designCEO facilitated programs and mentoring utilise performance frameworks and methodologies heavily influenced by elite sport, ensuring commitment and accountability to a team-based ethos. We teach a system that develops leadership, on the basis that leaders beget leaders.

People who…

• Are committed learners. Take responsibility for their personal development in the context of the team/organisation.
• Consistently set high expectations of themselves and behave to those expectations. They do the right thing, even when it’s hard.
• Have high functional capability. Know their role, play their role, as leaders and technicians.
• Understand that it not just what they bring to the team, it is what they are prepared to do for the team that counts.

Having achieved this, they embrace the notion of leader as teacher, understanding their influence, honouring their leadership role by coaching and mentoring self-responsibility. A winning organisation is an environment of personal and professional development, in which each individual takes responsibility and shares ownership.

Better people make better leaders and leaders create leaders.

• Performance Coaching – Leaders highly committed to their personal development, or seeking support managing complex and challenging phases that may require specific strategies or modifications to their leadership approach for effective performance.  
• Next-Step Coaching – Working with future focused organisations and individuals to proactively accelerate leadership development for high-potential talent.
• Integration Coaching – Assisting leaders to quickly assimilate and make a positive leadership impact in their new position or organisation.

The designCEO coaching and mentoring is a structured process based on the evidence based coaching effectiveness model developed by the Columbia Business School (New York) from which I have received coaching certification.

When discussing the competencies of successful leaders, the conversation soon focuses on:

• The need to foster and develop high levels of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
• Leaders operating in accordance with their strengths, their Natural Gifts.

Our belief is that increasing leadership effectiveness is a continuous process of action, reflection on action and then new and more effective action based on feedback.