Leadership development for your senior leaders
Evolve your leaders from individual experts into an integrated, high-performing team
Businesses that trust me to inspire and upskill their leaders
Leadership development for leaders of leaders
This is for your C Suite – leaders with managers reporting to them. Leading leaders is a whole different ball game to managing your frontline team.
Maybe you’re experiencing some of these problems?
Siloed teams
Leaders don’t consider how their projects impact on others. Instead of working together to achieve your vision, teams have conflicting goals.
Lack of progress
Your team has great ideas but projects don’t get traction. Leaders can’t predict and prevent potential consequences or handle tricky issues when they come up.
Weak connection
When teams are busy the first thing that goes is the personal touch. But that erodes connection. People don’t feel safe to be themselves if there’s no time to be human.
Poor collaboration
There are meetings after meetings, and whispers around the water cooler. Leaders form coalitions and feel on their guard. They’re not leading as a team.
Leaders are lonely
Leadership is isolating. The number of people senior leaders can talk to about gnarly issues is tiny. If they can’t trust their peers, life’s really lonely and hard.
Too busy to learn
Lots of leadership teams feel too busy for training. So, despite being smart people, they go round in circles because they don’t have skills or trust to tackle tough topics.
It’s normal if your senior leaders haven’t gelled. The deck’s stacked against them.
➡️ Our backgrounds limit our perspective
Senior leaders come up from different areas of your business and look at your organisation through that lens. But leaders must look beyond silos and understand what change means for the whole business. That takes support.
➡️ We believe our way is the right way
Objectively we recognise other people think differently, yet we still assume everyone sees things our way, and our ego doesn’t like to admit we’re wrong. It takes practise to entertain other perspectives with an open mind.
➡️ We’re all unreliable witnesses
Perception is reality for humans, but we’ve limited ability to take in the reality of a situation and our memory changes. At the same time our brain wants a coherent story and doesn’t care if that story is true.
➡️ We avoid tough conversations
Almost everyone likes to be liked. So having tough conversations is really hard. But when we don’t explore what’s really going on, we’re stuck with assumption, the mother of all fuck ups.
➡️ Assumptions undermine us regularly
When we decide we know what’s going on our confirmation bias kicks in and we only see things that support our narrative. If we don’t discuss our assumptions, we end up with misunderstandings that undermine our work.
Learning to collaborate takes time, tools, and trust
Strong senior leaders are self-aware and have a grasp of human psychology. They understand how an organisation operates as a cohesive organism. They know when they make a change it affects other parts of the business, and they’re able to have robust conversations to navigate this.
However, many leaders don’t realise how their brain works, or how to collaborate as an effective team, because they’ve never learned. Upskilling to become a high-performing team doesn’t happen overnight.
6 ways leadership development programmes pay off
Play to strengths
Know what each leader brings to the table, and where they fit in the leadership mix. Some bring big picture perspective; others are great with detail.
Increase productivity
Playing to your team’s strengths improves loyalty, problem solving, and creativity. When the right people are doing the right tasks, productivity grows.
Level up together
Leaders move from separate silos into a cohesive team. There’s a new energy and excitement. Leaders are working together, not pulling in different ways.
Culture of trust
Leaders look after one another and individuals feel like they matter. People open up and build the trust to try new tools together. Trust speeds everything up.
Less friction
Teams with high trust work better together. They share skills and language that allow them to work faster, trust each other to deliver, and have each other’s back.
Practical tools
From frameworks for courageous conversations to a matrix that helps prioritise tasks, your leaders get tools to tackle challenges and manage their load.
Principles for leadership success
❇️ Focus on personal strengths
You want your leaders doing work that lights them up. When people do things they love, they bring a different energy to work. And when you help leaders figure out what they’re great at, they help their teams do the same.
❇️ Culture drives growth
Culture is the enabler of your goals, mission, vision, and values. I help you develop a culture of continuous improvement that’s cohesive, aligned, and trusting, equipped to deal with challenges and achieve goals.
❇️ Slow down to go faster
Leadership development takes time, but when your team apply their learnings in the workplace they move faster. They can have courageous conversations and trust each other to act. Shared skills speed everything up.
❇️ Commit to the long haul
The deep work of building trust unfolds over time. Leadership teams must get together regularly to dig into who they are and how they work.
❇️ Set aside time regularly to connect
I work with senior leadership teams long term because high-performing teams need an ongoing relationship with a coach. You don’t take your car for a one-and-done service. Leadership development is just the same.
We build your leadership development programme together so it meets your team’s needs
1: Discovery
First, we get really clear on your goal. What are you trying to achieve by investing in developing your leaders? What do you want me to deliver, and how will you measure success?
Then we look at your logistics.
• How much time can you dedicate to development?
• How often can you commit to meet?
• Do you have calendar constraints, e.g. avoiding the run up to Christmas.
• What’s your budget?
We also review your company vision, mission, and values, and how well they’re being used. If your senior leaders aren’t living these foundations, nobody else in your company will, so we look at how we make them real.
2: Proposal
Your leadership development programme is tailored to your team’s needs.
I break down my approach and the topics I propose for your team, explaining how each recommendation meets your goals for the programme.
I outline the fees and your payment schedule.
You’ll also get a clear indication of how long workshops will be and how often they’ll happen. Your workshop schedule will be designed to work with the rhythm of your business. If people are stressed, they don’t get as much value out of learning, so I schedule sessions when people can be fully present.
3: Workshops and ongoing coaching
I work with senior leadership on an ongoing basis over several years.
Our first year together tends to be more intense as I upskill your team. After that we move into continuous improvement, meeting a few times a year.
A typical engagement is six workshops in the first year, followed by check-ins three times a year. However, we can configure this schedule to suit your team. Some prefer two-day workshops, others half days, or a combo of both.
It’s important for your leaders to connect two to three times a year, even after they’ve upskilled. Getting your leaders together in a room pays massive dividends. Chewing over challenges and getting support from people who’ve been in similar situations strengthens connection and trust.
4: Support between workshops
The real work doesn’t happen in the workshops. Progress happens when your leaders take what they’ve learned and apply it to their daily work.
Often leaders want coaching to help them handle a tricky challenge or to run something past a neutral sounding board. I offer a range of coaching options, so I can help out when your team need that extra bit of support.
My most popular workshop topics
I can tailor these to your needs, or create something entirely new, to take your leaders to new levels of impact and effectiveness.
Living your vision, mission, and values
It’s one thing having these fundamentals on the wall. It’s another making sure they impact on the decisions you make and the behaviour of your team day in, day out. Doing this exercise also highlights other gaps.
Self-awareness and working with others
I take a strengths-based approach to helping your leaders grow their self-awareness. I also use the Big Five personality assessment because it’s scientifically robust. Knowing each other’s strengths helps people work better as a team.
Giving constructive feedback
Teach your leaders to deliver helpful feedback and make feedback a normal part of everything you do. We explore what it looks like to have a culture of continuous improvement and uncover what stands in the way of that goal.
Navigating your people through change
When organisational change happens, senior leaders have wrestled with it for so long they can forget it’s new to everybody else. We look at how you bring people on the journey and co-create change.
Building emotional intelligence
We’re feeling beings more than thinking beings. Emotions drive the way we behave. I use the emotional culture deck to help your leaders express how they want to feel and design your workplace to deliver.
Planning your upcoming work
We look at the big things your team needs to achieve. Knowing what everyone else is dealing with builds empathy. People see how projects are interwoven, and how they can support each other to succeed.
Your leadership development investment
Your leadership development programme is tailored extensively to your team’s needs. These fees indicate what a typical programme of development costs, including all bespoke design and delivery.
Your first year of development
Your bespoke development package includes:
- Discovery call
- Developing scope of work with you
- Co-design calls for each workshop
- Designing & delivering 6 days of workshops
- Debriefs with you after each session
- Support with logistics
Ongoing leadership check-in workshops
Your bespoke development package includes:
- Developing scope of work with you
- Co-design calls for each workshop
- Designing & delivering 3 days of leadership check-in workshops
- Debriefs with you after each session
- Support with logistics
Coaching support between workshops
Online coaching sessions provide timely, confidential support to your leaders.
Example packages:
3 x coaching sessions per leader per year.
$1,300 + GST per leader PA
6 x coaching sessions per leader per year.
$2,500 + GST per leader PA
12 x coaching sessions per leader per year.
$4,500 + GST per leader PA
$50,000*
$27,000*
$1,300-$4,500*
I'm Daria, your leadership development coach
I’ve been leading since I was seven and a blackboard monitor at school. I’ve led in many businesses. And even when I actively tried to avoid leadership roles, I ended up being asked to lead projects, or to step up when a leader departed. So, I’ve accepted leadership is my purpose in life!
Leadership is one of the greatest privileges. And it is hard. In my first leadership role, I had the good fortune to have an amazing leader who coached and mentored me. And I still struggled.
I coach leaders because I can’t imagine what it’s like for leaders to be thrown in the deep end without support. They’re trying to do a good job, but they don’t know how to look after themselves, let alone the people they’re leading.
Lack of leadership development is far too common. Not only does it undermine great potential leaders, it holds organisations back from achieving true, sustainable success. I’m here to lead your leaders to be the best they can be.
Answering your leadership development FAQs
What sort of ROI can we expect on leadership development?
How good do you want your business to be?
What impact would it have if your senior leadership team were more cohesive, aligned, and trusting? Imagine if they were better equipped to deal with challenges, from having more courageous conversations with their team to developing a culture that enables your mission, vision, and values.
If you give your leaders tools to help them be more resilient and feel more engaged, productive, and valued, they’re going to have better relationships across the board. They’re going to come to work feeling rested, creative, and ready to go. Wellbeing becomes a beneficial, self-perpetuating cycle.
Leadership development has a multiplier effect. I did a strengths exercise with a leadership team and gave them all a deck of strengths cards to use with their team. The next day their CEO said, “Did you know most of the leaders took their cards home and did them with their partners overnight?” Within 24 hours, the impact of that exercise had doubled.
Now you may not care about that ripple effect for families and community, but leaders also take their new skills straight to their teams. When you invest in your senior leaders, they’re able to better support their direct reports.
How much time do workshops take?
A typical engagement is six full-day workshops in the first year, followed by full-day check-ins three times a year. However, we can configure your workshops to fit your needs. Some teams prefer two-day workshops. Others like to do half a day at a time.
How much work do our leaders need to do between workshops?
There’s no set homework, yet the true work happens when your leaders put what they’ve learned into practice.
Work between sessions is self-directed. Leaders do a personal action plan at the end of each workshop. It’s up to your leaders to hold themselves accountable. I also trust that if they need accountability, they’ll ask for support. Some organisations hire me as a coach, so their leaders can use me as a sounding board between sessions.
When I send leaders away, I give them worksheets with frameworks to help them put what they’ve learned into practice. Those frameworks become woven into the way your leaders work.
For example, your leaders already handle tricky conversations. The tools I give them help them have more effective conversations. Your leaders may invest a bit more time upfront planning how they’re going to have a conversation. But a discussion that used to take 30 minutes dancing around a sensitive topic, they can now resolve in 10 minutes.
Over time, the cumulative impact of better conversations, more robust thinking, and better planning makes your whole business more efficient and productive. You’re not wasting time going back and forth clarifying points, and redoing low-quality work done without a clear brief.
How long do we need to work with you for?
It really depends on your goals.
If you’re trying to solve a challenge with a tight deadline, we might have a limited engagement where we do six monthly sessions to solve specific issues and equip your team with the tools they need to succeed.
However, typically I work with organisations over several years. Our first year tends to be quite intensive as I upskill your leaders. Subsequent years are about continuous improvement. Usually, I check in with your leaders every 100 days, to maintain momentum and try new things.
Can we do our leadership development sessions on site?
No. Your on-site environment is too full of distractions. It’s too tempting for senior leads to pop off to check emails and get pulled into a situation by their team. Off site is more expensive, but it’s also way more effective.
Heading off site isn’t simply about avoiding interruptions, it’s about fostering a creative mindset. Fresh surroundings trigger fresh thinking. If people stay in the same environment, they’re going to think the way they always do.
I take your team out of their familiar boardroom setting where they probably sit in the same seats and take them to a different space to shift their thinking.
I can provide suggestions for venues in Auckland – venue hire, AV, and catering costs are in addition to my programme costs. You are welcome to make these arrangements directly with your preferred venue.
We've got a problem leader on our team. Will this fix them?
Don’t put everyone through training when one person is the problem. If you’ve got a performance issue, address it as such. Dragging everyone into a programme to fix a problem child is ineffective and disrespectful of everyone else’s time.
To be clear, I’m not talking about one leader being a bit disengaged, while everyone else is else is raring to go. Leadership development can help with that. But if someone is failing in their role, that’s a them problem or a leadership problem. A development programme isn’t going to help.
How much buy in can I expect from my leaders for this programme?
I’d be surprised if everyone is equally enthusiastic the first time I work with your team. Some leaders will say, “I’m too busy, this is a waste of time.” Others will say, “Finally, I’ve been asking for this for years.” Most will be somewhere in between. It’s my role to engage your enthusiasts and help people who are uncommitted to buy in.
People who think development is pointless quickly fall into two camps. Some give it a go and are won over to varying degrees. Others think, “Oh hell no. This is so not for me.” It’s up to you to decide whether that person is a good fit for your team. But outright rejection is rare. Typically, even sceptical leaders get something out of development by the end.
I also evolve my approach to incorporate feedback from your team. At the end of every workshop, I ask your leaders to give me feedback on what they liked and anything they think I could do better. I adjust the next workshop based on their notes. When I show I’m listening to their feedback, almost everybody comes on board.
Will I see an immediate change after each workshop?
The work doesn’t happen in the workshops. For example, you can send your leaders to learn how to give helpful feedback, however that doesn’t mean you’ll never have another issue with poor feedback.
That’s because your leaders learn a new approach to feedback in the workshop but that knowledge doesn’t have any value until they apply their new skills at work. And there can be trial and error as your leaders practice their new feedback techniques.
So, you may see immediate effects after the workshop as your committed, early adopters will go all in. Other learners may take longer. Expect the positive effects from workshops to take a little while to kick in.
How do I know my leaders will get practical tools from this? I feel like a lot of leadership development is just fluff.
I’ve been asked this by CEOs after they’ve signed me up to work with their teams, because their leadership team is having so much fun.
When senior leaders think of training, they often think of their experience of school. Everybody sat facing the front while the teacher lectured. Students were supposed to copy and regurgitate facts in exams.
But that’s not how teams learn how to work together or resolve tough situations. Practical, hands-on exercises are crucial, and I make learning fun because it sticks better in your leaders’ memory that way. But every activity has a deeper reason. Your team are learning skills, developing self-awareness and emotional intelligence as well as having a good time.
We always apply the frameworks I teach to your context. For example, I might give your team a model for a tricky conversation. Then I get them to analyse a real-life situation they’re dealing with. Why is this situation happening? What’s the real issue? What impact is this having on the business? What do I want to change? What are the benefits of making the change? We get into the nitty gritty and then they go away and have the conversation.
At the end of leadership workshops, your team create a personal action plan where they write down one or two actions they to commit to doing before their next workshop. Now I don’t hold their feet to the flame. They’re grown-ups. It’s their job to hold themselves and each other accountable. But committing to action is super important for growth.
And once they’ve taken their first bold step, and seen the positive results, their engagement in the programme is virtually guaranteed.
If you don't invest in leadership development, you’ll probably be fine. But is fine really what you want?
If you haven’t invested in your leaders till now, chances are you’re successful enough. But you wouldn’t be reading this if you were happy with status quo.
If you invest in growing your people, you retain top talent. If you don’t, you lose the cream to your competition till you’re left with a mediocre crew. If you lose your best people and the ones left behind aren’t feeling loved, that’s not going to lead to a great customer experience, or the growth you want.
I’m guessing you’re aiming for better than fine, so let’s talk.
Leadership success story
How Ngahuia Group evolved their senior leaders from a bunch of individuals to a unified team
Level up your leaders and level up your growth
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