Why leadership development

Leadership development is often a necessity, but also often a relatively vague concept. It’s clear in its definition, but when it comes to applying it, one can choose from hundreds of different classifications – all of them with some validity to them.

For me, leadership development bears strong connections with company culture and has mainly to do with enabling better communication and engagement between leaders and employees, almost in a coaching perspective. As such, my workshops and open trainings heavily focus on enabling leaders to listen better, observe in higher detail and with higher awareness and continuously provide their people with everything they need to perform at their best.

My leadership development approach

my goal is to help organizations to become stronger and faster, specifically when it comes to

  • innovative work – be it product development, process development or even a marketing campaign
  • leading under high uncertainty and pressure – for example because of a tough deadline or sudden changes in the market
  • undergoing change – be it digital transformation, organizational change or restructuring.

There are a few different ways to lead such processes, and scientifically the best ones have been found to be tied to how well leaders are able to communicate and engage with their colleagues and employees, as well as to how much freedom and trust they are able to give them – or, seen from the opposite side, how much they have trained and coached their people to trust them with taking competent risks independently.

Leadership development is an extremely serious issue, and for me it is not based on blueprints, tools or methods, but on skills. As such, I start developing a leader’s basic communication and interaction skills first, and quickly ramp them up to enable them to transfer said skills to others.

The outcome of my trainings and work is training two styles:

Both of these styles have deep connections to soft skills, like internal communication skills, as well as to the ability of the leaders to foster communication and building interaction among members. Back to our basics, this is why in my workshops I focus on building a person’s listening skills and communication skills first and on theoretical explanations or blueprints only at a later stage in the workshops.