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"You [Dr Stevens] are creating a revolution in leadership understanding and practice"


Brian Cunningham - CEO & Leadership Author

Self-Aware Leaders Programme

Get ahead of the problems that will impact the success of your rapidly growing business

With growth, comes complexity.  Complexity which accelerates alongside the scale of your business. And complexity brings uncertainty, unexpected emergent contexts, and unintended consequences.


As recent high-profile cases demonstrate, failing to keep up with this complexity can spell disaster for the success of a business.


Improving the quality of our thinking helps us to do that.  Thinking is at the root of everything we do.  So when we improve the quality our thinking, the quality of everything else we do improves too. This includes leading a business.


Our Self-Awareness is a measure of our thinking quality or complexity.  A self-aware leader has intention, awareness, and choice of response in any situation. And this enables them to deal with greater complexity in their businesses.



The one-day Self-Aware Leaders programme is the start of your self-awareness development journey which will help you to better predict of the problems that will impact the success of your rapidly growing business


Discover your key thinking habits, and how they impact you individually and as a leadership team through the Identity Compass™ profile

Develop an understanding of how these thinking habits translate to specific leadership risks for your business through the Leadership Risk Profile

Decide how we address these risks through expertly facilitated group discussion

Here's how it works

The one-day Self-Aware Leaders programme was developed based on Dr Darren Stevens' groundbreaking research on adult development combined with the latest research on factors affecting company success.


Dr Stevens' research demonstrates the correlation between self-awareness, adult development, and how an individual’s level of self-awareness directly impacts their capacity to perform in their role.


Effective leadership in dynamic and complex environments requires a capacity to operate from multiple, often competing perspectives (Bolden, Petrov, Gosling, and Bryman (2009)).  Leaders in these environments require two things:


  1. the capacity to appreciate and process paradoxical data (cognitive complexity)
  2. the possession of a range of leadership behaviours that will allow them to lead in this environment (behavioural complexity). 


By identifying and focussing on identifiable, measurable thinking habits (Cognitive Intentions) and linking those to specific areas of leadership which demonstrably impact company valuations and success more broadly, we can support you in defining steps which will:



  • develop the quality of your thinking creating the internal conditions to achieve both of these outcomes.
  • mitigate the identified leadership risks so you can better predict future problems impacting your business success


Thinking Insight

The Identity Compass™ provides insight into how you uniquely think, as an individual and as a leadership team.  It highlights your thinking blind-spots, and provides you with both a Thinking Quotient score identifying your level of socio-emotional maturity, and an overall Awareness Quotient score identifying your level of Dynamic Intelligence.  All of this helps you to better understand yourselves as leaders.

Leadership Insight

The Leadership Risk Profile provides further insight into nineteen key areas of leadership risk that have been demonstrated to lead to low valuations and even business failure.  It links these areas to your individual and team Identity Compass™ profiles to provide you with a unique view of your level of risk across these areas.

Vertical Development

Because leadership quality correlates with thinking quality, the Self-Aware Leaders programme is focussed on your vertical development.  It engenders your self-awareness, as individuals and as a leadership team.  This positively impacts your cognitive and behavioural complexity enabling you to make better choices based on the information available to you and the needs of your business.

Skill Development

Leadership skills and thinking quality go hand-in-hand.  Skills become easier to master as our thinking quality increases, and the next steps we define in this programme will facilitate your vertical development.

Community

We believe that our focus on vertical development using principles from Dr Stevens' Constructed Development Theory puts us at the forefront of Leadership Development which offers a unique development experience.  As such, we encourage our course participants to join the community of leaders that have been through our programme so we can continue to support our mutuale development.

Delivery Format

In this era of ever spiralling costs, we can all benefit from getting something at a reduced price.  That’s why we’re introducing this new programme at a special introductory rate for all bookings made and paid for until the end of 2022.  Get in touch to find out more.

Questions we get asked most about this programme

These are the most commonly asked questions.  Please get in touch if your question is not answered.

  • What’s the difference between training and leadership development?

    Leadership Training involves the teaching of specific leadership skills.  These might include goal-setting and planning, conflict management, or team building to name just a few.  Leadership development is about developing the individual as a leader and might include things like special projects or coaching.  Our contribution to Leadership Development is at the cusp of training and coaching with the specific aim of developing the quality of the business leader’s thinking. 

  • Will I get the same program as my competitor?

    The Self-Aware Leaders programme is a structured programme built around: delivering key insights into the unique thinking style of the participants, individually and collectively; linking these to specific leadership risks that apply to your company; defining next steps to mitigate the identified risks and continue on your developmental journey.  As such, whilst the programme structure will be the same as that delivered to another, the insight-driven content will be unique to how you construct yourselves as leaders of your business.

  • Who is this programme for?

    This programme was primarily designed for organisations with a leadership team of between 4 and 8 preparing for, or at the start of, a period of rapid growth such as a Series A funded technology firm.


    However, it would also benefit any organisation of a similar leadership team size:


    • preparing for or embarking on a major change
    • having gone through a period of rapid growth or major change and starting to see unexpected or unintended business problems
    • suffering from seemingly intractable business challenges

  • Can you give me some examples of topics that you address in the program?

    This programme is focused on identifying and mitigating leadership risks that will impact the success of your rapidly growing business.  These include risks related to: Strategic Direction, Risk Management, Organisational Design, Operational Management, Cultural Design, People Management, Conflict Management, Personal Development.

  • Can the programme be delivered remotely?

    Whilst we advocate in-person delivery, we recognise that with increased home and remote working this isn’t always possible.  Because of this we offer you the choice of in-person or remote delivery.

  • Who are the programme leaders?

    The programme is led by Dr Darren Stevens and Sean Ellis, co-founders of IAD (UK).


    Dr Darren Stevens is the creator of Constructed Development Theory, keynote speaker, and award winning university lecturer


    Prior to the IAD, Sean Ellis ran his own successful coaching company, and was a management Consultant and business change leader with 20+ years experience in all aspects of business change and transformation