What it is

The challenges we face today in our organisations and society cannot be met by existing expertise. Knowledge alone won’t do it. Instead, brave acts of creativity and collaboration are called for. There is a world of possibility waiting to be created. In this new realm of hyper-challenge, there is no room for grandstanding, no room for ‘me first’ leaders.

To meet this challenge we need to understand how the human mind works: how individual egos can get in the way, how unruly egos can bend teams and organisations out of shape. Leaders with quietened egos are able to release the energy and creativity of a connected, collaborative, and highly effective community around them.

The WISE Leadership Process helps leaders find a sustainable practice and way of leading that enables them to respond successfully to their biggest challenges and opportunities.

The problem it solves

The world faces massive and unprecedented challenges. At the organisational level, these include redefining the meaning of work; harnessing the extraordinary accelerated adoption of digital and distributed working; creating genuinely diverse and humane organisations.

Organisations also have a wider stakeholder role within Society where leaders need to engage and understand issues such as climate change, racial and gender inequality, the handling of global crises, questions around global food supply and societal inequities – to name but a few.

Organisations and society desperately need leaders who will enable:

  • A greater sense of purpose and tolerance of uncertainty for employees and stakeholders
  • A strong sense of common humanity
  • An authentic embodiment of their organisation’s values
  • Free flowing creativity
  • A genuine interest and engagement in the wider society.

Benefits

The old certainties do not fully or adequately address today’s problems – however attached we are to them, however much energy we put behind them. For something new to have the space to flourish leaders have to give up some of what they feel comfortable with.

Organisations need a proven way to help leaders do this.  The WISE Leadership Process has been developed from research1 around increasing leaders’ sense of purpose and tolerance of uncertainty, their capacity to connect differently with others and their ability to make decisions in complex situations where there is no one right answer.  The research also shows how learning how to lead in this different way can increase a participant’s ability to focus, to adapt to changing circumstances, to empathise, to find fresh perspectives (and negotiate between different perspectives), and to better regulate their own emotions.

Our experience of working in this way with many individuals and organisations shows that the approach works, whether in corporates, large charities or the public sector.

The WISE Leadership Process has a light time commitment for participants, disproportionate to the benefits of its outcomes. Right from the start live work and leadership issues are the practical focus of the process. It blends fully into day-to-day work and the practical results will be quickly visible.

The WISE Leadership Process is designed to be either face-to-face or 100% virtual with a flexible delivery schedule. It can readily meet the reality of global and distributed teams.

What they say

"OUR INTENTION HAS BEEN TO CREATE SOMETHING EXTREMELY PRACTICAL, WHERE PARTICIPANTS CAN SEE HOW MAKING SEEMINGLY SMALL INTERVENTIONS CAN MAKE UNEXPECTEDLY LARGE CHANGES"

Michael Chaskalson