For leaders
You are already good at the work. This is the rest.
A ten month engagement for the step from expert to executive. Most people make it eventually. This is how you make it now.
01The gap
The work made you. It will not carry you.
You are the one who gets the hardest problems. You are also the one who checks before deciding, who supervises rather than leads, who is excellent in the detail and quieter in the room.
That is not a knowledge gap. You cannot read your way out of it and no two day course closes it. It closes in how you behave on an ordinary Tuesday, for long enough that it becomes who you are.
It also closes on its own, eventually, for most people. Eventually is expensive.
02What changes for you
Four things change, and all four are yours.
Knowing yourself
You know your purpose, your values and how you want to lead.
Decisions you make and hold
You stop checking first. The work you already run finishes with you, and you can say why it went the way it went.
People who want to follow you
They come to you first and thrive. No title does that on its own. This is the part that has to be earned.
A room you can hold
Clients and executives deal with you directly, and are content to.
A course hands you someone else's model. This is written in your own words.
03The shape of it
Start at the bottom and read upward, the way a tree grows.
Start here and climb
Everything the tree becomes is already in the seed, which is why this is first and why it is short. One sentence that says what you are for.
Roots sit under the surface. They are what guide you through your biggest decisions.
Branches are the first part of a tree anyone sees, and they are what the treehouse eventually rests on. This is where you stop supervising and start leading.
Leaves fall and grow every season. Influence works the same way. It is not held once, it is renewed.
A treehouse is not an office and it is not a title. It is the place people choose to come to because of who you have become.
Ten sessions
- 01Purpose, values and the TEN™ Leadership Charter
- 02Goal setting under the C.A.R.R.Y.™ Goal Setting Framework
- 03The escalation line
- 04Judgment under uncertainty
- 05Presence under pressure
- 06Owning the function end to end
- 07Delegation and leverage
- 08Triple A Culture™, culture and followership
- 09B.O.O.S.T.™ Guidance, feedback both ways
- 10The system that remains
04Why ten months
Behaviour does not change in the session. It changes in the weeks after it.
Ten months is not ten conversations. It is the forty weeks in between, which is where you either hold the new behaviour or quietly return to the old one.
You send me a short update against your three goals every week. I respond to it. A goal no one checks on drifts quietly, so yours gets checked.
Between sessions you can message me on WhatsApp on anything that comes up at work. What shapes a leader rarely waits for the next scheduled session.
Ten months against three years. That is the trade.
05What it asks of you
About seventeen hours across ten months.
The work is meant to happen inside the job you already have, not beside it.
| What | How often | Your time |
|---|---|---|
| The sessions | Fifty minutes, one to one. Two at the start, then monthly | 8 hr 20 |
| Purpose, values and the TEN™ Leadership Charter | Once, at the start, in your own time | 2 hr 30 |
| Reflection beforehand | About fifteen minutes before most sessions | 2 hr |
| Your weekly update | A few lines against your goals, every week | 3 hr 30 |
| Message me on WhatsApp | As things arise | Your call |
It is front loaded on purpose. Nothing after it works without it.
Sessions run by video or in person. No assessment and no report card. Nothing here is scored. Ten months, and we can work around leave.
06What the wait costs
You will make this step. The question is how many years from now.
Some people make it at thirty five. Some make it at forty two, after two roles that did not quite work and a long stretch of being the best technician in the room.
Same person. Same ability. Seven years of difference, and everything that compounds off them.
You do not get the years back. You do keep the step.
Two versions of the same person, in the same job today. The two dots are the same step up. One of them reaches it three years sooner and never gives the ground back.
Into the role you were going to reach anyway.
What one step up is commonly worth. You do not give it back.
What that single step is worth across the twenty five years that follow it.
Nobody is promoted for completing a program. They are promoted for how they behaved for a year before anyone was watching.
Illustrative. The figures assume one $20,000 step held for twenty five years, with the same annual increases applied to both paths, and exclude superannuation. They are not a forecast and not a promise. What happens in any career depends on the person, the role and the organisation.
07It stays with you
Nobody is reporting on you.
You are paying for this yourself, so it belongs to you completely. Your organisation hears nothing.
What you bring to a session stays in the session, and what you build here goes with you into whatever you lead next, at this organisation or another one.
08Who you would be working with
I have led teams of more than five hundred people, and I have coached the leaders inside them.
I made this step myself, and I coach the people making it now.
Twenty years across Baker McKenzie, Ashurst, Deloitte, BHP and the Australian Taxation Office.
NeuroLeadership Institute trained coach. Executive education at Harvard, Oxford and Melbourne Business School.
Media trained national spokesperson.