INsight/ Ten Years After
Manila, 23 November 2023 — Three shortcuts to develop your leadership.
Story
It happened ten years ago. After completing my role as a development banker, I founded TransformationFirst.Asia as a leadership practice to help executives, professionals, and emerging leaders bring out their best as leaders. Five years earlier, I had already started a career shift from financing reforms in water security and governance—one of the world’s greatest challenges—to developing leaders through coaching and training. Why? Because it had dawned on me that deploying the resources of science, technology, finance, and law wasn’t enough to deliver quality investment results at scale and speed. What was missing was the investment in the human element: how to help more professionals, managers, and executives grow into leaders with the ability to influence the positive changes we urgently need in our world.
Founding TransformationFirst.Asia happened because we realized that a new approach was needed, one where professionals and positive change were seen to be at the center of development. Fast forward to today, ten years later, we have helped teams of board members, executives, and project professionals to influence or drive positive changes in their workplaces by growing their leadership abilities and changing their behaviors, both collectively and individually. I say ‘we’ because our work has, by choice, always involved a partnering approach with our clients where we were able to make changes happen together. We have also benefited greatly from collaborating with valued learning and development partners in Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands, and throughout Asia. Together, we have challenged conventional wisdom and fostered innovation in leadership development.
For me personally, the past ten years of working as a leadership coach and trainer have been a thrilling adventure that has led me to change the way I see the best in people, teams, and organizations. From countless first-hand coaching experiences, I discovered how leaders can learn to tap their hidden potential to flourish in work and life. Drawing on cutting-edge science and the best of Asia’s time-tested wisdom traditions, we have placed the transformation of leaders and leadership at the core of our coaching work. It is our theory of change. Rather than continuing to judge others and blame problems on external circumstances, our clients have discovered how to see that, as teams of leaders, it is always their turn to make positive change happen. This empowering process starts in themselves, collectively as well as individually. Hence Transformation First is our motto for delivering better results.
Challenge
After ten years in our practice, you might be wondering what ‘secrets’ or shortcuts we have discovered when it comes to developing your leadership. Quite a few actually! Let me touch on three of our ‘shortcut’ lessons learned, with a warning that some might seem counterintuitive to you. The first shortcut lesson we learned is that training doesn’t produce leadership. Instead, what makes you grow as a leader is to practice effective leadership behaviors in challenging assignments. The second shortcut lesson is, contrary to popular belief, that your success will mainly come from discovering your strengths and leveraging them in your work and life, every day and week. Be careful with concentrating on your weaknesses and hoping to turn them into excellence.
The third shortcut lesson we discovered is that you will grow your leadership faster when you collaborate with others and learn to share your experiences out loud, together. This also tends to be more enjoyable, even when you go through a tough challenge. Increasingly, therefore, we have shifted our focus to coaching teams of leaders. Not to worry, though, if you want to work individually, there is still a place for coaching individuals, including leaders within teams, keeping in mind that self-leadership will always remain a core challenge. Meanwhile, we are celebrating the work we have done with boards, executive teams, and project teams over these past years. We also keep developing new 21st-century solutions in Grow3Leaders, our community of practice that doubles as a living laboratory for leadership.
While recognizing that self-leadership remains essential, we have come to realize that the only way to drive positive change at speed and scale comes when leaders work together in teams. An important part of our work with teams is, therefore, to help them build a set of inclusive leadership behaviors and skills that will help boost performance and well-being across the organization. This cuts across all four generations in today’s workplaces. Hence our support for Crossgen Leaders. And there is more. Like how to overcome resistance in your workplace in ways that build on the latest research in neuroscience and positive psychology. How to communicate more effectively by expanding your range of leadership styles, how to master the language of leaders, and how to show up consistently as a Multiplier rather than a Diminisher. Leadership is truly a fast-developing field and we enjoy helping leaders in developing new solutions.
Question
Looking back, there is so much we are grateful for in our journey over the past ten years. A warm thanks to you if we have already worked together. Turning to the question for you this week, it is focused on the team(s) you are working with. Regardless of your own position and level of authority, how will you as a leader bring your team to a state of flourishing where high performance goes together with high well-being? I am looking forward to reading your response.
At TransformationFirst.Asia, we are super excited to start the next ten years of our leadership coaching journey. Our passion is to work with flourishing teams of leaders who are committed to driving positive change in their workplaces and projects at speed and scale, inspired by a big vision to regenerate a more peaceful, innovative, and sustainable world.
We support board teams and teams of executives, managers, professionals, as well as emerging leaders. Reach out if you want to bring your team of leaders to a state of flourishing, and you are ready to invest in the challenging journey to get there. We’d love to see if we are a good fit to support you with our unique blend of coaching and hands-on learning and practice.
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