Across several years of work with ESAB, a consistent design question has been how to make leadership development something leaders do, rather than something they attend.
The Executive Leadership Experience was built accordingly. From the opening moments, participants were asked to locate themselves honestly in their leadership context, build relationships quickly and become curious about how other people experienced them. Small Home Groups created an ongoing space for feedback, coaching, challenge and reflection around real leadership issues.
Self-awareness was an important foundation, supported by strengths work and 360-degree feedback, but insight was never intended to be the destination. Participants experimented with unfamiliar behaviours, practised influence, explored how they responded to challenge and worked with the moments in which their leadership energy or confidence could disappear.
The work increasingly focused on leadership as relationship. Leaders explored when to push and when to pull; how to combine direct challenge with genuine care; how to listen when their instinct was to persuade; and how to invite dissent rather than unconsciously close it down. Test-and-learn disciplines encouraged people to take new behaviours back into the business and return with evidence rather than good intentions.
Later work around leadership purpose, feedback and specific enterprise challenges extended the same philosophy. The programme became less a sequence of topics than a series of opportunities to enlarge a leader’s repertoire.
Leadership development became a contact sport: models helped people see what was happening, but the real growth came through encounters with other people, difficult moments, feedback, practice and consequence.