Developing Leaders: Where Do You Even Begin?

Leadership... what's the big deal, right? Work out what needs doing with your peers, dish out the tasks to your team, and let them get on with it. Crack the whip if it's too slow. Yell if they're not responsive. Give them a Gibbs-style smack to the back of the head (NCIS fans will know the one) if they get it wrong, and threaten their job if nothing else works.

Don't talk back, it's disrespectful. Don't get angry, it's unprofessional. Don't smile, people might think you enjoy being here.

Pretty simple formula, right? “Yeah, nah,” that doesn't fly in this day and age.

Today's leaders are expected to create psychological safety, bridge generational differences, and lead with care across gender, culture, age, race and more. Add personality types, strengths, DISC profiles and emotional intelligence, and it's a lot to juggle on top of your actual job. Without the right guidance it gets exhausting, and it's easy to end up managing everyone else's priorities and needs instead of your own responsibilities.

No benchmark, so I borrowed one

So where do you begin when developing your organisation's current and future leaders? There's no universal benchmark, because everyone has their own version of good leadership. The bad news is that it's overwhelming to work out what's worth your time. The good news is that leaders who do the research and find what aligns with them can flourish and stand out from the masses of "leaders" out there.

One book that has guided my own journey is Jim Collins' Good to Great (HarperCollins, 2001). I found it in the middle stages of my career, just after relocating to Australia to work for a telco that was rebranding itself as a tech firm. They gave every employee a copy.

What I appreciated was that Collins lets the data speak. His team spent five years studying 1,435 companies from the Fortune 500 lists, looking for those that went from average results to at least 15 years of outstanding returns, and found only 11 that made the leap from good to great. The data is American, so I'd love to see similar research for other markets, but the findings are valuable for any organisation with a long-term desire to be great.

Collins coined the term "Level 5 Leadership" for the leaders behind those companies. In his words:

”Level 5 leaders display a powerful mixture of personal humility and indomitable will. They're incredibly ambitious, but their ambition is first and foremost for the cause, for the organization and its purpose, not themselves.“

The five levels of leadership maturity

Collins' five levels give us a ladder, with Level 5 as the pinnacle of a leader's development:

ACNZ Conscious leadership framework

We frame leadership development through the perspective of four pillars:

• Identity: who you are as a leader, including your values, self-awareness and sense of purpose
  
  

• Mindset: how you think, and the beliefs and perspectives that shape your decisions
  
  

• Resilience: how you respond under pressure and recover from setbacks
  
  

• Competency: the practical skills to lead people and deliver results
  

For each pillar, we define the core skills and abilities needed to be impactful at each level of maturity.

I use these as a guide to leadership maturity. Levels 1 to 3 cover the shift from leading yourself to leading others. The questions that then come up are: how does anyone actually climb the ladder? What skills need developing at each stage, and how do you measure proficiency?

How you climb: the ACNZ High Impact Leadership Development System

To answer those questions, I combined Collins' levels with my Conscious Leadership framework, which frames leadership development as four pillars.

1. Emerging: you're aware of the capability, but it shows up inconsistently or reactively.
   
   

2. Developing: you've learned it and are putting it into practice, but it's still uneven, and you haven't yet built the consistency to rely on it under pressure.
   
   

3. Consistent: it's reliable under normal conditions, with occasional lapses under real pressure.
   
   

4. Embodied: it's second nature, including under pressure, and others learn it by watching you.

Four sub-levels of learning integration

Sitting through a training gives you knowledge. Actually behaving that way takes intentional application, reflection and refinement.

So alongside the levels, we also measure depth of integration: not the quality of your leadership at each level, but how consistently and reliably you live it. There are four sub-levels to each skill being worked on:

Three stages of the learning process

We also map the process of learning in three phases:

1. Awareness: gain the knowledge, then notice how it lands for you, especially as you imagine putting it into practice.
   
   

2. Experimentation: try turning that knowledge into action in several ways, to find the approach that feels most aligned and easiest for you.
   
   

3. Practice: rehearse that approach intentionally until it comes naturally.

Together, these give us a holistic system for guiding and measuring leadership development in the workplace: the Aspire Coaching NZ High Impact Leadership Development System.

It's not a workshop, a course or a programme, because leadership development is a multi-year process of progressive, intentional growth. It takes time, patience and active reflection to leverage your experience effectively and mature as a leader. The goal is to behave this way when you're under the pump to perform, rather than reverting to your default programming.

What's launching from early 2027

Whether you're stepping into your first team, managing managers or leading an organisation, there's a starting point for you. If you're seriously pursuing your leadership development, I'll be rolling out products and services progressively from early 2027:

Start now, stay in the loop, or talk it through

• Start today: take the free self-assessment for a quick read on how well you embody the four pillars of our the Conscious Leadership framework.
  

• Talk it through: book a discovery call for an obligation-free conversation about where you are now, which level fits, and what support would help most.
  

• Stay informed: join the waitlist by registering your interest to be updated when services are launched.

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