2023: A year in review
The Brave Insights team at our end of year event: Kimberly Luffman, Bec Weaver, Myles Balthazaar
We sat down with Founder and Managing Director Kimberly Luffman to hear her thoughts on 2023 and the exciting things planned for 2024.
What trends did you see in leadership in 2023? How has the landscape changed post Covid?
Overwhelmingly, leaders are juggling a lot more post Covid. Many are managing people and teams struggling with burnout, while managing their own mental energy challenges themselves.
The role of the leader has found its edge in my opinion . Leadership roles are overfull with expectation and the capacity challenges of the role is making recruitment into leadership positions more difficult. Many leadership teams are navigating the future, we’re seeing longer term planning and a focus on developing the whole team's leadership capacity to navigate complexity and manage their team dynamics for greater collective performance. .
What three key insights from workshops in 2023 can you share with us?
Bringing your own people together to solve complex challenges yields great results.
Leadership team dynamics are felt within the whole organisation, whether it’s spoken about or not, how well you work together is known and felt by everyone, and it either enables or derails performance.
If in doubt, lead with questions. You simply cannot go wrong being curious in leadership.
How did you push the boundaries towards your purpose in 2023?
We believe in developing Leadership that is Good for the World - and we’re excited we get to do this together.
It has always been one of my personal goals to get high-quality leadership development to more people, more often. And this year we were excited to facilitate a content-sharing arrangement which meant Interflow generously donated their leadership portal content and resources to St Vincent's De Paul, enabling us to maximise the leadership impact in the Not-for-Profit Sector.
Our belief that developing leadership that is good for the world has been further elevated as we worked across all layers of leadership in public safety across the Pacific Island. Our work with the Pacific Faculty of Policing has provided a wonderful opportunity to develop leadership for public safety and the communities they serve while also learning how to navigate leadership across different cultures and contexts.
2. As we shift into thinking about the future, it's time to think more systematically about leadership,
The typical role of ‘leader’ is now overwhelmed with responsibility beyond the average person’s available capacity. People are taking up these roles more reluctantly than we have seen before and they do so knowing full well the remit is beyond most people's capability for success.
If you’re thinking about how to succeed sustainably in 2024 think carefully about how you create a network of leadership within your organisation to support those in these roles, upskill them with the capacity to manage the role not just the work and ensure they have top notch coaching skills, so they have the best chance of unleashing the teams collective capacity and working more effectively.
More systematically though, we’re beginning to rethink what is needed for leadership in these times and I firmly believe the next evolution of leadership capacity within organisations sits within your existing teams. We’ve turned our focus to research and development of high-performing, self-managing teams who share leadership beyond hierarchy and tasks, to manage the performance of the whole team, together.
We will be sharing more about this in 2024. But for now just know we are working with academic partners at Newcastle University to ensure an evidence-based approach to this new team methodology and will be enabling this focus on teams through enhanced technology and with a ‘minimum intervention’ methodology to disrupt the idea that development must fight for time, often stealing the focus from the work, instead, we plan to embed development into the work of teams to make it business as usual.
We’re very excited about this new approach because as we know: “When everyone leads, the toughest challenges get seen and solved.” - Ed O'Malley, When Everyone Leads (2023)
3. Our leadership team is growing
We’re committed to ensuring we have a high-quality team to partner with you in the work of leadership. As part of that, we’re excited to be expanding the Brave Insights Leadership facilitation and coaching team with Vickery Emery and Steve Matthews in 2024. Both Vicky and Steve bring immense senior leadership experience to their work and share the same values as the extended Brave Insights team.
As a team, we remain committed to the continued growth and development of ourselves and our craft. You won’t be surprised to hear that Myles has become a Leadership Circle Profile practitioner earlier this year and is progressing quickly towards his ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) accreditation. Our leadership partner team also completed further leadership team coaching development, enabling us to continue to refine our team performance work with you. Our team is fully accredited in world-class tools like The Leadership Circle which continues to be the leading tool in our field as it provokes depth of insight into how people show up in the work of leadership.
One a more personal note
You, like us, have probably been so busy doing the work of leadership that you’re in desperate need of a well-deserved break over the festive season.
May your 2023 have been no more or less complex than the market you serve. May 2024 bring with it the courage to walk the road less travelled, in your own unique leadership journey, and may your leadership choices serve the generations to come.
Thanks for your support. See you in 2024.
Kimberly
