Many today’s leadership development initiatives still focus on surface-level skills, tools and models. They matter, but they’re not enough in complex, interdependent and fast-changing world.
We support leadership development at a deeper level, connecting individual growth, the development of leadership teams and teams, and culture change. In our experience, culture does not change through value statements, competency models or programmes alone. It starts to change when leaders question, and where needed change, how they think, interact and work together.
At the heart of our work is one belief: people, teams and organisations have far more potential than they, or others, can yet see.
In our work with organisations, we start from your situation, not from a ready-made solution. We design each process with you, around your strategy, the kind of leadership you want to strengthen, the real challenges your leaders face and what they need in order to grow. We also question the brief when we see something different from what was asked for, and we adjust as the work unfolds.
Our approach combines
- deep transformative work on psychological, relational and systemic levels, below the surface of behaviour
- practice: coaching, experiential learning and experiments in leaders’ real day-to-day work
- mirrors: theories, methods and frameworks
Our work integrates several theoretical foundations
We blend experiential learning with a broad theoretical foundation. Our practical work draws in particular on:
- Psychology, to understand people in depth: personality, emotions, motivation, metacognition and the mind–body connection
- Social psychology and systems thinking, to understand what happens between people: psychological safety, group dynamics, and organisations as complex, interconnected systems
- Leadership theories, to clarify the leadership we help strengthen: relational, coaching and collective leadershipeams, leadership and organisations: systems thinking, collective leadership, self-management and self-organising teams, and team and group dynamics
- Coaching psychology, adult development, transformative learning, and team coaching and organisation development research, to support the growth of leaders, teams and organisations
Our work brings together the ways of working and theoretical foundations described above with two more things: Sari Vuohtoniemi’s 25 years of practice as a coach and a developer of leaders and teams, and her ongoing doctoral research in psychology at the University of Jyväskylä on leaders’ growth through coaching in self-managing and collective leadership contexts.
Each keeps the others honest: theory is checked against what happens with real leaders, and practice is questioned through research. We stay critical of our own methods, keep what we see making a difference and let go of what doesn’t. Everything we do is anchored in leaders’ real, day-to-day work.
Tools you can try
We use various tools to build self-awareness, to understand and take personality differences into consideration in leadership, and to support growth as a team and leader. Here we have collected some of the profiles that you can also test, by buying the profile with a personal debrief session.
Enneagram
The Enneagram is an in-depth model for developing self-awareness, emotional intelligence, leadership, communication and team dynamics. It helps us understand our automatic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. It also shows the motivations and needs behind those patterns, which often drive us without our being aware of it. It helps us recognize our natural strengths and offers concrete ways to grow, building agility and resilience.
The Enneagram also deepens our understanding and appreciation of difference. It teaches us to see the good intention behind people’s behavior and to look at the world through different lenses. It is an excellent support for teams developing into high-performing teams. It also offers a wealth of practical insight on communication, giving feedback, handling conflict, leadership and working in a team.
We use the Enneagram as a stand-alone programme or as part of other development work, such as team development, leadership programmes and individual coaching. We often use the iEQ9 assessment and framework, which is based on the Enneagram theory. A team report is also available.
Try it: Buy the standard iEQ9 Enneagram assessment with a debrief session
WorkPlace Big Five Profile™
The Work Place Big Five Profile™ is grounded in modern personality research and the Big Five model of personality. The Big Five is widely accepted as the standard in personality research and is based on trait theory. The profile is an effective tool for individual and team profiling. It describes personality through five supertraits and 23 subtraits. The supertraits are Need for Stability (N), Extraversion (E), Originality (O), Accommodation (A) and Consolidation (C). Both individual and team reports are available.
Buy the WorkPlace Big Five Profile with a debrief session
Emotional intelligence: EQ-i 2.0
Research links emotional intelligence to leadership effectiveness and wellbeing. Emotional intelligence is our ability to understand, accept and manage ourselves, and to work well with people who are different from us. Emotional intelligence can be developed. For that purpose, we use the EQ-i 2.0, a comprehensive assessment built on Reuven Bar-On’s research-based theoretical framework.
Well-developed emotional intelligence shows up as healthy emotional and social functioning, which is linked to our wellbeing and happiness. The model has several areas that influence one another:
- Self-perception makes it easier to express ourselves.
- Expressing ourselves leads to healthier relationships with others.
- Healthier relationships support good decision-making.
- Good decision-making helps us manage stress.
- Managing stress helps us recognize our own emotions more clearly, and so on.
Every area affects the others, and together they create healthy emotional intelligence. No area is more important than another. The model works like a wheel, with no beginning and no end.
Try it: buy the EQ-i 2.0 assessment with a debrief session
Burnout assessment
The Maslach MBI + AWS Toolkit™ is a set of tools for assessing the extent and likely causes of burnout, and for taking a collective snapshot of wellbeing and engagement. It shows how burnout manifests, what kind of burnout may be present, and how well people feel they fit with their work environment. It measures exhaustion, cynicism and professional efficacy. It’s well suited to developing self-leadership, people management and organisational culture.
Try it: buy the Maslach MBI + AWS assessment with a debrief session.