Overview
As a leader, are you cultivating the types of relationships that bring out the best in the people you lead? How effectively do you engage, nurture and inspire others?
A leader’s relationship patterns have a huge impact on the satisfaction, productivity and morale of team members. A recent Gallop survey showed that 50% of employees leave their job because of a poor relationship with their manager. An organisation’s ability to survive and thrive depends on the quality of relationships between leaders and team members.
Unfortunately, although leadership has been studied for decades, existing theories and models aren’t enough. While they all emphasise the importance of relationship skills, they’ve left out a critical element that is the foundation of all relationships: attachment, or the emotional bonds we form with the important people in our lives.
Psychologists first developed attachment theory to study the way we learn how to operate in relationships throughout childhood. More recent research has uncovered the ways our attachment patterns affect our adult friendships and romantic relationships and even the relationships between leaders and team members.
Research shows that leaders displaying behaviours associated with attachment security—an inner sense of worthiness and safety within relationships—also demonstrate the relationship skills promoted by highly regarded leadership theories and models. Secure leaders are experts at supporting, nurturing, and empowering others. Their teams feel energised, engaged, and motivated.
For leaders who tend to display more insecure patterns, the impact on their team members and the organisation is swift and detrimental. The good news is that patterns can change. Anyone can learn attachment security—anyone can become a secure leader.
This program follows Kylie Bell’s book The Secure Leader. It focuses on helping leaders cultivate secure attachment patterns as the key to their effectiveness and their team’s wellbeing and performance. This deep-dive five-month program offers significant benefits to participants on both a personal and professional level. We translate research and leadership methodologies into best-practice skills and strategies, supported by on-the-job experimentation and coaching so leaders see tangible results immediately.
Objectives
The Secure Leader program helps leaders:
- recognise habitual relationship patterns and their impacts
- learn ways to create personal security and secure team environments
- understand why and how the prosocial skills in leadership theories and models work
- apply practical skills, methods and strategies to improve leadership effectiveness
- explore ways to connect with and support individual team members so they can thrive
- significantly improve the wellbeing and performance of their teams and organisations.
Methodology: This program runs over five months. Each month leaders attend a four-hour workshop, followed two weeks later by a small group ‘reflective practice’ coaching session.
