Leadership is Upside Down

3 min read

29 May 2014

When we think about entrepreneurs opening a new business, we know that in general they need a business plan, a strategy, a product, start-up funds and an audience to market to. But have you ever thought about what you need in order to be a leader, whether that is in a personal or professional sense?

Learning to lead yourself and others by leveraging off your strengths and exploring and transforming other key abilities and traits, is the starting point in your development as both a person and role model.

So perhaps it is time you ask yourself – is leadership for me?

We believe that anyone can be a leader. And by enhancing certain abilities, traits and behaviors, everyone has the opportunity to improve their capacity to do so.

To accompany you on this journey, it gives me great pleasure to present to you my new book and the leadership model and assessment tool that we have been working on for the past few years - the .

Leadership is Upside Down at TEDx

Last month I was honoured to have the opportunity to present the concept “Leadership is Upside Down” at the first live event for TEDx The Rocks – and what a line of speakers they had. Watch the video of my keynote below:

TEDx MC and slam poet Luka Lesson performed several of his pieces, with one phrase resonating deeply with me:

May your grey matter from now on, no longer be grey. May you mean every word that you say.

Luka Lesson (May Your Pen Grace the Page)

These words represent an idealism that I hope can one day be a reality. A reality that I believe starts by empowering the minds of today with the tools they need to transform their grey matter into what is required from the leaders of tomorrow.

Whilst listening to my fellow speakers, it became apparent that there was recurring significance being placed on a particular word – collaboration. This excited me greatly, as collaboration is one of the four competencies of the i4 Model which I believe is crucial for success in our ever-changing world.

By learning to collaborate and have open discussions between different generations, races and genders without bias, we will be building an agile society that can adapt to meet the demands of the present and be inspired to move towards a positive future.

Each day, as the appetite for knowledge and success grows, I watch more and more people becoming interested in learning how to develop their leadership capabilities. The explosion of micropreneurs, start-ups and other small- to medium- sized companies, has seen an increasing demand for people to take hold of their personal and professional development in order to prosper.

After many years of teaching leadership and recommending a wide variety of well-known models, I believe that a need has arisen when it comes to describing how a leader may look like in today’s world. Things have changed dramatically in the past 20 years and what people expect from their leaders and organisations today is utterly different to what they expected many years ago.

Based on this thinking I decided to review my many years of research and experiences in the leadership development space and write "Leadership is Upside Down", the book that explains the underpinning rationale, thinking and science behind the i4 Model and why it is now time for a ‘leadership revolution.’

To truly integrate brain science and leadership, the assessment tool was created by applying the philosophy and research from the book and the .

Initially the team at the embarked on the project of developing a comprehensive and more current leadership assessment tool. We wanted to create one that would allow people to gain a deeper understanding of how they work and interact with others, as well as exploring how they rate in some key abilities.

But we didn’t stop there.

Our amazing team has developed a state-of-the-art leadership assessment tool that not only looks incredible, but can be accessed from anywhere in the world by individuals, small teams, large organisations and everyone in between. This tool is easy to use, cloud based, available on any device and aims to revolutionise the outlook on leadership development for the 21st Century.

Throughout this process, we have worked with an array of inspiring and uplifting individuals from different backgrounds and with varying interests and skill sets. To this fantastic team - a big thank you for believing in our vision and supporting us throughout the last 18 months to make all of this happen.

To all of my clients, colleagues, friends and others around the world, I can only say with excitement - we invite you to try our , use it with your teams and recommend it. We are counting on you!