Scaling
Leadership

The Scaling Leadership Program helps current and emerging leaders become the best leaders and team members they can be.

Leadership challenges your organisation may be facing:

  • limited talent pool of emerging leaders making succession difficult

  • leaders facing unprecedented pressures resulting in burn-out

  • leaders don’t feel they are learning and advancing which impacts retention

  • leaders not able to step-up as they lack confidence and leadership capability

  • how to build a leadership culture that retains and attracts talent 

Benefits to organisations that scale leadership include:

  • develop the quality and diversity of the leadership pipeline

  • enable succession and have the right leaders at the right time

  • retain and attract the quality of talent needed to succeed

  • create an employment experience so all can become more of their best

  • enable the organisation to achieve their strategic objectives more consistently

The Scaling Leadership Program includes:

To scale leadership, learning needs to focus on the ‘whole leader' to develop greater agility, resilience, and courage to lead through increasing uncertainty, complexity, and change.

The Scaling Leadership Program enables leaders to access more of their greatness and is facilitated as a retreat or a modularised program designed on the 3 tenets of leadership:

  • Tenet 1: RELEVANCE – to lead is to inspire and be inspired with purpose

  • Tenet 2: RELATIONSHIPS – leaders rise on the quality of their working relationships

  • Tenet 3: RESULTS – leaders do great work through securing others' cooperation and commitment.

Optional Masterclasses

How to discuss the undiscussables

Do you feel it’s all too hard to have the difficult conversation and avoid them in the hope the matter will resolve itself? Especially, when having to give someone feedback they may not want to hear or to resolve a disagreement with someone who believes they’re know better.

Do you:

  • believe it’s unsafe to speak up or challenge other’s thinking

  • feel more is unsaid than said

  • not want to offend others, so avoid difficult conversations

  • feel anxious about having difficult conversations

  • feel you need to speak more of your truth

Then, this Masterclass will help you make everything important to you, discussable.

This Masterclass will help you to: 

  • understand why we get stuck in difficult conversations

  • adapt your mindset to better manage difficult conversations

  • to caringly challenge team members and better understand one other

  • build your confidence and courage to speak more of your truth

  • master the 3 tools to discussing the undiscussable

Register for it here.

Download a detailed brochure on this virtual workshop

Contact us to request a complimentary PDF copy of A guide to discussing the undiscussables

Why moods matter

Has anyone ever suggested that you ‘keep your emotions out of it’?

This is humanly impossible given we are biologically, inescapably emotional beings. What the person meant was for you to be in a mood that serves you. Everything you say or do is because of the mood you’re in. Mood’s matter.

Do you:

  • find others’ moods impact you

  • recognise you can be easily triggered into a ‘negative mood’

  • appreciate the impact your moods have on others

  • find it hard to talk about your own and other’s moods

  • struggle to shift the team’s moods to better serve all  

Then, this Masterclass will help you manage your moods to bring more of your best and have greater impact.

This Masterclass will help you:

  • develop greater awareness of the 6 primary ‘moods of life’

  • understand how moods create ‘spaces’ of possibilities

  • build greater resilience by leading from more resourceful moods

  • to shift the team’s moods to better serve all

  • build greater self-confidence to deal with uncertainty and change

Download a detailed brochure on this virtual workshop

Contact us to request a complimentary PDF copy of A guide to why moods matter

How to coordinate action

Work is about coordinating action – it’s about securing others’ cooperation and commitment to get done what is needed. Work is about making requests and managing commitments. 

Think about how many requests you make of others a day and what percentage of these request are effectively met. A ‘sloppy request’ will always get a ‘slippery commitment.’  

Do you:

  • feel others lack accountability to their commitments

  • say ‘yes’ when you should have said ‘no’ to someone’s request

  • feel irritated when a team member makes a ‘sloppy request’ of you

  • recognise that you may make ‘sloppy requests’ of others

  • find it harder to get things done in this hybrid world of work

This Masterclass will help you:

  • ensure others understand what you expect from them

  • increase productivity by ensuring your requests are met

  • avoid making ‘sloppy requests’ and minimise wasted effort

  • secure greater commitment and cooperation from others

  • do more great work and have more impact

Download a detailed brochure on this virtual workshop

Contact us to request a complimentary PDF copy of A guide to how to coordinate action

How to lead in uncertainty

Not accepting the normality of uncertainty invites we live in greater fear and anxiety. Accepting the normality of uncertainty opens us up to a world of possibilities. This is not to say things get easier, they just become more possible.

As we ride life’s continuous ‘waves of uncertainty’, our greatest opportunity is to replace our fear with courage and uncertainty with confidence.

Courage is about leaning into what is possible, despite the challenges and difficulties that exist. Confidence is not about the lack of fear, but the triumph over it.

The “Leading in Uncertainty” workshop helps leaders to:

  • Understand why we get stuck in fear and anxiety in times of uncertainty

  • Shift your state to accept what you cannot change

  • Develop greater confidence and courage to see things differently to access new possibilities

  • Avoid burnout by focusing your energy and attention to what you can influence and change  

Download a detailed brochure on this virtual workshop

Contact us to request a complimentary PDF copy of A guide to how to lead in uncertainty

 Let’s Discuss

Let’s discuss how the Scaling Leadership Program can help you build a high performance culture through accessing more of the leadership capacity and capability distributed across the organisation. You can call me on +61 414 654 437 or email me at bernard@bernarddesmidt.com.

Testimonials

  • If you have done many leadership workshops, but are looking for true change Scaling Leadership would be my choice. Bernard invites you to commence a journey of self discovery through relevant pre-work, contemporary industry cases and insightful monthly modules. What I valued most about Bernard was his ability to encourage leaders of all levels to be their best self without judgment, and providing frameworks to support their quest for great work after the course was completed. I personally found Scaling Leadership an outstanding experience, and would recommend Bernard as a best in class option for leadership training.

    Elise Karadjian (Head of Retail - Camilla)

  • Our business has been working with Bernard for several years now. Bernard manages to find the right balance between learning without posturing, facilitating with flexibility and covers difficult topics with humility & humour. The courses we create feel intuitive and becomes an evolution of learning as opposed to a program that copied and pasted, each session has a bespoke feeling to it leading to high engagement. I personally attribute much of my exponential learning to Bernard and the perspectives he’s introduced into my thinking.

    — David Longman (Managing Director - Divcom)

  • Bernard helped me unlock my leadership power to then allow me to unlock my team’s power. In doing so, building a dynamic print design team that is flourishing and high performing.

    — Lalita Lu (Textile Creative Manager - Camilla)

  • Bernard has both an engaging and challenging facilitating style which encourages thinking and discussion. Our leaders are bright smart people and I knew they needed someone who had a strong presence, whose material was thought provoking and up-to-date and who could move our leaders forward on their leadership journey…

    — Linda Smith (Manager – People & Culture, ISPT)

  • ...it was an eye-opening experience and Bernard provided a safe environment where judgement is suspended, and open and frank discussion could take place. It was a very humbling experience and Bernard is a very courageous person who has stretched and challenged all of us to go places where we could not have imagined let alone gotten there on our own...

    — Cath Jules (CEO - Criterion Conferences)

  • My big learning for the day was “I will” not “I will try”. Skip the last word, focus on the first two! It was thought provoking, and a reminder that all the small things matter, our thoughts link to moods, link to actions, link to outcomes.

    — Olivia (Production Manager - Camilla)

  • A leadership program that looks at leading through deeper self-knowledge; how this informs how you lead; its impact on the people you lead; and the effect this has on others.

    — Suzanne Shepherd (Group Executive – Human Resources, McMillan Shakespeare Group

  • …there has been a big shift in our development in 6 months and Bernard had a huge part to play in the improvements. Leadership awareness has increased significantly, and we have the tools to shift the way we operate as leaders and the results are already evident in the 360-degree feedback we did.

    — Claire Lauber (Ex-General Manager - Woolworths, Victoria)

  • I’m proud to be part of a company and culture that is so heavily invested in personal development. The opportunity to have Bernard share his expertise truly added value to my journey in becoming the best manager for my boutique team. This session highlighted to me the importance of being brave enough to be vulnerable and how creating a safe environment to simply be human is key!

    — Suze (Boutique Manager, Camilla)

  • ...The greatest and unique aspect that Bernard bought to the program – that I have rarely seen in any other facilitator – is his ability to enable people to think, feel and speak freely without fear of repercussion.

    — Sean Dempsey (CEO - Plan Partners)