Team Builder
Embedding a high performance culture
The conditions we create
You cannot outperform your leadership
Our offering is designed for leaders who know that personal leadership effectiveness drives team and organisational performance and that there must be a better, more efficient and effective way to learn leadership.
Team Builder
Embedding a high performance culture
The Intention
“Upon completion of a designCEO program, leaders will have established personal and professional philosophies and principles they will seek to live and lead by, fundamental beliefs that underpin their actions, resulting in leadership behaviours that lead to excellence.
It is how cultures are built.”
The immersive leadership masterclasses have been exceptional, skillfully integrating expertise in leadership, culture and strategy.
Cameron adeptly captivated the Senior Leadership Team by intertwining personal and leadership storytelling, drawing parallels to sport and sharing his profound knowledge.
The mecoachingntoring sessions, a personalised journey for me, have delved into developing my own leadership trademark, the importance of storytelling and provided greater self-awareness of my natural gifts and emotional intelligence. These sessions have been thought-provoking and provided actionable guidance in applying the leadership tools shared by Cam and, importantly, my personal growth in making a difference as a leader at WDRC.
The engagement of designCEO has been a valued investment by the Council. I recommend partnering with Cam for those seeking to fortify leadership capabilities, enrich your professional acumen and contribute to shaping a more dynamic team culture.
Jodie Taylor
Chief Executive Officer | Western Downs Regional Council (Qld)
The immersive leadership masterclasses have been exceptional, skillfully integrating expertise in leadership, culture and strategy.
Cameron adeptly captivated the Senior Leadership Team by intertwining personal and leadership storytelling, drawing parallels to sport and sharing his profound knowledge.
The coaching sessions, a personalised journey for me, have delved into developing my own leadership trademark, the importance of storytelling and provided greater self-awareness of my natural gifts and emotional intelligence. These sessions have been thought-provoking and provided actionable guidance in applying the leadership tools shared by Cam and, importantly, my personal growth in making a difference as a leader at WDRC.
The engagement of designCEO has been a valued investment by the Council. I recommend partnering with Cam for those seeking to fortify leadership capabilities, enrich your professional acumen and contribute to shaping a more dynamic team culture.
Jodie Taylor
Chief Executive Officer | Western Downs Regional Council (Qld)
Our system of leadership
Building a leadership system that is equal to the challenge of leadership
Setting a clear objective to be good at trust
Our leadership offering is for leaders, teams and organisations seeking to build high levels of trust as the basis for sustained performance.
To embrace the expectations of your role, welcome the responsibilities and pressures as a privilege, a right you have earned, and be energised by the opportunities they provide. Know your role, accept your role, and play your role.
As a CEO in the AFL, the most complex and competitive of environments, I long ago learnt that elite sport is not team versus team. It is system vs system. The team with the best systems win.
And what is the most important system?
Our system of leadership.
At designCEO, we seek to match ambition with capability, and goals with systems.
Whilst our work is ambitious to match the expectations of the organisations and individuals attracted to our offering, we focus on a system:
That builds on the learnings of high-performance sport, now thoroughly tested, endorsed and embraced in business and corporate environments (including organisations such as L’Oreal, ANZ, John Holland, and Servier), to support the ambitions of leaders to become the leader they feel good about being.
It is focused on high-performance leadership rhythms, routines and habits to enable leaders to establish their daily practice of leadership excellence, all capable of being executed in high-stakes environments.
Calm, brave, humble and compassionate leaders who understand what their role expects of them, what they expect of the role, and most importantly, what they expect of themselves.
Embedding a high performance culture
Defining, designing and embedding the leadership system
Which leadership program is right for your team or organisation?
We first seek to determine the type of program required by the team or organisation utilising the designCEO performance frameworks to define expectations and performance outcomes.
Many leadership development programs fail to answer the most critical questions, including:
What is the organisational need for this program?
What outcomes are you seeking from the program?
A central part of the program’s design is that it does not seek to replace important strategic, human resource and governance frameworks already established. Its role is to ask the right questions of these programs, but more importantly, ensure that leaders take responsibility for their overall effectiveness.
Above all else, we seek to build powerful leadership habits, small changes done regularly, all aligned to a high-performance leadership mindset, skillset and identity.
Establishing highly meaningful and impactful leadership programs for leaders and their teams.
Team Leadership Group Coaching
Learning leadership in a team environment
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Ten sessions, made up of eight tailored 1.5-hour leadership workshops, effectively four modules each with two sections, plus two concluding sessions whereby participants will present their leadership philosophy to their fellow leaders, with each session preferably spaced approximately one month apart.
Team Leadership Masterclasses & Workshops
Shared leadership experiences with Executive Teams learning together
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The Masterclass is deliberately challenging, with each component having follow-up exercises, with leaders able to pass these learnings onto their teams.
It is a leadership system of operation focused on both the mechanics and dynamics of high-performance, building on the three frames of Leadership Mindset, Leadership Skillset and Leadership Identity. It can also be broken into four virtual sessions.
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A significant step up from the Leadership Masterclass, with space for testing the models and frameworks in the context of the organisation and the leader's role and responsibilities.
It is specifically designed to build high-performance leadership capabilities for the organisation’s most senior leaders to build trust, set standards, model behaviours and establish performance expectations to address current and longer-term cultural and strategic imperatives and goals.
High
Performance Culture Programs
These are our signature offerings for organisations with high-performance ambitions or seeking performance turnaround
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Working with the organisation's most senior leaders over an eight (8) month plus period.
This sophisticated and multi-layered program is designed to transform leadership mindset, skillset, and behaviours to establish and sustain a high-performance culture.
Effectively, it combines the Team Leadership Intensive and Team Leadership Coaching , with the addition of Individual Leadership Mentoring for all participants, including leadership profiling.
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A fully tailored, structured and embedded offering, including workshops and mentoring (group and individual). For organisations with high-performance ambitions or seeking turnaround.
Success is never the result of a single thing, but failure often is. Good culture is an artefact of our combined behaviours, particularly as it relates to building trusted relationships. The work leaders do now, when it’s hard, will aggregate and be the reason they succeed in the future.
Connections formed and established during these challenging times will be the platform for loyal, trusted and high-performance relationships in years to come.
From our constraints come our opportunities
What is the leadership system?
The goal is personal leadership mastery.
“We do not rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our systems” - James Clear
The programs are designed to develop and prepare targeted groups of current and emerging leaders for high-impact leadership roles, at all times recognising the need to perform well now while evolving their leadership game.
These range from one, two and three-day Leadership Masterclasses/Intensives, Leadership Team Coaching, to embedded tailored High Performance Culture and Leadership Transformation Programs, working with the organisation’s most senior leaders and targeted high-potential leaders to establish a leadership pipeline.
This is achieved by a mix of:
Intensive and immersive workshops focused on leadership learning and accountability to agreed team performance expectations. Team-based cohort learning is essential for teams seeking to work together. They share experiences, establish intent, build trust and understanding, and make collective commitments that are specific and unique to the team.
Deliberate practice, taking the learnings and immediately testing leaders and teams in relation to their expectations. This occurs in the context of the workshops and the days, weeks and months immediately following the learning.
Coaching and mentoring to ensure understanding and accountability of the processes. Our coaching and mentoring utilise profiling tools relating to the leader’s Emotional Intelligence (EQ) as well as seeking to build on their strengths using a process known as Natural Gifts.
Performance accountability is a process of regular check-ins to build accountability, ensure understanding and receive feedback. This will be set up to complement existing meeting frameworks and workflows.
Understand what we are trying to do, and how my contribution matters
Leadership learning is hard
People do not experience our intentions; they experience our behaviours.
Leaders seek accountability from their teams but fail to ‘earn the right’. Accountability is an outcome, the capacity to empower teams to achieve performance beyond their expectations.
Both the system and methodology are highly accountable, building on four high-performance trust habits that are immediately executable and will complement and amplify the effectiveness of existing strategic and performance management systems.
In this regard, the personal framework I utilise with the leaders I work with:
Lift - create personal connection - to engage
Shift - develop leadership capability - to embrace
Challenge - build individual and collective character - to embed
These elements form the basis of the process's final and ultimately most important component:
Accountability - acknowledgement and acceptance of responsibility - do the work.
The sessions are deliberately challenging (High-Intensity Group Learning), with each component having follow-up exercises (Productive Struggle), with leaders immediately able to pass on these learnings to their teams (Deliberate Practice).
We are all in the business of human behaviour
Seven reasons why this leadership program could fail
High performance is not for everyone.
Leadership would be easy if not for the complexity, ambiguity, and unpredictability of people and behaviours, which is why we need leadership!
While many like the idea of high performance, it is a challenging path.
We are in the business of human behaviour, and this will always be challenging.
The rewards for getting it right are so valuable because they are so rare.
The reasons why leadership and culture programs fail:
You lose focus on the long term when the short term gets too hard, as it will.
The leaders get scared, lacking the bravery to model behaviours and tackle the issues that will emerge from a program that builds on challenging behaviours.
There isn't the core talent, mainly an inability to learn and change.
You don't give it enough time. We are not seeking big slabs of time; in fact, we are seeking the opposite. It will fail because leaders will not make the small day-to-day efforts that behavioural change requires, or they let their efforts lapse over the weeks and months following the initial burst of enthusiasm.
You stop and/or reduce the resourcing of the program.
You are not serious about it, liking the idea of high performance more than it's often confronting reality.
You lose interest, and energy or settle for being mediocre and falling back to the status quo.
Some thinking that informs us on high-performance teams
LESSON #13
The game does not give up its rewards easily
Cameron Schwab
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Playing at the highest level isn’t pressure, it’s a reward”.
Bill Shankly – Legendary Manager of Liverpool FC
It is a quote I wrote down many years ago, which I found both challenging and comforting.
As I write it, I am immediately taken back to a place.
Something I experienced many times.
I am driving away from a game when our team had been beaten badly, not our first loss, in fact, we no longer look like winning.
In football, as an experience, losing is plainly not unusual. For every game, there is a winner and loser. But then some losses demand questions be asked and answered. You know the games. Your team has been so reduced by the opposition the loss now feels personal.
It was the home games I remember most. Driving out of the MCG with Richmond or Melbourne, or Subiaco Oval with Fremantle. The matches played in front of your people. Those who had aligned their identity to ours, often having no choice in the matter, anointed with a club before they’d met their grandparents. It felt as though we had dishonoured them.
They came to watch even though we were unwatchable.
When you get in the car, you immediately turn off the radio to save yourself from the public postmortem. You have just left the private version of this in the player and coach’s rooms. The inner sanctum conversations with those who actually have their hands on the levers.
As you talk to them, you feel devoid. This is when you are expected to find the right words, to soothe and find a way forward. Yet you have none, and whatever you say feels empty and hackneyed and does nothing to change the mood or move the dial.
In the now silence of your car, an inner voice starts telling you stories. You refer to yourself in the third-person, not by asking questions but by making accusatory statements.
“Cameron, I think you are fucking the whole thing up”.
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Some more thinking on leadership
