An honest baseline of how you lead today.
Before a team can have an honest conversation about how they lead together, each person needs clarity on how they lead individually. This session creates that clarity through a structured self-assessment and a personal leadership statement, making assumptions visible and building the foundation for everything that follows in the day.
Leadership culture is shaped by what individual leaders believe and how they spend their time. Those two things often diverge in ways that go unexamined for years. The Managing vs Leading self-assessment gives people a direct way to audit where their time actually goes, measured against clear criteria for where effective leadership focuses its energy. The gap between intention and practice tends to be immediately recognisable, and often quite striking.
The Leadership Statement exercise builds on that honesty. Each person drafts a short answer to a deceptively simple question: what do you believe about how people do their best work? Writing it down forces a level of precision that thinking about it rarely produces. When the statements are shared, patterns emerge quickly. Some beliefs are widely held without ever having been articulated. Others reveal genuine differences in how people think about motivation, accountability, and the relationship between leadership and performance.
The debrief brings these threads together. What does the managing/leading split cost the organisation when leaders default to the wrong side of it? Where do the team's beliefs about leadership align, and where do they pull in different directions? These questions create the honest foundation that the rest of the day builds on.
This module works particularly well because it asks people to examine themselves before asking them to evaluate each other. It creates the conditions for a collective conversation that groups consistently report they have needed to have for some time.
Participants leave with an honest picture of where they spend their leadership energy today, a personal statement of what they believe about how people do their best work, and a clear view of the patterns, differences, and assumptions that shape how this team leads.
This module sets honest individual baselines before any collective conversation begins, surfacing the gap between how leaders intend to lead and how they actually spend their time. Work through managing versus leading, have each person draft a short leadership statement, then debrief what it all means.
Share the comparison table, and ask each person to work individually for five minutes, marking each item M or L based on how they actually spend their time today, setting aside how they intend to spend it. In pairs, they share honestly: what is the split, and where does the pressure to manage come from? Then bring the room together and ask where they see the most consistent pull towards managing over leading, and what that costs the organisation.
Each person drafts a short statement of two or three sentences answering: what do you believe about how people do their best work? Ten minutes solo, then pairs share and help each other sharpen the language. Each person reads their statement to the room, and you capture key phrases on a flip chart. Once all have shared, ask what themes they see, where the statements align, and where there is tension.
Reflect on three things: the managing and leading split, and what it costs when we default to managing; the leadership statements, and what assumptions we share and where they differ; and the gap between intention and day-to-day practice. Close with a transition: we now know something about how we each lead, and the rest of the day is about what that means collectively.
Use You as a Leader when you want each person to get an honest baseline on how they lead before any group conversation. A self-assessment shows where their time goes, and a personal statement makes their beliefs about how people do their best work explicit.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
