Leading like a gardener

A practical and experiential 10 week course for leaders and teams wanting to make an outsized impact at work without sacrificing their wellbeing

What does it mean to lead like a gardener?

“Leading Like a Gardener” means you focus on cultivating the conditions for others to successfully grow and produce fruit.

To be able to create conditions for ourselves and others to succeed we need to adopt a systemic worldview.

But what does systemic even mean?

Adopting a systemic worldview means seeing that your organisation is not just a collection of separate departments or functions but a complex system where everything is interconnected - changes or actions in one area of the business can have wide-reaching effects on the entire organisation and beyond.

Problems are often described a systemic when they are hard to solve, or engrained in ‘how things are’.

What a systemic worldview gives you is a new way to understand ‘how things are’.

When we take a systemic worldview we can often find interventions that are simple, but not easy to see until we look at the world differently.

In this 10 week introduction course we’ll learn to practically apply a systemic worldview to create the conditions at work where you, your people and your organisation thrive

Hi, I’m Bailey 👋

I’ll be your facilitator

I learned how to create the conditions to thrive at work after being dropped into the deep end in my first group product manager role at Xero.

The conditions to succeed for my teams and I didn’t exist and I made it my focus to figure out how to change that.

And change I did! In this role and later roles at Xero and then Sharesies I was able to work less and achieve more by implementing simple interventions that created clarity and momentum towards what we were aiming to achieve without the burnout.

I created World Changing Business so that I could expand my impact to help others thrive at work, and my first offerings were Systems Thinking courses.

I’m excited to bring this next iteration to life to help others create balance and impact at work.

What others have said

  • "Some of the exercises in this course fundamentally changed my approach to challenging experiences. I suspect participating in this course has made me a better leader and problem solver. The course wasn't really what I expected, it was much more relevant, impactful and practically applicable in my working life than I ever imagined it would be."

    Group Product Manager based in Wellington

  • Absolutely mind blowing. Explained really complex ideas in a very simple and easily to understand way - which was applicable not only to systems thinking, team dynamics but also in relationship to ourselves. Cut through all the BullS**T and boring bits around this topic and provided a unique lens of looking at problems and a variety of tools to solve them.

    Health Professional and Small Business Owner based in Bali

  • I feel energised! This confirms I am a systems thinker, and that my area to grow is in setting system/problem boundaries, and communicating my thinking to get others on board.

    Head of Engineering based in Wellington

Who it’s for

Change makers

Are you leading or contributing to a change initiative? In Leading like a Gardener you will learn and practice practical skills to drive change inside and outside your organisation. The skills you will learn are industry agnostic and will help you in any role where you need to change the status quo.

Technology leaders & teams

Technology organisations are made up of teams with wildly different cultures and expectations. Learn how to navigate restructures, challenging stakeholders, and team dependencies to deliver better product and customer experiences in this course.

Sustainability professionals & teams

How to drive transparency, accountability and sustainability thinking within an organisation when you only have so many hours in the day? It’s common for sustainability teams to have unsustainable workloads. Learn how to change that and drive collective action that makes an impact in this course.

What you’ll get

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    Weekly 90 minute online sessions with a mix of theory and break out activities to apply to your work context

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    A basic understanding of systems thinking & living systems theory and how it applies in the context of modern work

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    Practical tools that you can use day to day when you face complex challenges

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    Access to the Collective Flow app for you and your team

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    The ability to identify and leverage your own strengths and the strengths of others

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    Peer support to work through challenges and practice using tools to navigate complexity at work & beyond

Interested?

Leading Like a Gardener isn’t running at this time, get in touch if you would like to be notified when we run it again.