SLOW DOWN TO SPEED UP
EXECUTIVE COACHING FOR TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT
True leadership emerges from deep within. As the world grows more complex and interconnected, your inner capacities become your most powerful resources. Together, we explore your growth edges, unlock deeper levels of awareness, and cultivate the capacities needed to lead with clarity and compassion in an increasingly interconnected world. As your inner capacities grow, your outer impact expands - enabling you to consciously guide your organization toward a better future for all.
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
THE SEVEN TRANSFORMATIONS OF LEADERSHIP
Already in 2005, Harvard Business Review published an article called The Seven Transformations of Leadership:
"... we’ve found that leaders who do undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies."
Today, we have realised that this - more specifically the Vertical Leadership Development underlying it - is key to utilizing our fullest potential.
VERTICAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
AN INNER JOURNEY FOR OUTER CHANGE
As leaders, we are familiar with the relentless pursuit of goals, metrics, and outcomes. This Achievist mindset, while effective, often limits our capacity to see beyond immediate results.
In today's VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) - called "a perfect storm of increasing complexity, accelerating change, and near-constant uncertainty" - most successful Achievist leaders hence sooner or later hit a mental and emotional glass ceiling.
There is simply a significant gap between the complexity of the task given, to that of the Achieveist mindset's mental wiring and capacity.
Transformative coaching invites us to step into a new paradigm, where growth is not just about doing more, but about becoming more.
It challenges us to expand our self-awareness, understand the deeper currents of our motivations, and align our actions with a broader vision.
Vertical Leadership Development is an important key to help leaders elevate their perspectives, increase their positive impact, and move beyond business as usual. Ultimately to build a better business and a better future.
This is vital, because good business is simply good for business, and seriously needed in solving the world's wicked problems.
And you as a business leader is crucial in this transformation. By growing vertically, providing purpose, direction and resources, you can contribute to meaning, purpose-led transformation, growth - and even help enhancing the wellbeing of both people and planet, while future proofing your business.
What you will need to develop to enable this is a wise, calm and strategic mind, insightful self-awareness, ability to create deep connection, and impactful change. Something that is now being picked up by the Inner Development Goals (IDG).
INNER GROWTH FOR OUTER CHANGE
THE INNER DEVELOPMENT GOALS
The IDG Framework points to the inner skills and qualities needed for leaders to successfully work with complex societal issues and co-create a prosperous future for all of humanity.
Our work is based on the decades of research underpinning the framework with a focus on Adult Development, Vertical Leadership Development and Transformational Coaching.
TRANSFORMATIONAL COACHING
VERTICAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Our approach to Executive Coaching for Vertical Leadership Development is based on the StageSHIFT methodology, as well as Harvard professor Robert Kegan's approach to adult development and change.
Our approach not only helps create better self-awareness and leadership capabilities but helps develop leaders from the typical "Achievist" mindset of business-as-usual, via the "Catalyst" mindset, to that of the "Synergist" - sometimes also called the "Transforming" mindset.
As a Synergist, leaders have the presence of mind and visionary zeal to transcend the turmoil, set new aspirations, inspire stakeholders, trust emergence, and re-invent their organization.
VERTICAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
EXPLORE THE PROFILE
We can help you better understand the highs and lows of your current leadership capacity through the StageSHIFT Vertical Holistic Leadership Profile (VHLP).
It will help you better understand your current behaviors in an organizational and leadership context, and what you might want to work on to expand your leadership capacity and impact going forward.
EXECUTIVE COACHING
FOR EXPANDED PRESENCE,
CAPACITY AND IMPACT
Leading transformational change asks for you as a leader - not only to understand the world around you, and your organization - but also to go inside of yourself to get in touch with your own purpose, to elevate your perspectives and go beyond business as usual.
Over 12-24 months, we will help you find your inner compass - and grow vertically - to support you on the journey to orchestrating impactful change across your organizational ecosystem and beyond.
This process is optimally run as preparation for, or in parallel to, a strategic and transformational journey of your organization aiming to co-create Better Business and a better future.
TRANSFORMATIONAL EXECUTIVE COACH
ELISABET LAGERSTEDT
Elisabet Lagerstedt is the founder and director of Future Navigators, and the author of two books. With a profound experience of how an inner journey can enable positive outer change, she helps executives, teams and organizations go beyond business as usual, to accelerate Better Business, and co-create a better future.
Working with Elisabet is an exploratory journey, and can mean anything from 90-120 min online sessions with focus on you and your business, to walk and talks in the woodlands or beaches of the very south of Sweden with deep contemplation and reflections on yourself and your leadership.
TRANSFORMATIONAL EXECUTIVE COACH
JESSICA LÖWENHIELM
Jessica Löwenhielm, the founder of Wholly, is a Certified StageSHIFT Executive Coach, specializing in adult developmental psychology and vertical leadership development, and a practitioner of Gestalt in organizations. Based in Stockholm, Sweden.
With a solid business and leadership background she today dedicates her time to helping individuals, leaders, and organizations grow. Her work is based on the belief that we all have a deeper inner core and potential that we can realize. It is about living and leading one's best life and creating a strong impact not only within ourselves but also beyond.
VERTICAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
THE StageSHIFT APPROACH
We apply the StageSHIFT approach for vertical leadership development and organizational evolution, which is developed by Dr. Antoinette Braks and building on decades of research on adult and leadership development.
StageSHIFT Coaching is highly innovative and integrative and helps liberate and connect mind, spirit, and heart to realize our unlimited human potential. The approach has proven to be four times more effective in 10 percent of the time invested compared to other vertical leadership development methods.
StageSHIFT Coaching also uniquely integrates vertical leadership development with organizational evolution and transformation.
A StageSHIFT Coach adopts an explicit evidence-based transformative coaching approach. Transformative coaching involves dialogue, and asking leading questions offering deeper insights. It is also an invitations to work with proven StageSHIFT techniques and frameworks.
The pathway covers several areas (see image below). The goal is to help expand the leaders self-awareness, presence, capacity, and impact through vertical development to the Synergist level.
A StageSHIFT COACH
To receive a StageSHIFT certification - on top of their previous extensive leadership, consulting, and coaching experience - a StageSHIFT Coach needs to have their center of gravity at the later stage of Synergist or Alchemist, which is held by less than 10 percent of the executive population. They, therefore, have the capacity to hold an expansive coaching space that enables strategic leaders to extend their depth of meaning-making and expedite their development.
Elisabet Lagerstedt and Jessica Löwenhielm are both Certified StageShift Coaches trained directly by Dr Antoiniette Braks over several years. They both hold the following certifications:
- Certified StageSHIFT Vertical Leadership Coaching (12 months program)
- Certified StageSHIFT Vertical Systemic Team Dynamics (12 months program)
- Certified StageSHIFT Vertical Holistic Leadership Profile (3 months program)
As part of the StageSHIFT community and the StageSHIFT DEEPER Coaching Integration program (ongoing supervision and support), we can also help put you in contact with other StageSHIFT coaches and consultants globally.
LEARN MORE
VERTICAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Adult development and Vertical Leadership Development are becoming increasingly embraced by leading management thinkers and organizations around the world. It has also been highlighted in many different popular leadership publications - from Forbes to Harvard Business Review. A great white-paper is for instance also The Future of Leadership for Conscious Capitalism.
There are several schools of thought within this field. Notable research has been produced by Jane Loevinger, William Torbert and Susanne Cook Greuter. Another school of thought was originated by Robert Kegan, building on the work of Jean Piaget, a famous psychologist with a focus on child development. Terry O'Fallon has instead taken an integral approach to vertical development, building on the work of philosopher Ken Wilber. Other researchers has then focused on specifical aspects
of vertical development, for instance on the more mature, or post-conventional stages, which have proven to be of utmost interest in the space of leadership due to their evolving capabilities to thrive in disruption and complexity.
Dr Antoinette Braks has later focused on the applied part of Vertical Leadership Development from an executive coaching and organizational development perspective, see for instance:
- "From developmental to transformative coaching to reach later stages in vertical holistic leadership development" (article, 2023)
- "Leadership Coaching Leads to Later Stage Development" (article, 2021)
- "Executive Coaching in Strategic Holistic Leadership: The Drivers and Dynamics of Vertical Development" (book, 2020)
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We are on a mission to accelerate Better Business and co-create a Better Future. Join our exploration beyond business as usual as we explore trends, roam the frontlines of Better Business, touch on the emerging paradigm of Regenerative Business, and the evolution of conscious impact leadership.