Strategic Leadership and Communication System

What is SLEAC?

Wood Brown & Company developed its management and business training approach, the Strategic Leadership and Communication System (SLEAC), in response to the need of the business community for a system that facilitates the comprehensive development of leadership skills.

SLEAC is a program that focuses on the development of the diverse skills of leadership. We recognise that good leaders require not only support from the professional culture of which they are a part but must be able to nurture themselves in their personal lives.

An explicit aspect of SLEAC is its understanding of the importance of the various domains that affect all leaders, whatever their role within an organisation. Thus SLEAC focuses participants on the importance of sustainable models of leadership.

In developing sustainable leadership, SLEAC helps participants to examine six key domains that are important in both their personal and professional lives:

• Attitudinal and intellectual skills
• Behavioural and emotional skills
• Core leadership and physical skills

The interrelationship between each of these skill domains is vital to the development of leaders who are able to take responsibility for positive cultural, business, strategic and team change within their organisations.

It is equally important for participants to understand that each of these six interrelated skills apply to their personal lives. In doing so, we aim to show participants how good leaders are capable of nurturing and renewing themselves in order to nurture and renew their organisations.

What are the aims of SLEAC?

The program is designed to show participants how to draw on their personal creative resources to develop a stronger sense of self-awareness. This awareness will help them to understand not only the style of leadership they offer, but how this style affects those around them.

An integral aspect of this is process is to help participants apply the principles of SLEAC to their personal lives and to focus on the importance of sustaining a good work and life balance.

From this perspective, participants are shown how to develop in themselves, as well as facilitate in others, the key skills of:

• Communication
• Problem solving
• Motivation
• Goal setting
• Active listening
• Implementing and managing change
• A cycle of self-assessment and implementation
• Team building
• Self-monitoring

Participants are shown how to understand and apply the interdependent cycles that are inherent in the strategies of all effective leaders. Importantly, they are also shown how to apply and use these cycles in their own lives so that they may sustain and grow themselves as well as their organisations.

What are the cycles utilised in SLEAC?

There are two fundamental cycles utilised in SLEAC. These form the basis of the personal and organisational approaches to leadership adopted in the program. They are explicitly designed so they may be applied by participants to their own lives as well as their work lives.

These cycles emphasise the importance of a continuous process of self-assessment and self-renewal. These two cycles are intrinsic to the growth of all leaders and focus participants on the essential need to care for the mental, emotional, physical and moral aspects of their own lives as well as for those of the teams or organisations they lead. Importantly, as agents for cultural change, leaders must be well grounded in themselves in order to take effective roles in that change.

The Continuous Improvement Cycle underlies all other aspects of SLEAC and shows participants the importance of self-renewal and self-assessment as a means of maintaining the vitality that is essential to their personal and professional lives.

The Continuous Improvement Cycle underpins organisational change and renewal, as well as providing a systematic means of allowing participants to learn how to undertake a similar process in their personal lives.

The second cycle that underpins the remaining aspects of SLEAC examines the personal resources and skills leaders require to be effective in their designated roles. These roles are divided into six specific quadrants for more detailed examination:

• Resourcefulness
• Communication
• Strategy
• Inclusiveness
• Motivation
• Visionary

Intersecting each of these interdependent quadrants are the

• attitudinal and intellectual,
• behavioural and emotional
• and core leadership and physical skills cycles.

These cycles form three bands moving uniformly across each of the quadrants to indicate how the individual’s mental, emotional, physical and moral resources help to form the architecture of personal and organisational existence. This completes the fundamental architecture of an approach to leadership that is capable of sustained growth and self-renewal.

Wood Brown & Company offers leadership and management workshops applying the Strategic Leadership and Communication System as well as using this approach as the underlying basis for its consulting work with organisations and groups.