Alignment is a planning conversation that explores how The Return to Ourselves could bring more humanity to your leadership culture.

We’ll talk about the challenges leaders face, how The Return could help, alignment with other leadership activities, session design and delivery, the pro-active role of participating leaders, and the role of internal mentors and sponsors.

Humanity is a differentiator in leadership, purpose, culture and style. It starts with self-awareness and builds with virtue-led, character formation. It extends to those around you and the people you serve. It touches your role in shaping organisational humanity in local and global ways.

This conversation draws on the humanity already present in your leaders’ lives. It does not preach. Leaders are invited to find the virtues they want to cultivate in light of your corporate priorities, their current role and their future aspirations.

Leadership creates value that lasts. It engages others and takes them with you to innovate, make a difference, and change life for the better. Leadership sets high expectations, especially your own.

Intelligent technology, complex relationships and operational risk make moral courage and human care critical to your business plan. This leadership conversation sees the human dependencies in your work and prepares the ground for dealing with them.

Purpose provides clarity, unity, motivation and meaning. It unites people in a common cause, creating a shared sense of identity and belonging. Purpose is more powerful when it’s human.

This conversation gives your leadership the purpose it needs to make it appealing, engaging and viable. If you have ever been in a great team, you know why this matters, and how important it is to build understanding and commitment to it, one person at a time.

Belonging is a rare but sought after effect of good, human leadership. Like engagement, its most profound advantage – when we have it – is an increase in the discretionary effort we are willing to make.

Starting with past experience of belonging in different contexts, this inquiry-led conversation turns attention to – and further generates – the individual, authentic action leaders can make to a sense of belonging in those they lead.

Courage is the confidence to stand tall for the purpose we serve, and stand with the people and principles that matter.

This conversation differentiates physical courage from moral courage and focuses on the latter. Virtue-led leadership sets a high bar for our ethical judgment. Leaders with moral integrity earn our respect. People we lead notice it when it’s there, and hate it when it’s missing.

Voice brings us to the world of language, rhetoric, and storytelling. Effective leaders go beyond feeling imperfect and exposed. We have to find our voice – a voice that speaks the truth and explains, persuasively, the promise we care about; a voice that shows it listens, and responds with courage and care. A voice that speaks for ‘you’.

Of our respected leaders, few things are remembered more than the clarity and eloquence in their voice.

Impact is the value we create, the difference we make, and the lives we change for the better.

We might express it as a vision, or a target with a number. Numbers matter, but leaders are rarely known for numbers alone. Ultimately, leadership is human – we know a good leader for who they are, not just for what they do. Our human impact is harder to measure – it’s qualitative and it’s personal – but our permission to lead hinges on it.

Guardianship is an unusual word to describe a leader’s role in developing future leaders – but it deserves a bit of reverence. The role covers what it means to be a leader, who might be chosen, and how they are prepared for it. In human communities, experienced elders are chosen as guardians for their wisdom and the high regard in which they are held.

Guardianship is a higher honour than leadership itself. We have to be worthy of it.