Holistic Leadership Development

The invitation

Holistic Leadership Development supports leaders through emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual development, aiming to develop well-rounded individuals capable of leading with authenticity, resilience, and empathy in dynamic and complex environments.

In this learning module, you’ll come to understand more about your leadership and whether your mind, heart and actions are in alignment.  How you engage in your leadership using a holistic leadership approach becomes a conscious choice that you make. By participating in this Holistic Leadership Development module of the Genuine Contact program, you’ll get to the very heart of how, what, when, and where to lead.

During your learning, growth and development as you go through this module, you are invited to reevaluate your choices, dreams, goals, boundaries, and the standards you have set for yourself in your leadership. A shift in perspective occurs that expands your leadership capacity.

A holistic leadership development approach is well worth adding to your leadership repertoire as you learn, grow and develop your leadership.

Why use this approach? 

Think of an organization as a living entity. Every living thing, including the organization, functions at its best within life-nourishing conditions and with leadership that has the knowledge and capacity for taking care of it.

A holistic leadership approach guides you to engage in leadership of an organization that is dynamically moving forward and working with the potential that is inherent in the forward movement. 

Within a holistic leadership approach, you learn how to create gain from the rhythm of people’s need for divergent, emergent, and convergent thinking. This breaks the people free of the limitations too often posed with insistence on convergent thinking only - only making decisions that drive forward to results. You’ll position the power of the people in your organization for success in fulfilling the purpose of the organization.

 The Holistic Leadership Development module of the Genuine Contact program was designed to strengthen your leadership capacity and provide you with a guided experience to design a plan for how you show up in your leadership. In a world that too often supports the superficial, finding quick solutions, a holistic approach delves into the root causes to find your way to real solutions.

Using this approach, you will 

• Understand the leadership needed in the living organization
• Learn about leading into the unknown, finding the best way forward through uncertainty
• Learn how to be successful with your leadership in a performance environment of constant change
• Develop greater conscious awareness of how you show up in your leadership, how you engage others in your leadership, and the leadership choices you make
• Gain a new perspective and new ways of understanding your leadership to be of greatest value to your organization
• Learn to nourish a culture of leadership to support leadership throughout the organization carried out individually and collectively

This Holistic Leadership Development module is a complete skill and knowledge development and growth opportunity for consultants, managers and leaders. It provides benefits used on its own or in conjunction with other components of the Genuine Contact Program

Who needs to be involved

Whether you are a leader who wants to inspire and drive meaningful change within your organization or community, or an aspiring leader wanting to transition into a leadership role with confidence and skill, you will benefit from learning more about a holistic approach to leadership. 

A holistic approach to leadership is right for leaders who want to:

• foster a strong sense of belonging, trust, and collaboration within teams
• reignite passion for leadership and find balance in your personal and professional lives
• create environments where diversity, equity, and inclusion are prioritized
• navigate organizations through complex changes and challenges
• cultivate innovation while maintaining alignment with core values
• lead with purpose while addressing community-focused missions.

The Holistic Leadership Development workshop invites leaders to align their mind, heart, and actions by fostering emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual growth. Participants will deepen their leadership capacity, learn to navigate uncertainty, and create life-nourishing conditions that support organizational success and sustainable, authentic leadership.

Learning this module together with team members has the added benefit of developing the team.  This module is also of great benefit to managers, consultants and coaches.

How does it work? 

This learning module includes 6 phases of learning, designed to take you from an introduction and orientation through to guidance for developing, implementing, and adjusting your unique plan for developing your leadership holistically. Your learning includes self-study for preparation, real-time learning June 23-27, 2025 in Waterloo, Canada, and follow-up mentoring to support your implementation, monitoring, and adjustment of your new leadership capacities.

1. Discernment: You’ll begin with establishing some baseline measures that capture your perceptions of your leadership from a holistic perspective. You’ll explore your understanding of why leadership is important, how it is carried out, where and when.
2. Readiness: You’ll be presented with information to explore to develop your understanding of a holistic approach to leadership. This will include Five Beliefs to mull over and consider their implications for leadership. These Five Beliefs inform five significant paths for the expansion of your capacity with your leadership from a holistic perspective.
3. Engagement: You’ll be taken through a series of activities designed to engage you with your leadership. Each of the activities provides you with a unique lens to view your leadership and to use the tool or technique provided to increase your capacity for leadership.
4. Construction: You’ll have the opportunity to review all that you learned in this module, developing a plan that is uniquely yours for how you want to show up in your leadership.
5. Implementation: You’ll have the opportunity to consider implementing your plan receiving feedback and mentoring. A follow on mentoring circle provides you with a forum to discuss the learning you gain when you implement your plan. You’ll enhance your learning via application.

Monitoring and Adjustment: The learning will include monitoring your progress using the baseline measures that you started with and making adjustments to either how you are implementing your plan and/or to the plan itself. The module is designed with follow on mentoring circles to have group discussions facilitated by a Genuine Contact trainer about what has been about using a holistic leadership approach in accordance with your unique leadership design for how you show up in your leadership.