Holistic, integrated
I am a thoughtful, holistic and integrated leader with an internal culture of people-first wellbeing. I model self-care, boundaries and accountability, alongside empathetic, compassionate and generous behaviour.
Getting it right
I work to ‘get it right’ rather than ‘be right’: as a leader, it is for me to have the best questions and to nurture my team to arrive at the best answers. Working from a co-creation and consensus-building praxis, I acknowledge the fear and uncertainty of these times and work to deescalate it.
Living our values
Fostering a contributions and conative model of management where people are valued for their inherent qualities, I enable my team to live their own values, successfully navigating the space across their complexity of needs, expectations and ambitions and the same of the organisation.
Respond, not react
Anchored in social practice, I intuitively resist action bias in favour of ‘specify and respond,’ complemented by thriving in working with the ambiguous and unknown.
We are all, always, becoming.
This is a notion I hold dear to – for my clients and myself. As much as I may be a leader, more importantly, I am always becoming a leader.
I share my leadership attributes here in a spirit of transparency and radical honesty, as an insight into my skills, a snapshot into where I am now as a leader and my direction of travel, and as an invitation to all for conversation around the need for new types of leadership, where we seek that talent and how we nuture it.
The Kolbe Index is the one I have found to make the most reflective impact, as a holistic purview and as appreciative of all that a person can bring to leadership. Brené Brown is someone I hold in the highest esteem and have learned an incredible amount from. I advocate to my clients to lean into both, and to model best practice, I offer this open page to my leadership profile.
Kolbe Leadership Score, aka, my MO.
Specify – to gather and share information
research in-depth; establish specific priorities; quantify & rank order particulars; define objectives; assess probabilities; define terms with exactness; determine appropriateness; provide historical evidence; create analogies; and develop complex strategies
Envision – when handling space and intangibles
create virtual presentations; conceptualise solutions; envision circumstances; capture the essence; portray symbolically; find tangible methods; sketch ideas; simulate actual situations; concoct out of thin air
Adapt – to arrange and design follow through
create shortcuts; revise approaches; thrive on interruptions; diversify; switch tasks frequently; be flexible; cut through bureaucracy; do several things at once; keep everything accessible; loosen up rigid processes
Innovate – to deal with risk and uncertainty
create a sense of urgency; initiate change; improvise solutions; promote alternatives; negotiate shortcuts; mind map possibilities; originate options; generate slogans; defy the odds; ad lib stories and presentations
Fact Finder – elaborate, compute, document, substantiate, validate
Follow Thru – diversify, disguise, randomise, switch
Quick Start – speculate, discover, originate, promote, experiment
Implementor – conceptualise, symbolize, imagine, virtualise, visualise
Brené Brown -
Daring Leadership
Rumbling with vulnerability
having the courage to show up fully when I can't control the outcome
Living into your values
I do more than profess our values, I practice them
Learning to rise
gaining skills in rising up to enable people to take risks and jump into the vast unknown
What People Are Saying
“Working with Cara, I experienced in her a talent for coming up with the unique, the unconventional; a radical thinking grounded in being able to deal with the unknown and ambiguous as well as the pragmatic and practical, invaluable skills for this time and what we face in the future.”
— R, Brighton
“When Cara came to work with our senior and Board leadership we embarked on a process that held us in a creative and considered space, from big picture visions through to purposeful action. All the time Cara modelled best practice in her own leadership and we learned as much by example as by practice.”