Director

My core mission has been to bring the human condition to the boardroom table and bring the reality of business to people. They are completely different paradigms – completely different realities – but if you are to be successful as a business or as an individual, you need a healthy working relationship between the two. I honour both the human condition and the reality of business, without compromise. This focus, I have always believed, is what makes my work unique, important and inspiring. 

How do I bring my core mission about?

I work with talented people who want to make a difference through their work, as well as people trying to find their mojo – especially amidst change and reorganisation.

In the main, I work with the C-suite of organisations. Chairmen, chief operating officers, executive and management committees. I also work with employees who need to have input on a particular initiative – what I term Sideways Leadership. 

Any organisation, if it is to meet its challenges and move forward, must take decisions that will have a long-lasting impact on the business. These decisions will be taken, not in some highly organised ivory tower, but collectively, in the chaotic, fraught, misunderstood world of board and executive relationships. 

The greatest resource leadership can draw on when taking the collective decisions that will move their organisations forward is the people they work with. That means my mission manifests in various practical forms. 

1. Executive coaching – my facilitation requires a safe, but challenging space
   1. For individuals
   2. For teams in tough, exasperating, anxiety-provoking, but “we can do this” sessions
2. Team facilitation and team alignment – I help individuals and teams find and clarify a common purpose
3. Transitional coaching – helping people and teams move into or take on a new reality or a new role
4. Strategic alignment – I help people agree on a strategy or get buy-in for a strategy
5. Leveraging diversity – because of where we live, diversity of identity is hugely important. Even more important is diversity of thought, values and opinion. I help people move beyond identity to create a shared sense of purpose and mission.

The purpose of all my facilitation is to create an environment in which effective, executable decisions can be made. This is what it’s all about. 

1. Working with your people 

I help people understand themselves – what makes them tick and what makes them tricky. 

I develop their leadership skills. 

I help them engage with each other. The better they resolve conflict, work with each other, trust each other, and interact with each other genuinely rather than being guarded, defensive and deliberately destructive… the better your organisation’s collective decisions will be. 

When people are confident in themselves, with a healthy degree of self-knowledge of who they are, when they are prepared to work openly and honestly with each other, recognising their own passions and ambitions, but recognising too that if they subordinate their drive to the collective interests of the organisation, a breakthrough takes place. It will be quite unlike any other they have had in their careers. 

2.Working with reality in all its messiness

How do you bring your ideas, aspirations and values – and make them work in a specific context? An idea will attach to certain assumptions about how the world will be – but the world is like it is, in its own messy reality and in its minute particulars. Therefore, my work is all about helping you:

• Work with your particular context and reality
• Work with who you uniquely are
• Work with what you are accountable to achieve.

3.Getting it just right 

This is the quality I work with continually. 

• What does a board do? 
• What does an executive committee do? 
• How do they each fulfil their roles for the benefit of your organisation?

How do I stress-test you as a board? What does that actually mean in the way that I interact with you, as a CEO and your team? Without getting too involved? But without compromising what you aspire to? Without standing too far back. Getting the distance just right. For a particular set of circumstances.

I began working in 1986, in Human Resources (Personnel Management, as it was then called). From the get-go I was fascinated how people grow their work and how organisations are made or broken by their people. 

Since then, I have acquired enormous experience in facilitating the strategy and leadership development of top South African and global companies. 

I have developed an enviable reputation for working with powerful personalities and teams. These include key people within the private and public sector as well as state owned entities. I have become a trusted advisor to high-profile captains of industry in South Africa and abroad. 

Indeed, I am widely regarded as a thought leader in the field of leadership development, organisational change and strategic choices.

I specialise in coaching Board Executive Team members and senior executives. I facilitate leadership and cultural alignment, resolve conflict, align strategy, and I help implement sustainable change. 

1. I developed the Learner Leadership Concept to guide strategy and leadership development, resolve conflict and build leadership awareness skills and trust.
2. I have been recognised for my groundbreaking work in developing the impact of experts who may not have formal authority in organisations – termed Sideways Leadership. 
3. I co-developed LifePi – a unique biographical questionnaire and report that helps people in leadership develop their awareness, responsibility and growth. LifePi is core to all my consulting. 
4. I am the co-author of Smart Leadership, published by Wiley-Capstone, UK, now in its second edition. 
5. I have been on the faculty of Wits Business School since 1995, lecturing on a number of MBA Programmes in the fields of leadership, change management and organisational development, including the Executive Coaching Programme. 
6. I am a regular columnist in South Africa’s leading business newspaper, Business Day. My articles deal with leadership and related issues. I am also a columnist for CFO South Africa. I am frequently quoted at length by the press and electronic media.  
7. I have been included in the International Who’s Who. 

My key clients include Tiger Brands, Mastercard Foundation, Eskom, Sasol, Glencore, AngloGold Ashanti, HSBC, FirstRand, RMB, BHP Billiton, and Value Capital Partners.

YSA – Yudelowitz, Shannon and Associates

In 2002, Brad Shannon and I established a unique boutique management consultancy, YSA, with a specific focus on leadership development. Our business is based proudly in Johannesburg. We have worked mainly in South Africa, but the practice is increasingly global as our reputation grows. We now consult in Canada, Africa, and Europe. Having built and sustained YSA, we do what we do with a great deal of experience and with more conviction than ever before. We are convinced that this is important work. 

Gemini Consulting

In 1998, I founded and built what was then a completely new and trail-blazing Leadership Development and Alignment Practice within Gemini Consulting, and played a key role in marketing this offering for the global firm. I held several prestigious positions and board appointments at Gemini and was a faculty member of Gemini University in France and the USA.

Adcock Ingram

I was the HR Director for the Pharmaceutical Division of Adcock Ingram, at the time a leading pharmaceutical company, and was a member of the Executive Committee that returned the division to profitability. 

Masters of Management from the University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Business, Johannesburg, South Africa

BA (Hons) in Psychology from Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.

Gestalt Organisation and Systems Development International Programme run by the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland (2008/2009)

Recess College for senior executives and professionals on individual and organisational leadership development, personal and professional renewal: facilitated by Elisabeth Henderson of the Recess College UK (2003).