Leadership Coach
Building your personal leadership game
Who the leader can be?
Leadership is a craft, learned and earned
Coaching is one of the most powerful personal and professional transformation tools. Coaching can help you achieve great things, both in your career and in your life.
The rewards of being coached are twofold. To be successfully coached, you require self-awareness, humility, the ability to listen, a hunger for feedback, a commitment to action, and a willingness to be held accountable, the qualities you need to lead.
My role is to teach, challenge, encourage, provoke, remind, refer, prod, push, guide and cajole leaders to be the change they seek to make.
Leadership Coach
Building your personal leadership game
Intention
“As coach, mentor and teacher, not coaching to who the leader is now, but who the leader can be.
I will ‘meet’ the leaders where they are now and find out where we can go together.
I will channel my inner Tom Hafey, Ron Barassi, Allan Jeans, the great AFL coaches and teachers, who all saw something in me that I had not yet seen in myself.
We will achieve great things together through a mix of:
Being a trusted confidant and critical friend
A plan and a system to achieve their leadership goals
A leadership system of operation
Yes, it is important that the leaders feel good about what I bring as a coach, but the goal is to help them believe and feel great about who they can become as a leader.”
You get it kind, and you get it straight. Every time.
As a coach, Cameron is a breath of fresh air in a space crowded by many who haven’t ‘walked the walk’.
He has the achievements, the hits, the wins and the elite-level accolades to back up his perspectives.
He’s approachable, knowledgeable, generous, insightful, and practical. He has extremely experienced perspectives at the elite level of sports and business, which afford him a unique synergy and alignment between the two to guide mentees.
Cam’s insightful and considered storytelling method and anecdotes pave the way for creative conversational thinking, and you know exactly where and how you need to do the work to achieve the results!
Damian Hall
Managing Director | Super Butcher
You get it kind, and you get it straight. Every time.
As a coach, Cameron is a breath of fresh air in a space crowded by many who haven’t ‘walked the walk’.
He has the achievements, the hits, the wins and the elite-level accolades to back up his perspectives.
He’s approachable, knowledgeable, generous, insightful, and practical. He has extremely experienced perspectives at the elite level of sports and business, which afford him a unique synergy and alignment between the two to guide mentees.
Cam’s insightful and considered storytelling method and anecdotes pave the way for creative conversational thinking, and you know exactly where and how you need to do the work to achieve the results!
Damian Hall
Managing Director | Super Butcher
It is the hard days that define us
“Sometimes you have to let the tide go out to see where the rocks are.”
I have little to offer you if not for the mistakes and failures.
I describe this as the ‘leader’s limp’, the inevitable condition that leaders will develop if they are prepared to invest themselves fully in the expectations of the role.
The lesson? Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo.
“Never trust a leader without a limp” is a line I use often, and I enjoy listening to and learning from leaders who have the courage to be authentic, and to speak about their ‘limp’.
I work with leaders prepared to fully engage with leadership and its expectations to the extent that when it reveals who they are, they work hard to find the best parts of themselves while having the self-awareness that this is not what people get to experience all of the time, as well intended as they hope and believe it is.
My goal with the leadership coaching and teaching is to not only build on these lessons of leadership, mostly wonderful but often harsh and unforgiving in ways that I questioned my capacity to withstand, but to share the wisdom, gratitude and love I have of those who trusted me enough to share the best of themselves.
I got to benefit from their bruises, as I hope you will from mine.
To be the person in your leadership life who can offer the insights from the lessons of lived-experience leadership, with the integrity of a coach who understands just how hard it is, and the importance of being and having a trusted confidant.
Building your personal leadership game
The designCEO offering
We offer personal leadership experiences for CEOs, C-Suite and Emerging Leaders, designed to match leadership ambition with leadership capability through tailored leadership offerings.
One-to-One Coaching and Mentoring
For CEOs and Senior Leaders.
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Our offering includes Leadership Mentoring/Coaching, built around ten sessions across the year, structured for maximum impact and effectiveness.
We also offer the option of quarterly full-day offsite Leadership Intensives for a more immersive experience.
Our mentoring programs include Leadership Profiling, specifically Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Natural Gifts Profiling (NGP).
These are excellent tools for gaining personal leadership insight, particularly relating to self-awareness and the behaviours and communication skills (individual and group) required to lead and drive performance expectations during times of change.
Masterclasses, Immersions and Workshops
Shared leadership experiences with like-minded leaders.
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Shared leadership experiences with like-minded leaders.
Some of the offerings will be exclusive for leaders in CEO roles or equivalent:
Leadership Masterclasses
Half-Day Virtual Masterclasses run approximately four (4) times per annum. Leadership teams are also welcome to attend as a group.
One-day in-person Leadership Intensives, held offsite most likely at our outstanding facility eclat in Hawthorn East, Melbourne.
Leadership Immersions:
Three-day Leadership Immersions, held in either Daylesford, Red Hill or Torquay, all beautiful rural locations approximately 90 mins from Melbourne CBD.
Leadership Workshop, four (4) half-day Intensives, held on the same day and time over consecutive weeks at [eclat](https://eclat.com/) in Hawthorn East, Melbourne.
CEO Connect
A new designCEO membership initiative exclusive to CEOs and equivalents.
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A new designCEO membership initiative exclusive to CEOs and equivalents.
It will be built around the trust models of designCEO, focusing on connection, based on two mindsets:
Belief
Belonging
Membership will be via invitation and expression of interest, requiring substantial engagement and commitment to the group and its members.
We will seek high levels of leadership diversity, particularly regarding life and leadership experiences.
CEO Connect will focus on the whole CEO learning journey, with cycles of action and reflection with the support and care of a close group of peers and coaches.
It will include a combination of:
“A problem shared
Trusted, time efficient, curated and collaborative, but also thought-provoking, conversations with fellow CEOs, focused on maximising the experience together, individually and collectively.
“Deep learning”
Peer meetings, off-sites and workshops, including participation in various forums, roundtables and group coaching, including sessions with inspiring and thoughtful CEOs, elite high-performance team sport coaches, captains and leaders.
There will also be tailored learning sessions held at elite sporting environments and high-performing organisations.
“A trusted confidant and critical friend”
One-on-one Leadership Mentoring with Cameron Schwab
Aspirations get you going, understanding who you are keeps you going
It is a game never won
Being a leader brings with it a very specific type of pressure
Our role as leaders is to create the conditions that get the best from a group with all of its idiosyncrasies.
No team is the same and will always require something different from you, the leader, and a new way will need a different conversation.
Trust always precedes progress, and you can only ‘push’ to the level of trust you have built.
The designCEO coaching and teaching programs and workshops have been designed to support CEOs and leaders in high-impact roles, at all times recognising the need to perform well now while evolving their leadership game.
They are designed to build high-performance leadership capabilities for CEOs and leaders to build trust, set standards, model behaviours, and establish performance expectations to address current and longer-term cultural and strategic imperatives and goals.
The sessions will be challenging, with each component having follow-up exercises, and leaders will be immediately able to pass on these learnings to their team.
They build around important leadership conversations, which include space for testing the models and frameworks in the context of the CEO and leader’s role and responsibilities.
Any leader who undertakes the leadership learning experiences with me will not be asked to do ‘more’ - but will be asked to do ‘different’ as they develop their leadership craft.
If it was really good, what would it be like?
From success to significance
“Don't just aspire to be a leader, honour the role, aspire to make a difference.”
At designCEO, we teach a system focused on high-performance leadership habits to enable leaders establish their daily practice of leadership excellence, all capable of being executed in high-stakes and high-pressure environments.
Our leadership offering has been developed for:
CEOs and leaders seeking a coaching relationship to develop their personal leadership system of operation, a plan and a system to achieve their leadership goals, and the support of a trusted confidant and critical friend.
CEOs and leaders who find themselves in a place of overwhelm, who are seeking to find their own leadership voice to lead with courage, confidence and belief.
CEOs and leaders seeking to leverage their unique characteristics and skills to build personal leadership authenticity, belief and resilience.
Fast-tracking leadership development, either within their current role or transitioning for greater responsibility.
CEOs and leaders not comfortable with the status quo, willing to challenge assumptions, disrupt default thinking by asking better and more compelling questions, and introduce original ways of thinking in relation to developing leaders.
Who are you practising at being?
Our aspiration
Creating more conscious and fulfilled leaders
The designCEO methodology builds on contemporary and sophisticated coaching and learning models and systems that focus on self-responsibility to maximise individual and group performance in high-stakes and team-focused environments.
We focus on delivering unique, advanced, yet deliverable strategy and culture concepts and frameworks from the uncompromising world of professional sport in combination with leading-edge academic concepts from the Harvard and Melbourne Business Schools, ensuring commitment and accountability to a team-based ethos, that involve:
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“Leadership is about other people,” Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll has said. “… And without that connection there is no leadership.”
The designCEO methodology builds on contemporary and sophisticated coaching and learning models and systems that focus on self-responsibility to maximise individual and group performance, to build connection and alignment, in high-stakes and team-focused environments.
It is a leadership system of operation, focused on both the mechanics and dynamics of high-performance, building on the three frames of Leadership Mindset, Leadership Skillset and Leadership Identity to embed the High Performance Behaviours to build a High Performance Culture.
Leadership Mindset - Going Deep. The curiosity to learn and the courage to unlearn. Reflective thinking, building clarity around the expectations of the leader's role, both cultural and performance.
Leadership Skillset - Going Forward. The system and the work. Do the reps, mostly small and regular activities, to establish habits and build leadership capability to match leadership ambition.
Leadership Identity - Staying True. The stories you tell yourself. How to overcome self-doubt by developing a leadership identity that is a self-expression of the leader’s unique expertise, experience, and essence.
Upon completion of a designCEO program, leaders will have established personal and professional philosophies and principles they will seek to live and lead by, fundamental beliefs that underpin their actions, resulting in leadership behaviours that lead to excellence.
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The teaching process is a systematic process of consistent yet modest efforts, such that they never overwhelm leaders who are managing significant workloads and expectations.
A central part of the program’s design is that it does not seek to replace important strategic, human resource and governance frameworks already established. Its role is to ask the right questions of these programs, but more importantly, ensure that CEOs take responsibility for their overall effectiveness.
Above all else, we are seeking to build powerful leadership habits, small changes done regularly, all aligned to a high-performance leadership mindset and identity.
The goal is personal leadership mastery, which requires breaking down the elements and finding a system that works for the leaders and their teams.
We teach and coach an integrated performance system utilising sophisticated learning models and systems garnered from elite team sport, supported by training and insights from the Harvard Business School and Columbia University (NY).
Both the system, and methodology are highly accountable, building on four high-performance trust habits that are immediately executable, and will complement and amplify the effectiveness of existing strategic and performance management systems.
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Increasing leadership effectiveness is a continuous process of action, reflection on action and then new and more effective action based on feedback.
When discussing the competencies of successful leaders, the conversation soon focuses on the following:
The need to foster and develop high levels of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Leaders operating in accordance with their strengths, their Natural Gifts.
There are many ways of gaining emotional intelligence feedback in the workplace, but the most objective method is to compare emotional and social competencies using high-quality psychometric assessment tools.
Scientific research has identified ten emotional skills that drive leadership performance, and these skills are measured in an assessment tool developed by RocheMartin called The Emotional Capital Report (ECR), for which I am accredited. The ECR is a psychometrically validated measure that can be completed online in around twenty minutes.
Your Natural Gifts Profile (NGP), also completed online, connects you to your authentic self, and unites you with the things you most enjoy doing, the areas where you are most likely to excel. They are your 'easy wisdom'. From your gifts come your purpose, a means by which you can sustain high energy and focused attention.
These insights have proven to be a valuable component of the offering, particularly as it relates to the leader developing their Leadership Philosophy.
Some thinking that informs us on coaching
LESSON #17
Can you coach effort?
Cameron Schwab
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When listening to commentary surrounding elite team sport, the many post-mortems seeking to explain why one team won and their opponents lost, who performed well while others disappointed, the conversation will inevitably deal with notions of ‘effort’.
While often hidden in the myriad of data points and video analysis, what is being said is “The team that tried harder won”, particularly when seeking to explain a result other than expected.
“They didn’t come to play” is the term often used by expert commentators, former players and coaches, who have a very firm grasp on what ‘effort’ means at this level of competition, having deep experience with the variability of performance from week-to-week and season-to-season, but now sit a safe distance from the performance environment and its many uncontrollables and complexities, relieved of this responsibility.
That same term is often spoken in hushed tones by ‘inner sanctum figures’ huddling in corners of desolate aftermatch changerooms as the defeated team tries to make sense of something other than the desired and worked-for outcome. Just a few hours earlier, those same changerooms held so much hope. It is sport’s greatest juxtaposition.
I’ve been in those huddles countless times and been part of those conversations, somehow distancing myself from the responsibility for the outcome, a kind of ‘them and us’ mindset. As CEO of the club, this was bullshit, and I needed to be better.
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Some recent thinking on leadership
