FAQ

How does Summit organise itself as a leadership development ecosystem?

We are embedded in a network of leadership development professionals from academia, consultancies and the business world. This network has developed over 30 years.
We draw from the network according to the client’s needs, always keeping in mind that our understanding of these needs shift over time.
We work from the principle of “Summit at the core.” Your main contact for the design and delivery of the developmental experience is always a member of our core team.

By engaging with Summit, you engage with a rich ecosystem of professionals and practitioners who understand our ethos of impact by going below the surface.

Why does Summit pay special attention to leadership transitions?

Clinical research tells us that transitions in work and in life are rich opportunities for accelerated growth – if they are managed intentionally.
Organisations might do a good job of managing the strategy and tactics of leadership transitions, but in our experience not many take advantage of their potential for personal growth and stronger leadership impact.
Our transitions work supports executives in transitions so that they grow in profound ways as they help their organisations to grow.

Summit’s approach to helping executives grow through their transitions draws from clinical work in post trauma/transition growth and how different schools of psychology work with inner narratives through the transition process.

When you talk about the science of leadership development, what science do you mean?

Leadership development practitioners sometimes draw from research in adult development when they construct developmental experiences.
They rarely draw from clinical research into how our minds operate most effectively while under stress, in complex situations, while trying to maintain a healthy balance between order and chaos in large, adaptive systems.
Lasting development leverages all that we know about how our minds tend to work, and how we tend to change ourselves in helpful ways, under the stresses of leadership.

Summit’s developmental work reflects our deep understanding of how the laboratory of leadership can help us to grow ourselves so that we have greater impact on the organisation, on the people around us, and on ourselves. We are guided by many clinical approaches, although our work is shaped most strongly by clinical work in depth psychology, existential psychology, evolutionary psychology, narrative psychology and (last but not least) positive psychology.

Does Summit focus on a specific level of leadership?

We think less about levels of leadership in our work, and more about transitions into complexity and tension.
Summit often engages with executives in transition. Transition typically means that the executive is preparing for a new role, has made the transition into a new role, or is staying in a role whose nature is changing significantly.
Because our work often uses the process of transition as the laboratory for development, we often engage with high potential leaders (who are preparing to guide their organisations in the future and who occupy the challenging buffer role between senior leadership and the front lines of the business) and with senior leaders (who are experiencing the complexity of enterprise leadership for the first time).

Summit’s work supports movement into roles where tension is new, unexpected and challenging. We use this tension to explore, deconstruct and reconstruct the leader’s core beliefs, assumptions and narratives.

What are the advantages of working with Summit?

We are small, focused and flexible. Our size keeps us focused on clients with a specific developmental need. Our focus keeps us on territory in which we know we can make a profound difference. Our flexibility allows us to improvise according to the unique challenges and contexts of our clients.
We know leadership development really really well. 30 years of operating in the leadership development world in business schools, in large consultancies and in smaller boutiques has taught us to value deeper work that leads to profound growth over the seduction of simple or slick answers to complex leadership challenges.
We know what works and what doesn’t work. We have designed hundreds of leadership development interventions for organisations in just about every industry and from all corners of the world. We’ve worked on large scale, standardized leadership development programs (early in our careers – we wouldn’t recommend this approach now!) and on short, intensive interventions designed to help our clients grow quickly (highly recommended, provided we stay focused and work below the surface). We’ve learned the value of integrating personal, team and organisational impact in leadership development work. And we’ve learned the value of working with the individual in order to impact the organisation. We bring all of the lessons we’ve learned through three decades of hard experience to bear in our engagement with you.

What is it like to work with you at Summit?

We make some commitments to you, our client.

We are honest. We will tell you what we think and why we think it. Good leadership development is the result of a dance of ideas that can sometimes feel like a wrestling match. It is never the result of closed conversations and ideological traps.

We are open. Our expertise is deep enough to allow us to flex, to evolve and to improvise. There is no one true way to work with executives on their development. There are many possible approaches. The art of effective leadership development often lies in the ability to understand which approaches will be most effective for each of our clients.

We learn together. Each engagement is its own theatre. We absolutely love the process of understanding you, of digging below the surface of your challenges, and of exploring different ways in which we can support your growth. The joy of discovery is the energy that keeps us curious, fresh and inspired!

We understand the seriousness of our work. We know how profoundly it can impact the lives of the executives with whom we work. And we also appreciate how important it is that we have fun while we do the work. An important part of our ethos is guided by clinical research that indicates that positive emotion leads to expansive thinking and therefore to personal and organisational growth (see Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis of Seligman’s Authentic Happiness for details of the research). Curiosity, exploration, discovery and a deep caring for the work and its results all guide our work.