Hope – A Critical Leadership Competency

Virtual coffee talk

Organizations are scrambling to write a new playbook to make sense of the emerging business landscape. Leaders report high levels of employee anxiety, fatigue, and mistrust as businesses explore opening offices safely, are already back in the office, or balance a hybrid remote and on-site environment. Familiar, go-to practices that help us build trust, and deliver results with focus, accountability, and care are under scrutiny today. Specifically, making sense and trust in today’s climate is awkward and clumsy. Leaders are having trouble in helping people hold hope, stay accountable to daily work, and drive business results.

Learning Objectives

1. Practice exercises that help build hope in each conversation and interaction
2. Explore how their strengths can also create difficulty for them
3. Take away one idea on how to use love as a foundation to leadership practices
4. Consider ideas to build a conversational toolkit to make all conversations safe, equitable and inclusive

About Our Facilitator

Sunitha Narayanan brings creativity, play, gentle humor, and focus with 25+ years of experience in leadership and executive coaching to elevate leadership impact by helping leaders and their teams harness strengths by raising awareness around blind spots, untapped talent, and cognitive diversity.
With deep and intuitive listening Sunitha helps clients uncover where they are in their growth process, to hear where they are out of balance as well as how a client’s vision, values and purpose drive their engagement and alignment to personal and organizational goals. The feedback from clients when clients work with Sunitha is that she offers a safe yet challenging space to experiment without censure; to use failure as creative inspiration; a space to build a culture that promotes psychological safety so that each voice is honored.

Sunitha brings a deep and extensive background in a variety of behavioral and leadership assessment tools to analyze data from stakeholders with exceptional ability and documented success in establishing trust and intimacy of coaching relationships. She is published in industry journals on leadership topics such as authenticity, performance management, team building, and productive conversations. Her personal belief is that exemplary and unstoppable work happens with and through people. And she is on a mission to hold wholehearted space so that clients can listen to their authentic voice first, then connect that to that of a colleague or a team.