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About Gayle Hardie

Gayle is internationally recognised for her capability, enthusiasm and experience in the world of leadership and organisation transformation. She currently works with boards and senior leaders all over the world in a range of areas, including: transformational leadership and change in individuals and organisations, strategic planning and development, emotional health and leadership resilience, leading through facilitating, strengthening collaboration, and board and executive mentoring and coaching.

Leadership and recognition

Recognition and leadership have an interesting history together. In many of these cases, a recognised leader is a ‘big’ leader – someone with charisma, conviviality and, often, volume. He or she is someone comfortable in the spotlight and decisive in a crisis. There is nothing wrong with any of these characteristics, but it would be a mistake to think that they define leadership simply because they are characteristics common to prominent leaders. Authentic leadership is more than conspicuous leadership.

By |2017-02-08T12:22:35+11:00April 24th, 2012|Emotional health, Leadership|Comments Off on Leadership and recognition
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The Caring Leader

When working with leaders, we notice that this form of caring is one of the gifts that others are attracted to. Caring leaders demonstrate a style of leadership which brings others along with them. But it needs to be inherent in the leader, not a part of their role. A caring leader is someone who has a genuine interest in others. Let me explain what I mean. (Dedicated to my father, Gordon Henderson, who passed away on March 27.)

By |2017-02-08T12:22:35+11:00April 12th, 2012|Emotional health, Leadership|7 Comments
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Giving leaders time to think

In my last post I talked about our desire to create environments in which leaders can really explore what is important to them. This usually means breaking away from the ‘standard’ approach to workshops and conferences, and instead giving leaders both time to reflect and time to be heard. To this end we often, within our leadership programs, use a framework called the 'Thinking Environment' to give leaders the opportunity to reflect and be heard on an issue of their choosing.

By |2021-04-21T16:40:14+10:00March 26th, 2012|Leadership|2 Comments
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Open Space and the Leadership Experience

One of the things we have noticed when working with leaders on their development is that traditional approaches to learning and building understanding about themselves don’t always achieve the outcomes they want. In many cases their journey through both life and work has already given them enormous experience and knowledge to draw on. They find that conventional development programs tend only to confirm what they are already aware of, while pre-determined or tightly facilitated programs don’t give them the opportunity to identify what they see as important in their learning. In this context it is really important to us that our leadership development programs, including our Leadership Experiences, provide ample opportunity for this exploration.

By |2017-02-08T12:22:35+11:00March 13th, 2012|Leadership|4 Comments
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Operating ‘above the line’ in practice – Part 2

In my last post I looked at emotional triggers that come from our environment and some ways we can learn to deal with these in an emotionally healthy way. Another source of triggers can be more ingrained: they come from long held beliefs and assumptions. There is an example of this sort of trigger which has become common around the streets of many Australian cities – and particularly Melbourne – over the last few years: the clash between motorists and cyclists. At times, displays of yelling and abuse between drivers and bike riders escalate to the verge of all-out battle...

By |2017-02-08T12:22:36+11:00February 27th, 2012|Emotional health|Comments Off on Operating ‘above the line’ in practice – Part 2
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Operating ‘above the line’ in practice – Part 1

A question we get quite often when working with above and below the line and emotional health levels is “how can I use them in practice?” While ‘catching your reactions’ is an important first step towards operating above the line more often and building your emotional health, you also need to know where to go beyond that initial point of self-realisation.

By |2017-02-08T12:22:36+11:00February 15th, 2012|Emotional health|1 Comment
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Chinese dragons and a wonderful welcome in Cyprus

I'm not normally in the habit of using this blog to report on the work that Malcolm and I do, but the week we've just had has been so extraordinary that I just have to share it with you. If I tell you that it included celebrating Chinese New Year in a UN demilitarised zone, including dragons and lions with 'camouflaged legs', and fireworks as well, you might understand why. We have just returned from a week in Nicosia, the capital and largest city in Cyprus. We were there to work with the teachers, students and parents of Highgate School, an independent school in that city ...

By |2017-02-08T12:22:36+11:00February 1st, 2012|Emotional health, Leadership|2 Comments
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Reflecting on the year that was

For our final post of 2011, I thought it would be good to reflect upon what has been an amazing year for Global Leadership Foundation. Many of you will know that we base the way we work on three guiding principles: self-realisation, collaboration and stewardship. These are good perspectives for reflection too.

By |2017-02-08T12:22:36+11:00December 12th, 2011|Leadership|4 Comments
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How to see disagreement in a whole new light 

There is nothing quite like an industrial relations dispute to highlight one of the main points we like to make about emotional health. The Qantas dispute, which I mentioned last time, and which now looks set to be locked in arbitration for some time, is a case in point. Disputes like this – the ones that drag on with neither side able to budge – are good examples of ‘either…or’ thinking. In this case, without knowing the details, there is a strong suggestion that both sides are seeing the outcome as ‘either we win or they win’. It doesn’t need to be that way.

By |2017-02-08T12:22:37+11:00November 28th, 2011|Emotional health|2 Comments
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