A Development Programme for Emerging Leaders
Middle managers have faced the same challenge for decades – it’s not about them, it’s about the process and the dynamic of organisational growth and change. The skills that earned their promotions won’t get them where you need them to go. Technical excellence is no longer enough. The work now is leading others, shaping context, influencing without authority, thinking strategically while executing tactically.
Most development programmes respond with competency frameworks and skill-building workshops. These have their place. But they miss something essential: leadership is not primarily a set of techniques. It is a way of being—of seeing situations, understanding oneself and others, holding complexity without being paralysed by it.
Evolving Your Leadership takes a different approach.
The Method
The programme combines text-based seminar dialogue with individual coaching over six months. Participants read primary texts before each session—not summaries, but the works themselves: Rumelt on strategy, Achebe on leadership and storytelling, Wangari Maathai on persistence and systems change, Ben Okri on imagination, Drucker on effectiveness.
The seminars are facilitated inquiry, not lecture. Participants wrestle with ideas together, articulate positions and have them challenged, discover insights through genuine debate. Something else happens in the process: people who have argued over what Erasmus actually did to rebuild the Springboks develop a shared vocabulary that persists long after the programme ends. Three individual coaching sessions translate seminar insights to each leader’s specific context—their demonstrated strengths, limiting patterns, and developmental edges.
The Design
Track One: The Seminar
Eight emerging leaders meet five times for three-hour facilitated sessions. The reading list integrates traditions usually kept separate: business strategy alongside African philosophy, Harvard case studies sharing space with Nobel laureates. Rumelt and Okri. The Springboks’ transformation and Capitec’s disruption. Toni Morrison and Peter Drucker.
Track Two: Individual Coaching
Three 90-minute coaching sessions distributed across the programme. We map the conditions under which each leader operates at their best. We identify limiting patterns. We translate insight into concrete action with specific commitments and timelines.
What Changes
They think differently. Exposure to diverse frameworks breaks habitual patterns. Leaders start asking different questions, seeing situations through multiple lenses.
They know themselves better. The coaching surfaces where they excel and what limits them—foundation for deliberate rather than accidental development.
They see each other differently. When people meet as learners grappling with hard questions rather than as functions defending positions, something shifts. These discoveries persist.
They become learners. Participants discover a habit of reading and reflection that compounds over time.
They operate with greater agency. The central insight: when you step in with intention, you create results.
The Investment
Five seminars (3 hours each) + three individual coaching sessions (90 minutes each) over six months. Cohort size: 8 participants. R55,000 per person (ex VAT).
Can be run within a single division or across divisions to accelerate silo-busting and culture creation.
Why This Programme
Evolving Your Leadership complements formal training programmes and business school learning by integrating cross-domain thinking with individual coaching, seminar dialogue that builds shared vocabulary across a cohort, and a reading list that places Rumelt alongside Achebe, the Springboks alongside Capitec, Drucker alongside Okri.
The leaders in your organisation today will shape it tomorrow. This programme prepares them for that responsibility.
“Karl has been instrumental to my growth and maturing as a professional, person and leader. His deep listening, searching questions, personal curiosity and deep belief in the grandness and potential of humanity, businesses and the individual has shaped and served me tremendously.
– Gillian Barlow, CFO
He has helped me define with clarity and surety what I bring to the table, how to serve the businesses I lead with what I bring, and providing me with tools and wisdom to navigate and tackle the complexity and problems the world of work brings.
He has navigated me and a previous executive team through a tumultuous change management process and walked me through personal professional coaching.
He is my go-to when I am in need of strategy, leadership and business development or professionally a little lost and need of help deciphering where to from here. It is such a comfort to me knowing that he is a call away.
He will become your partner in crime, ally and greatest supporter. I strongly recommend this man, his work and his way”