Stephen Barden

Dr Stephen Barden (DProf) is a coach-mentor and author specialising in identifying, assessing and developing top level leaders and organizational cultures.

 

He turned to coach-mentoring after 15 years in senior management including  ten years as CEO in the media and technology sectors.

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Developing Partnering Leaders and Cultures

At the individual and team level, we help leaders develop and maintain skills, behaviours and values to ensure the sustainable success of both their organizations and themselves.

Books

how-successful-leaders-do-business-with-their-world

How Successful Leaders Do Business with Their World

By Stephen Barden

In this rigorously researched book, Stephen Barden presents compelling evidence that top leaders learn from a very early age to 'do business with the world' by using their power and authority to partner with it, rather than impose themselves on it. Based on interviews with the military, corporate and educational leaders, How Successful Leaders Do Business with Their World offers powerful insight into how these findings can be applied in practice.

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Consulting

Using the model of the Navigational Stance, we assess candidate leaders to enable potential employers to discover how c-level recruits will use their power once in office.

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Podcast

The Power Of Balance

Let's Talk About Power

We have been sold a myth: that good, successful leaders are fiercely competitive battlers. The aggressive combative leaders we have been taught to admire actually hold a deep seated anxiety that they and their world have a profoundly unbalanced power relationship. That their world is an actual or potential threat. Drawing from his book “How successful leaders do business with their world”, as well as conversations with top leaders, author and coach-mentor Stephen Barden argues that truly successful leaders, those who act on behalf of their entire constituencies, have learned that they and their worlds are partners with a manageable power balance. That their power lies in that balance. 

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Speaking

Stephen Barden is available to speak about :

  1. His book, How Successful leaders do business with their world
  2. His model of The Navigational Stance,
  3. His work and practice
  4. The Myths of Leadership
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Watch Stephen Speak

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Blogs

Tell me

"When you hear someone - or you - talking about who is right, their primary concern is abo ...

Leaders just do the job or Leaders: just do the…

Manage an organization in the interests of any group – shareholder, customer or employee – and you become their agent. Run it on behalf of all stakeholders and you become everybody’s agent – just before you become a gibbering wreck.

“Top Leaders’ Experiences of learning”

If we are to mentor and coach leaders-in-the-world, then we need to understand something of their relationship with the world: not only their perceptions of their capacity to act but also how they arrived at those perceptions.

Trust the Process of the Heart

We worry so much about the future that we fail to manage the present. We build artificial visions of the future and then expect life to match up to them. And when they inevitably don’t, we burden ourselves with disappointment and a sense of failure. We use our heads and our gut – but not our hearts, the most formidable organ of them all.

The Behaviour of Ailing Corporations

How your company behaves to any one section of its stakeholders has a direct impact on its business and outcomes – because it offers the world a window into its soul: its values, priorities, limitations, aspirations and ability to reach its outcomes.

Managing fear

If wishful thinking – in the form of greed – got us into taking excessive risk, then realistic, clear , values based thinking will be needed to get us out.

Remembering a Dismembering World

  Politicians and commentators, particularly those in the center, persist in making the mistake that what is happening in the US, Britain and now spreading

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July 16, 2018 No Comments

Tell me

“When you hear someone – or you – talking about who is right, their primary concern is about power. When they  talk about what is right, then you’re

Read More »
December 27, 2017 No Comments

Leaders just do the job or Leaders: just do the damn job.

Manage an organization in the interests of any group – shareholder, customer or employee – and you become their agent. Run it on behalf of all stakeholders and you become everybody’s agent – just before you become a gibbering wreck.

Read More »
September 16, 2015 No Comments
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