Transformative Leadership
how to lead ourselves and our organisations through strategic conversations that matter
“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”
T.S. Eliot“What got you here won’t get you there.”
Marshall Goldsmith
The heart of transformational leadership is becoming a leader in a new way of working, leading sustainable change and innovation. It is about seeing and acting from a new perspective and is much about unlearning what no longer serves us, as it is about learning new ways. We keep and nourish the core values and traditions with an organisation, while giving up fears and limiting beliefs that prevent us from seeing where transformation needs to happen and growing beyond where we are now.
Transformational leaders actually do what others only speak about. This is a path of authenticity which requires us to change ourselves in order to change the organisation or system we belong to. Transformational leaders step outside of rigid hierarchical structures to cultivate and support participatory leadership, releasing the fear of giving up control and allowing others to step into leadership and something new to emerge.
Transformational leaders work with purpose, openness, curiosity and a passion for creative process. They make room for organic co-creation, while recognising the deep roots of an organisation, collaborative process or event. Any event, workshop, team coaching or intervention needs to be viewed from the larger lens of past, present, and future.
The events, processes and team trainings that I host allow for cross-disciplinary connections beyond silos. This is achieved by transforming the spaces where we gather, creating the conditions for new ways of relating. Together we take a transformational approach to every step of event production – from invitations, to venues, to participant interactions and feedback. By levelling and opening the field we create space for leadership to emerge from unobvious places.
Organisations often struggle to innovate within rigid or overly complicated structures that are serving out-dated purposes. Transformational leadership finds the elegant simplicity that can hold the complexity that is present when we gather in groups for collaborative work. Formats can be remarkably simple, but hold deep power and potential to bring about sustainable shifts. Processes animated by transformative leadership can create breathtaking results.
Transformational leadership is as much an internal practice as an external one. We begin with personal leadership, then come into co creation with others to finally together listen to the future that truly emerges. A degree of inner transformation must be present in order for the outer transformation to take place.
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Franco Accordino
Dedicated mentor and coach, helped me discovering new ways to engage with stakeholders and make sense of their collective intelligence. She masters numerous techniques to harness knowledge, from art of brainstorming to mind mapping, and combines them into the right mix of tools to make conversations meaningful and enjoyable. If you want to design a complex process to achieve a policy or business purpose, shared or personal, Ursula is the right person to ask for!
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Simon V. Mathis
Ursula is an extraordinary leadership trainer and mentor. I have had the pleasure to learn from and work with Ursula in a professional and personal context for almost a decade. Under her mentorship, I learned how create the conditions for meaningful dialogue in teams and have seen such “hosted” conversations catalyse positive change in business and academia. Over the years, I have seen Ursula transform teams from diverse backgrounds spanning public policy to industry through the principles of meaningful dialogue.
I regularly apply the principles I learned from Ursula in my professional life and saw them enable effective co-creation in the board room, when I worked as management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, and more recently in research and teaching at the University of Cambridge.
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Jürgen Schneider
The Efficiency Act affects many different stakeholder groups and we had great respect for the evaluation of this controversial law. In the course of many workshops and discussion rounds with the support of Ms. Hillbrand, it was possible to work out the core problems and identify concrete needs for change. At the end of the process, not all interest groups were of the same opinion, but solutions could be identified to balance interests.
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Franco Accordino
Dedicated mentor and coach, helped me discovering new ways to engage with stakeholders and make sense of their collective intelligence. She masters numerous techniques to harness knowledge, from art of brainstorming to mind mapping, and combines them into the right mix of tools to make conversations meaningful and enjoyable. If you want to design a complex process to achieve a policy or business purpose, shared or personal, Ursula is the right person to ask for!
