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Facilitated by internationally recognised leadership experts from the highly regarded team at Cultivating Leadership, this part of our Leadership Masterclass Series captures the heart of what Best Places to Work™ and Cultivating Leadership are all about: growing leadership from the inside out.

Together, the masterclasses offer a deep, human-centred approach to leadership development - helping you align your internal capability with the evolving demands of today’s world. You’ll walk away with greater clarity, confidence, and connection - and the ability to lead with real impact. And that’s exactly what it takes to shape and sustain New Zealand’s Best Places to Work™.

Building on ‘The inner work of purposeful leadership’, Part Two of our Leadership Masterclass series turns outwards, towards leading others, shaping culture, and influencing beyond your own team - across departments, partnerships, and wider workplace systems.

Today, leaders face constant change, competing priorities, and growing complexity. Traditional leadership approaches often fall short or are unhelpful in environments that are uncertain and demand agility and connection.

This Leading Others Masterclass helps you build the confidence and clarity to lead in these conditions. Whether you’re shaping a culture of innovation, managing competing priorities, guiding a team through change, or trying to make progress when the way forward isn’t clear, this session gives you the tools to lead effectively.

Why attend?

Guide your team through uncertainty with greater clarity and confidence.
Empower innovation and collaboration by integrating diverse perspectives.
Strengthen your ability to influence and shape human dynamics across teams and contexts.
Enhance resilience and responsiveness when leading through crisis or change.
Build confidence in working with tension, polarities, and competing priorities.
Expand your capacity to see the bigger picture and take leadership action that reflects it.

What you’ll learn:

Tools and practices to distinguish between complexity and complicated challenges for better decision-making in an unpredictable world.
Strategies to enable a culture of innovation through experimentation and continuous learning.
Insight into the workplace culture needed for teams to perform well together, not just once but over time.

Facilitators

Facilitated by internationally respected leadership experts, the day is led by the Cultivating Leadership team - known for their deep, human approach to growing leaders in complexity.

Leanne Holdsworth

Leanne stands for a future where it is normal for work environments to be places where human beings thrive, enabling organisations to succeed whilst at the same time, building social capital through how those humans are able to show up with their families and communities.

She is the co-author of Human Work: Five Leadership Mindsets for Humanising workplaces and author of the book A New Generation of Business Leaders and has spent 15 years advising organisations predominantly in the private sector (across most sectors including banking, primary sector, FMCG, tech, pharmaceuticals) as well as the public and not for profit sectors in sustainability strategy and leadership.

Geoff Harrison

Geoff believes that leadership is both learned and co-created, and that the conditions necessary for leadership to emerge can be actively cultivated. He feels that in our increasingly complex world, the leadership patterns and behaviours that brought success today will need to evolve to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Using experiential and action learning techniques, Geoff helps leaders develop the self-awareness and interpersonal skills necessary for leading high performance teams, those with the capacity to grow and thrive while operating under conditions of complexity, risk, and uncertainty.

Geoff has over 15 years’ experience helping individuals and organisations identify and re-frame issues that can derail effective team performance. He specialises in designing and delivering innovative developmental learning experiences and has had the opportunity to work with leaders in a variety of venues ranging from boardrooms to snowy mountaintops.

Speakers

Heather Polaschek

Heather is a People & Culture leader at RUSH, known for driving inclusive change, developing strong leaders, and embedding sustainable DEI frameworks. With 15+ years' experience across multiple industries, she brings deep expertise in leadership development, change management, and team performance. Heather also leads RUSH’s Managed Services function, combining her strengths in people strategy and operational delivery to build trusted client relationships and high-performing teams.