Built on difference
While Penny was growing up in Southland, heading to university in Otago, Adam was growing up in Zimbabwe, arriving here in New Zealand aged 18. Now over twenty years, later they still remain each other's favourite practitioner to work with.
We came to this work from genuinely different places: Penny from law, accounting, private sector consulting to complex policy work across government; Adam from private sector banking, management, strategy, and leading teams of over 100 people gave him a deepening curiosity about what actually moves people.
Ten years of running a practice together changes things though and now the learning has gone in both directions enabling this work to both of us to hold the full palette.
What that looks like in practice is our clients experiencing evidence and wisdom together. Strategic rigour inside of embodied presence. Structure that creates spontaneity. The analytical and the animate. Most practices choose one side or the other. Creative Leadership does not. That tension is where we are brave enough to dive into and honestly, it's where the most useful work happens.
The leaders who work with Creative Leadership consistently say the same thing: something shifted. Not because they learned a model. Because something changed in how they see themselves and how they show up.
Adam
Adam was born in Zimbabwe and after arriving here New Zealand started in banking at NBNZ which lead to a career in management and strategy. He made the big step of shifting into a Masters at Otago which in turn became the genesis of moving towards answering deeper questions of what shifts people, and how do we create the conditions for it?
He is co-founder of Ruku Ao, a collaborative initiative bringing together government agencies, the arts and community organisations, and a finalist in the New Zealand Innovation Awards in 2016. A past attendee was quote recently as saying " at the time I don't think I really understood it, but now 10 years later I still refer to it".
His training in psychodrama, embodied and somatic leadership through the Strozzi Institute sits alongside his coaching certifications and years as a public engagement practitioner.
His passion comes alive though when he can get people out into the outdoors and he's a trusted facilitator for many of Outward Bound NZ's professional programmes. He is a regular facilitator for LDC Leadership in Practice and New Leaders programmes.
In a room, he works with what is alive. The undercurrents, the things people are sensing but not saying. The dynamic that has been running the meeting before anyone called it to order. He knows how to bring those things into the open and how to hold a group through what it finds. He keeps going further in his practice. His clients notice.
Penny
Penny trained as a lawyer and qualified as a chartered accountant. Years at EY followed, then complex policy work across government. Then a deliberate move toward the work that actually held her attention: how leaders think, make decisions, and whether they can sustain themselves through it all.
That earlier career is still present in the work. The strategic precision. The ability to read what an organisation is actually doing, not just what it says it is doing. The instinct for what will hold up in practice rather than on paper.
But so is the other side. Penny works in systemic constellations, breathwork, and somatic approaches to leadership. She holds qualifications as a PreKure Health Coach, an accredited Menopause Coach and achieved Chartered Member (CMInstD) status with Institute of Directors (NZ). These are not additions to the main work. they are part of the same view: that how a leader is as a person is inseparable from how they are leading which in turn is inseparable from the environment they are in.
She works with leaders at significant moments at a level most practitioners don't reach. She's interested in what's underneath: the pattern that's been running for years, the belief that was useful once and isn't anymore, the thing a person knows about themselves but hasn't said out loud yet. She has a capacity to bring people back to themselves to help them locate what they actually think, want, and are capable of, when the noise of a demanding role has made that hard to hear.
How we work
We aren't really big fans of working from a curriculum and we are really bad at working from a model chosen before we even met you. That just isn't our vibe. Instead when you work with us, we like to talk with you and figure out together. We don't tell you your context, we wait for you to tell it to us in your words. Letting you name the pressures you are feeling, the dynamics running underneath the surface and giving space to the questions that haven't even been spoken out loud yet.
We hold things most practices keep separate. A strategy offsite might move between a rigorous stakeholder analysis, a direct conversation about what's actually fracturing trust at the executive level and end with time to sit and breath under a tree. A coaching engagement might start with a leadership diagnostic, find its way into how someone is sleeping, what they're avoiding, or the question they haven't said out loud yet.
We don't treat those as separate conversations. They're the same one, held with enough range to move between them.
Twenty years in, we're both more curious than we were at the start. About leadership, human behaviour and what makes development stick. Our clients don't get what we knew a decade ago. They get what we know now and that is a cool thing and yes we take cheeky selfies before we start facilitations to send to our kids (if you have read this far down the page, you deserve to know that yes we have been married for over 20 years, are parents to three young adults daughters and been running this business for most of that time!)
Depending on your need, we will also call upon or recommend some of our amazing associates. You can read more about them here.