Leadership Principles
Bringing Simplicity to Leadership Development

A notable development in the leadership training sector is the growing preference for people-centric models against the traditional leadership command and control style. Gordon Tredgold, the visionary founder of Leadership Principles, affirms these notions and helps good managers develop into great leaders.

Tredgold’s experience in guiding global teams led him to discover that the core principles of leadership remain consistent across cultures. These involve providing clarity and space for employees to excel, offering support whenever necessary and acknowledging a job well done. Tredgold’s training methodology is built around these same principles, where he motivates leaders to guide their teams and enable them to achieve an organisation’s goals and objectives in a timely and effective manner.

“I emphasise four key areas in my leadership training, including leading oneself, teams, initiatives, and shaping organisational culture,” adds Tredgold. These encompass essential leadership aspects, from understanding a leader’s influence and style to effectively delivering results and nurturing a sustainable organisational culture.

‘Leading self’ entails understanding various leadership styles and essential qualities that influence and motivate individuals. The focus of the training subsequently transitions to ‘leading teams,’ delving into the effective use of emotional intelligence to establish strong team connections. The third area explores effective strategies for managing initiatives, projects and departments.

The training also prioritises organisational culture, as Tredgold regards it as the guiding force that enables each individual to perform well without external leadership. Tredgold assists clients in fostering a high-performance culture by offering his distinctive ‘High Performance Leadership Masterclass,’ centred on four key FAST principles—focus, accountability, simplicity and transparency. These elements play a pivotal role in determining the success of an organisation’s initiatives.
When a team lack focus, they tend to divert their attention from the primary objective to potentially conflicting pursuits. Similarly, a lack of accountability caused by employee’s unclear roles and responsibilities, as well as insufficient tools, can impede their effectiveness. The idea of simplicity emphasises creating a deep understanding of the problem and then solving predicaments in a straightforward manner. In accordance with the transparency principle, team members are thoroughly briefed on the significance of a project, ensuring adequate time is provided, developing a feedback system and implementing mechanisms for monitoring and assessing progress.

Tredgold has extended his expertise to several organisations and individuals, all of whom have benefited from his leadership training services, especially through his ‘FAST’ approach. In one noteworthy instance, he assisted a client who was grappling with customer disruption caused by defects in their IT systems. The client established protocol for employees facing IT system issues, which involved raising tickets to prompt the appropriate personnel to address and resolve the problem.

However, it was discovered that despite a copious number of reports, delays in resolving IT problems occurred due to the shortage of employees to interpret them. For that reason, Tredgold initiated monthly meetings to review these reports, intending to hold employees accountable for their work. Before Tredgold’s intervention, the responsibility of reading the reports rested solely on one department member. Now, the task is distributed among multiple teams, enabling them to gain a deeper understanding of issues, take ownership and proactively resolve the issues. As a result, the monthly ticket count was reduced from 700 to 500, and the average resolution time decreased from 50 hours to 19 hours, for an overall reduction in disruption to customer of 75 per cent.

Leadership Principles has established itself as a dependable ally to businesses owing to the exemplary expertise and unconventional approach of its founder, Gordon Tredgold. His simplistic approach, enriched with pertinent examples and real-life references, has transformed leadership development, propelling numerous individuals toward their coveted goal of effective leadership.