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Authentic Leadership by Leveraging on Your Strengths

The Problem. Most managers have been taught to lead like someone else. Leadership courses hand every participant the same model of the ideal leader: decisive, charismatic, visionary, composed. Participants dutifully practise the model, and for a while it holds. Then pressure arrives, the borrowed behaviours fall away, and they default to instinct anyway, now with the added burden of feeling they are not "leadership material" because instinct did not match the template. The cost to organisations is real: capable people who hold back, lead hesitantly, or burn energy performing a version of leadership that was never theirs.

Why Current Solutions Fall Short. The market offers two responses, and each solves only half the problem. Competency-based leadership programs teach what good leaders do, but treat leadership as a uniform to be worn rather than a capability to be grown from within, so the learning rarely survives contact with real pressure. Strengths workshops, on the other hand, start in the right place: participants discover their CliftonStrengths profile and experience a genuine moment of self-recognition. But most stop there. Participants return to work with a report and a vocabulary, not a leadership practice. Self-awareness without application changes nothing about how they decide, communicate, or lead a team on Monday morning.

Our Solution. This 2-day program closes the gap between knowing your strengths and leading from them. Using the CliftonStrengths assessment as the starting point, participants convert their dominant talents into a concrete, personal leadership approach: how they make decisions, communicate direction, build trust, manage the blind spots that come with every strength, and get the best from team members whose talents differ sharply from their own. The premise is simple and liberating: the most credible, sustainable, and influential leader you can become is a deliberately developed version of who you already are.

Participants will go through the Clifton StrengthsFinder online to explore unique Top 34 Strengths, get insights reports and action plan included (worth S$80.00)

Objective

By the end of this program, you will be able to:

• Explain your Top 5 CliftonStrengths in plain, workplace-specific language, so that you can articulate the distinct value you bring as a leader without borrowing anyone else's script.
• Translate each of your dominant talents into specific leadership behaviours in how you decide, communicate, and motivate, so that your leadership style is consistent, credible, and sustainable under pressure.
• Identify where each of your strengths can overplay into a blind spot, so that you can manage the risks of your talents before they undermine your leadership.
• Recognise and name the talents of colleagues and team members whose profiles differ from yours, so that you can assign work to natural talent and appreciate contributions unlike your own.
• Build complementary working partnerships around your non-dominant areas, so that gaps are covered through collaboration rather than through pretending to be well-rounded.
• Commit to a written, strengths-based leadership action plan tied to your current role, so that application begins the week you return to work.

Outline

Focus: Why imitating leadership templates fails, and what four decades of Gallup research reveals about the performance returns of building on natural talent instead. Establishes the crucial distinction between a raw talent and a developed strength.
Outcome: Participants can name their Top 5 themes, locate them within the four talent domains, and explain why their profile is leadership raw material rather than a personality label.



Focus: Guided interpretation of each participant's individual CliftonStrengths report, moving from five theme names on a page to a working understanding of how those themes already drive their decisions, communication, and working style, grounded in their own career examples.
Outcome: Participants can give a concrete example from their own work of each Top 5 theme in action.



Focus: Participants revisit their proudest professional moments and trace which talents were doing the work. Patterns emerge, and with them a defensible answer to the question every leader must be able to answer: why should anyone be led by you?
Outcome: Participants can articulate their personal leadership signature, the recurring combination of talents behind their best performance, in under two minutes without notes.



Focus: Every strength, overused or misread, casts a shadow. This module examines how each participant's talent combination can work against them: strengths applied in the wrong dose, the wrong situation, or perceived very differently by others than intended.
Outcome: Participants can identify one blind spot arising from their own combination and one specific strategy for managing it.






Focus: Authentic leaders do not only know themselves; they spot what is naturally right in others. Participants learn to recognise talent themes from observable everyday behaviour, and practise on the live diversity of profiles in the room.
Outcome: Participants can identify the likely dominant talents of a colleague from behavioural cues and name the contribution those talents make.



Focus: The hardest people to lead are those whose natural approach differs most from ours, and they are also the ones a team cannot succeed without. Participants practise adjusting how they communicate, delegate, and give recognition to team members with contrasting profiles, and design complementary partnerships that cover their own non-dominant areas.
Outcome: Participants can name one specific adjustment they will make when working with a real colleague whose profile differs sharply from their own.



Focus: Applying the full two days to a realistic leadership scenario: composing a team around complementary talents, positioning people where their strengths matter most, and using a shared strengths vocabulary to convert friction over working styles into productive collaboration.
Outcome: Participants can map a team's strengths and defend a talent-based division of work for a real or realistic project.



Focus: Individual reflection and structured action planning, translating both days into specific, written commitments tied to each participant's actual role, team, and upcoming work, with peer accountability built in. Closes with open consultation on each participant's real leadership situations.
Outcome: Each participant leaves with a written, dated leadership action plan applying their strengths to a real task, relationship, and team decision.

Who should attend

• Mid-level managers and team leaders who want to lead with greater impact by building on what already works, rather than compensating for what does not.
• Emerging leaders and high-potential talent preparing for their first leadership role, seeking confidence grounded in genuine self-knowledge rather than imitation.
• Experienced leaders and department heads who sense their current leadership style is costing them more energy than it should, and want an approach that is sustainable because it is authentic.
• Professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs who lead without formal authority and must influence through credibility and trust.

No prior leadership training is required. Each participant completes the CliftonStrengths online assessment before the program, and their personalised report becomes their working document across both days.

Methodology

This program is built on the trainer’s unique approach to designing training that produces lasting change rather than a pleasant two days out. Three commitments shape every design decision. First, the entire program is framed around what participants already do well: even the discussion of blind spots is approached as strengths in the wrong dose, never as flaws to be fixed. Second, activities and group work are deliberately structured so the room feels safe for honest self-reflection and candid peer exchange; without that safety, participants observe politely rather than engage genuinely. Third, participants do not merely learn about strengths-based leadership, they practise it: every concept is applied to real colleagues, real teams, and real upcoming work through facilitated exercises, peer coaching, and scenario-based practice, so that application begins inside the room, not after it.

Participants leave with their individual CliftonStrengths report, a personal leadership signature they can articulate, and a written action plan already in motion.

Profile of Coen Tan

CSP, Global Speaker and Coach, Keynote Speaker, Podcast Host, Certified NLP, MBTI and Enneagram

Helping the Voiceless find their True Voice One Story at a Time. Coaching Business Leaders to Inspire and Lead through Magnetic Stories, Host of "The WholeHearted Podcast."

A keynote speaker, high-impact trainer, coach and strategic communications consultant, Coen has spoken to and trained over 42,000 individuals and professionals in Singapore, China, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, U.S.A., Canada, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. His clients come from various sectors, such as Pharmaceuticals, FinTech, Banks, FMCG, Chemicals and Government Organizations, with notable names such as PayPal, American Express, Citibank, Bank of Julius Baer, Siemens Healthineers, Danone, Nestle, Prudential, AIA, AXA, Zurich Insurance, Roche, Merck, AstraZeneca amongst others.

- holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Human Resource Consulting,
- Advanced Certificate in Training and Assessment (ACTA)
- a certified NLP Practitioner
- a certified Enneagram Practitioner
- an accredited MBTI Personality Profiling Practitioner
- a Certified Organization Culture Transformation Practitioner
- achieved the Gold-Distinction Award (Speaking in Public) by the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA).
- a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) by the National Speakers Association (NSA)