This page isn't a pitch — it's the thinking behind how Howorth Francis approaches leadership coaching and organizational change. The whole of what we do, and why the change tends to last.
Most leadership coaching and training programs work at the level of what people can put into words — the framework on the slide, the values everyone can recite by Friday and no one's using by the following Thursday. That's the easy part.
The part that actually decides how a leader performs and how a team works together sits underneath it: the gut read on a room, the call that turns out right before you could explain why, the moment a team just clicks. Process-Oriented Leadership works at that level. It's the whole of what we do, and it's why the change tends to last.
Cognitive scientists estimate that most of our thinking — on the order of 95% — runs below conscious awareness. It isn't idle. It's already doing the heavy lifting behind every intuition, every moment of flow, every time you read a person correctly without quite knowing how. Most leadership development never reaches it. We train the rest.
Cognitive science and Eugene Gendlin's work on how people actually change — the basis of Focusing, which Charlotte taught for over a decade. Read more on the 95% →
A leader who can facilitate, not just manage — who reads what a team needs and draws it out, rather than pushing from the top. Our approach develops the whole range of a leader's intelligence: not only IQ and emotional intelligence, but the somatic, gut-level read that good decisions actually run on.
It's the "leader as coach" model that Harvard Business Review has pointed to as the one that fits how companies work now. Other models name these as nice-to-have qualities and leave you there. The difference here is a structured way to actually build them — in a leader, and then through a team. Here's the thinking underneath that.
"Process-oriented" started as a way of describing how real change actually happens: not a single fix, but a sequence — work a problem through its stages, generate a solution, and you have something you can repeat. A process.
It draws on the work of the late Eugene Gendlin, a University of Chicago psychologist whose Process Model — closely related to what cognitive scientists now call embodied cognition — treats a person, and a team, as a living, moving thing rather than a fixed set of inputs and outputs.
That matters in practice: people behave differently in different contexts, so you can't develop a leader, or a team, by working on one piece in isolation. You work with the whole of them, and the environment they're in.
Command-and-control has run out of road. In a market that changes this fast, a culture built on orders from the top can't keep up — it can't take in what it needs to and respond in time.
What replaces it is leaders who facilitate rather than manage: who listen well, ask the questions that open something up, and build on what their people are already good at. None of that is innate or out of reach — emotional intelligence, real listening, better questions, drawing out strengths can all be taught.
Change usually starts with the leaders, because that's where it moves fastest, and works its way out through the teams from there.
Before any of that can move, though, a team has to be able to say what's actually happening. Where it helps, we begin with an anonymous team assessment — Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team model — as a way of getting the truth onto the table. Charlotte on why that's only the beginning →
Six qualities a leader needs to build a self-motivated team.
Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory found people are intrinsically motivated when three things are present — autonomy, competence, and connection. What underpins all three is choice.
Other models list qualities like these as aspirations and stop there. What's different here is a structured way to build them, and then carry them through a team.
Boston Consulting Group found that 85% of companies attempted a major organizational transformation in the past decade, and about 75% of them failed to improve performance. The reason most fail is that companies run change as a results exercise — set the target, push for it — when culture only moves through a process. Work with the human resistance that sits above and below awareness, and change holds instead of snapping back.
People give more when their work connects to something they care about — a career, a community, a cause. The leaders who get that out of a team are the ones who take the time to connect the day-to-day role to why it matters, so the work stops feeling like a cog turning in a machine.
Part of our approach is helping people find where their own sense of purpose and the organization's actually overlap, and lead from there. It's the difference between compliance and energy.
Most leadership training works at the level of what people can put into words — the framework on the slide, the values everyone can recite by Friday and no one's using by the following Thursday. Process-Oriented Leadership works underneath that: the gut read on a room, the call that turns out right before you could explain why. It starts from a conviction that everyone has the natural capacity to solve problems and make good decisions, and that leaders get stuck on inner roadblocks. Our model brings those capacities back online — with a deliberate, step-by-step method for reaching intuition, so a leader doesn't have to wait for it to arrive by chance — and supports a genuine developmental shift, so they lead from a more evolved place.
Conventional programs name qualities like listening, humility, and courage as aspirations and leave you there. The difference here is a structured way to build them — first in a leader, then through a team. It also treats change as a process rather than a fix: work a problem through its stages and you have something you can repeat, rather than a framework that fades.
Cognitive scientists estimate that most of our thinking — on the order of 95% — runs below conscious awareness. It isn't idle. It's already doing the heavy lifting behind every decision, every new idea, every moment of flow, every time you read a person or situation correctly without quite knowing how. Most leadership development never reaches it. That's where we work. The approach draws on cognitive science and the late Eugene Gendlin's research on how people actually change.
Communication, Humility, Ownership, Integrity, Courage with compassion, and Embodiment — six qualities a leader needs to build a self-motivated team. The name isn't incidental: Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory found that people are intrinsically motivated when three things are present — autonomy, competence, and connection — and what underpins all three is choice.
If any of this speaks to what you're navigating, talk it through with the assistant in the corner — it can take you from here to a conversation with Charlotte and Rod whenever you're ready.
