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COACHING INDUSTRY INSIGHTS EVENT
The Leadership Equation: Coaching What Leaders Can’t Yet See

A new way to connect Identity, Presence, Impact, Context and Spark — and help awareness survive the live leadership moment.

What if the challenge in leadership development isn’t that leaders don’t know enough — but that, under pressure, they can’t always see what is shaping how they lead?

Over years of coaching leaders, Mike Hutchins kept seeing the same pattern. Smart, capable people could reflect brilliantly after the fact, yet find themselves repeating familiar behaviors when complexity, uncertainty and pressure returned. The very qualities that had helped them succeed — expertise, decisiveness, care, control — could begin to limit them, often without the leader realizing it in the moment.

That question became the starting point for The Leadership Equation, a new framework for understanding how leadership performance actually emerges.

On November 4 at 12 PM join us for a highly interactive 45-minute session, Mike will share the thinking behind his forthcoming book and explore five interconnected elements of the Equation: Context, Identity, Presence, Impact and Spark. Rather than treating leadership as a collection of competencies, the Equation looks at the whole system: the environment a leader is operating within, who they believe they need to be, how that is felt and expressed, what their leadership actually creates, and the deeper source of meaning and energy underneath it.

For coaches, however, seeing the Equation is only the beginning.

Mike will also introduce ACT — Awareness, Choice and Transformation — and explore one of the central developmental challenges in coaching: helping awareness move from something a client can access with distance and reflection to something that becomes available while leadership is actually happening.

This distinction has practical implications for how we coach. A leader may notice tension without recognizing the pattern behind it. They may understand their Impact after receiving feedback, yet still revert to an old Identity when uncertainty returns. Coaching can help them make those connections, rehearse for the moments that matter, and gradually create more choice in real time.

The session will also offer an early look at how the Leadership Equation is being extended beyond the book: into LEAP, ACT Leadership’s next-generation development program for experienced coaches, and Mirror, an AI-enabled coaching tool designed not to give leaders answers, but to help them practice awareness through the Equation.

Participants will leave with a fresh lens for listening to clients, a practical way to connect patterns that are often treated separately in coaching, and some provocative questions about where human coaching — and leadership development itself — may be heading next.