Leading Beyond the Role: What I Took Away from the Co-Active Leadership Workshop

By Xavier Roigé, Procurement Manager in the Pharmaceutical Industry and Green Light GO student

In increasingly complex organizational environments, leadership requires more than just decision-making and results-oriented skills. It requires awareness, flexibility and the ability to adapt to the system and to people.

Green Light GO’s Co-Active Leadership Workshop program offers just that development space: an experience designed to expand the way professionals understand and exercise their leadership.

There are formative experiences that add up. And there are others that reorder, not because of what they add, but because of how they change the way you understand your own role.

I have been in environments where leading is part of everyday life for years. Teams, stakeholders, decisions, pressure, results. In the “doing”. In the “resolver”. In the “push”. Co-Active Leadership Workshop does not come to replace that, but to expand the framework. To understand that leading is not just a position or a responsibility. It’s a way of being.

One of the most relevant learnings for me was to understand leadership as a system, not as an individual action. This, which may seem conceptual, has very practical implications. You stop focusing exclusively on what you do as a leader, and you start to observe what happens in the system you form with others.

How you impact.
How you are perceived.
What dynamics are generated beyond your intention.

And, above all, what space are you creating for others to lead as well.

That’s where the CLW program’s 5 dimensions of leadership come in (and why they matter).

One of the axes of the program is to work on leadership from different dimensions: inside, in front (the classic version of leadership), behind, next to and on the field. Beyond the model, what is relevant is what it forces you to do: get out of your usual pattern. In my case, it was especially uncomfortable—and at the same time eye-opening—to explore positions that were less natural for me, such as leading “from the field.” Understand that leading does not always imply setting direction.

Sometimes it involves holding.
Sometimes accompanying.
Sometimes just being.

And that, taken to the day to day, changes many interactions.

What I took with me

Beyond frameworks or concepts, what I really take away from the program are three very specific things:

1. More awareness of how it impacts others
Not so much in what I say or do, but in how I generate it in the system.

2. More flexibility in my leadership style
Being able to choose where to lead from depending on the context, and not just from my natural tendency.

3. More presence
Understand that, in many cases, the quality of leadership is not in the solution… but in the quality of the presence you offer.

In my case, there are three clear changes:

• I’ve stopped intervening so quickly to “solve”
• I pay more attention to team dynamics, not just tasks
• I seek to generate more space for others to assume leadership, without the need to constantly lead

It is not a radical or immediate change. But it is a sustained change. And, above all, more conscious.

If I had to summarize the Co-Active Leadership Workshop in one sentence, it would be this: it is not a program to learn leadership, it is a space to experience it.

And that makes the difference, because what you take away is not just knowledge. It is experience. And the experience, when it is powerful, stays.