About CoLEAD
Connect. Collaborate. Cultivate
CoLEAD is a collective leadership and systems practice grounded in the belief that lasting impact is rarely created by one person, organisation or idea.
How we work is in our name
Connect.
Collaborate
We create connections between people, ideas, knowledge and opportunities.
Often the capability to make progress already exists. We bring it together differently, making relationships visible, connecting across boundaries and creating space for different perspectives to shape what happens next.
We work with people, not simply for them. Collaboration means sharing thinking, learning and responsibility, rather than arriving with pre-determined answers..
We create the conditions for people with different experiences, expertise and perspectives to work through complexity together and develop approaches grounded in their context.
Cultivate
We focus on what needs to be strengthened for impact to grow and endure. That might be relationships, leadership, capability, ways of working or the wider conditions surrounding them.
Rather than creating dependence on CoLEAD, our aim is to strengthen what people and communities can continue to build from.
Collective by design
Different challenges need different people, perspectives and forms of knowledge.
We draw on a trusted network of practitioners, researchers, specialists and collaborators, bringing together the capability that makes sense for the work.
Sometimes we lead. Sometimes we contribute. Sometimes our most useful role is creating the connections that allow others to lead.
What matters is having the right people around the table and working in ways that strengthen, rather than replace, the capability that already exists.
Anna Hayward
CoLEAD grew from the way I've found myself working over many years, connecting people and ideas, asking questions, making sense of complexity and helping create the conditions for people to move something forward together.
My work has taken me across organisations, communities, iwi and government, often in spaces where there isn't an obvious answer or a ready-made solution. I'm most interested in what becomes possible when the right people, perspectives and conditions come together.
As Tangata Tiriti, Anna is committed to continually examining what responsible practice looks like within Te Tiriti relationships, particularly when working alongside tangata whenua and within Indigenous-led contexts.Her professional practice increasingly intersects with research and scholarship.
Through doctoral research, Anna is exploring Tangata Tiriti praxis and the relational, institutional and leadership conditions that shape tangata whenua authority within Indigenous-led systems transformation.
Learning is part of the work
CoLEAD is deliberately a practice that continues to learn.
The questions that emerge through our work inform what we read, research and explore.
In turn, that learning changes how we practice.
We share some of that thinking, alongside the ideas, research and work of others that influence us, because knowledge becomes more useful
when it is part of a wider conversation.
Connect. Collaborate. Cultivate.
Strengthening the conditions for lasting impact.