Grow Leaders. Build Communities.
Helping farm leaders understand why their leadership isn't landing and what to do next
Important Questions
Why do team conflicts often resurface repeatedly?
Because the root causes, like underlying perceptions and context, aren’t fully understood or addressed.
Is generic training enough to fix issues?
Training programmes help, but without shifting perceptions and behaviours, problems often persist or return.
How do language barriers affect leadership?
Communication breakdowns across multilingual teams often create misunderstandings that can erode trust and authority. Language is more than words and sounds. It embodies culture.
What happens when leaders lose their team's trust?
In short? Decreased productivity, disengagement, high turnover, and cultural breakdown. They ultimately struggle to influence and guide their teams effectively, and the organisation pays the price.
How can leadership challenges be truly resolved?
By focusing on changing perceptions, behaviour, and organisational culture (context), not just skills or instructions. If you upskill a toxic worker, you just end up with a skilled toxic worker.
When leadership doesn’t land, it’s often not about skill — it’s about relationships, how people experience leadership, and the context they’re working in.
Leadership improves when four things become clear:
1. What’s really happening
Most leadership challenges come from unseen patterns rather than obvious events.
Before anything can improve, leaders need a clear view of what is actually driving the behaviour they’re seeing — not assumptions, not blame, but the real dynamics beneath the surface.
Clarity here often reveals that the problem is different (and more solvable) than it first appeared.
2. What the leader is trying to achieve
Every leader has an intention: clarity, performance, respect, stability, direction.
But teams experience leadership through impact, not intention.
Many problems emerge simply because what the leader meant and what the team heard are not the same.
Understanding this gap is often the turning point.
3. How the situation is experienced by others
People don’t respond to instructions — they respond to how they experience the person giving them.
And that experience is shaped by language, culture, hierarchy, history, and trust.
When leaders understand how their teams interpret their actions, tone, expectations, and decisions, new options for influence and connection open up.
4. What small, practical shifts will actually make a difference
Leadership improves through behaviour, not theory.
Once the real dynamics are clear, the next step is identifying small, practical adjustments that change how leadership is received.
One or two targeted shifts, in communication, timing, clarity, or presence, often create disproportionate improvements.
How We Begin
Leadership challenges often don’t need more expensive programmes or generic training. They need clarity. Here are three simple ways to start:
Leadership Reality Checklist
Access a short checklist and reflection guide to help you understand where your leadership approach may not be landing as intended.
Online Diagnostic Tool
For a deeper assessment, use our AI-assisted self-diagnostic tool, which highlights patterns, perception gaps, and potential friction points.
A helpful step before a conversation.
A focused in-person discussion of your situation and your diagnostic results.
We explore what’s really happening and whether an on-site visit or short intervention makes sense.
Diagnostic Conversation
What past clients say
"Being a manager, you are faced with different walks of life and personality types in your team. Gideon gave us the tools to lead this diverse personal group and get them to buy into our strategy. Approaching and leading everyone in my team accordingly as individuals. Times have changed, and we as leaders can’t expect the same result as what was accepted years back. Gideon had a positive impact on our new way of leading.”
Danie Swanepoel, Afgri Vredendal
“Ek het Gideon Hanekom ontmoet met n sessie aangebied tydens n Bestuurvergadering. Gideon het n gemaklike, dog doelgerigte en interaktiewe benadering tot die onderwerp van bespreking. My ervaring was dat Gideon weet waarvan hy praat en uit ondervinding kon deel. Terug op kantoor kon ek dadelik die beginsels begin toepas wat bespreek was. Hy was goed voorberei en ek sal hom verseker aanbeveel."
Thys Bester, Afgri Piketberg
I have worked with leaders, teams, and organisations across community, organisational, and high-performance environments. My current focus is on leadership challenges in agriculture and multicultural workplaces in the Western Cape.
Helpful insights from the field
Reflections on organisational psychology theory, models, leadership, communication, culture, motivation, and more from and for real working environments.