Explore the Harvard-researched Leadership Maturity Framework to identify your growth edge and unlock your next stage of development, influence, and impact.
An immersive leadership experience for city leaders, changemakers, and ecosystem builders.
Come as our guest. Attend the full experience without paying anything up front. There is no financial risk in attending.
At the close of the program, sit honestly with what you received. If something shifted, if new awareness opened, if you leave with something you can actually use, we warmly invite you to honour that with a financial expression.
The value of each day is £899. What you give is entirely at your discretion: the full amount, a portion of it, or nothing at all. All are received with the same openness.
If the experience did not serve you, we are grateful you came, and the experience is our gift, freely given.
The Leadership Maturity© Profile is a sentence-completion assessment that maps the developmental stage from which you are currently leading, giving you a precise and personal lens that makes everything you encounter in the program directly and meaningfully your own.
It is delivered via the LeadershipMaturity.ai platform at EUR 120, paid separately.
If you are attending Day One, completing the profile is entirely your choice. The day holds its full value with or without it. What it adds is intimacy, the ability to meet every concept, every conversation, and every moment of recognition not just intellectually, but as a direct reflection of where you are in your own leadership journey. We strongly encourage you to take it in advance of attending. Your results will be shared with your facilitator, who will in turn share them with you, so that you are both working with this living information together as the day unfolds.
If you are attending both days, the profile becomes essential, not as a condition, but because Day Two is built around it. The work of the second day moves into deeply personal territory: how you relate to the people around you, how you build and lead your teams, how you engage with colleagues, clients, and communities, and where your natural edges and growing edges lie in working with others. It invites you to understand your own leadership maturity not in isolation, but in relationship, to the people you lead, the systems you are part of, and the complexity you are being asked to navigate. Without knowing where you are standing, that work cannot reach you in the way it is designed to. The profile is the foundation it is built on.
And if, at the close of the program, this work feels deeply meaningful to you, if you find yourself wanting to go further, you are warmly invited to book a one-on-one coaching session with one of our lead facilitators. In that space, the insights from your profile and your experience of the two days can be brought into direct relationship with your own leadership context: the real teams, the real tensions, the real decisions that await you. A practical, personal, and supported next step for those who are ready to take the work all the way home.
Why do two mayors look at the same city and see completely different problems?
How does the stage from which I lead shape every decision I make?
What becomes visible to me when I grow into the next stage?
We help you bring that intentionality. While most leadership programs give you more tools, this one focuses on developing you, the person using them. It works at the level of meaning-making itself: the worldview from which you act.
Grounded in Dr Susanne Cook-Greuter's Leadership Maturity Framework, developed through decades of research at Harvard, the training treats the way you make meaning as something that shapes every decision you take, and as something that can grow.
The way you make meaning shapes who you see as a stakeholder, what you count as a problem worth solving, and which futures you can even imagine.
This is vertical development: nurturing a genuinely deeper foundation to lead from, because leaders at more mature stages navigate complexity with greater ease, engage stakeholders more effectively, and create more lasting, sustainable change.
Day One is a complete experience in itself. You will leave with a new and personal lens on your own leadership, a deeper understanding of how developmental maturity shapes the way leaders see, decide, and relate, and a concrete commitment to carry meaningfully back into your work. Day Two is an invitation to go deeper: for those who feel called to continue, it takes everything opened on the first day into deeper, more personal territory, working directly with who you are in relation to the people, teams, and systems you lead. Come for one day, or stay for both. Either delivers a complete experience on its own.
“The city is not out there. The city is us.”
Dr Paddy Pampallis · Co-Founder, Global Mayors Academy
You will be among city leaders and changemakers drawn from a community of 130+ co-founders across 50+ countries, all working at this depth.
Facilitated by Dr Paddy Pampallis, Lev Gordon, Ferial Puren, and Dr Robert Fischer. All times shown are Swiss local time (Central European Time).
“What does the world look like from where I am standing, and what becomes visible when I move?”
This question opens the program, and returns at the close of every half-day.
“How consciousness shapes the decisions that shape our cities.”
Paddy holds one of the world's first doctorates in executive coaching and is the co-architect of the Global Mayors Academy's City Leaders Program, shaping its developmental design alongside Ferial Puren. As Africa Partner to Dr Susanne Cook-Greuter Associates, the Harvard-based pioneers of the Leadership Maturity Framework, she brings over two decades of applied expertise in vertical leadership development to her work with city leaders. She serves as faculty at Meridian University, the University of Cape Town, and the Da Vinci Institute, sits on the Accrediting Board of the World Association of Business Coaches, and is a Senior Supervisor at the Global Team Coaching Institute. Through her Integral+™ model and Ubuntu Coaching Foundation, she supports leaders to move from transactional modes of leadership into genuinely transformational presence, cultivating the depth of awareness that complex city systems require. Her work rests on a conviction at the heart of GMA: that the quality of our cities emerges from the maturity of the consciousness shaping them.
“Cultivating the response-ability to lead in service of life.”
With 25 years of experience at the intersection of regenerative city transformation, leadership development, and whole-system change, Ferial co-architects the Global Mayors Academy's City Leaders Program alongside Dr Paddy Pampallis, developing leaders across every dimension: personal, relational, and systemic. A Harvard Business School alumna with a foundational background in architecture and design, her deep investment in her own personal development has woven these disciplines into a multidimensional intelligence that serves to cultivate the conditions in which individuals, and the cities they serve, can truly thrive. She co-founded Living Cities Earth as an action-research ecosystem, now convening 130+ co-founders including systems thinkers, city builders, policymakers, and transformational leaders, from which the Global Mayors Academy was born. She describes her approach as entangled development: the understanding that personal transformation, systems redesign, and ecological regeneration are inseparable. In her work, she supports leaders to cultivate the inner environments required to shape the outer conditions where people, communities, and cities can genuinely flourish, guided by a single compelling question: how do we develop leaders capable of meeting this moment in human history, wisely and in service of life?
“Inspiring leaders to co-create cities where life truly thrives.”
Lev brings over 30 years of global experience, spanning more than 35 countries, in business, leadership development, and city transformation. He holds an Executive MBA from Columbia Business School and has completed executive education at Harvard Business School and London Business School. His career includes shaping multi-billion-dollar platforms at ING before dedicating the last decade to supporting city leaders through executive coaching and integral development. At GMA, he holds responsibility for its visionary direction and strategic partnerships, playing a central role in shaping program design and developing the wider ecosystem of city leadership. In his work, he bridges every developmental concept with the lived realities of urban complexity, supporting leaders to connect inner growth with the real-world challenges their cities demand of them. He holds a vision at the centre of everything he does: to inspire and support leaders of positive change to co-create cities where all life can truly thrive.
“The inner life of leaders shapes the outer reality of cities.”
Trained as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Robert brings decades of clinical and developmental experience to his work with city leaders. His practice explores how individuals relate to the fundamental dimensions of human existence, identity, meaning, love, responsibility, and mortality, and how these deeper layers of inner life shape the way people perceive, relate, and lead. In his work, he supports leaders to become more conscious of the emotional patterns and personal narratives that quietly drive their decisions and relationships, turning the friction of worldview encounters into developmental insight rather than rupture. He brings this same depth to his role on the strategic management teams of both Living Cities Earth and GMA, ensuring the inner dimension of leadership remains central to the Academy's work. His practice rests on a conviction shared across the GMA faculty: that the most consequential transformation a city can undergo begins not in its systems, but in the awareness of those entrusted to lead it.
Inspired by the work of Dr Susanne Cook-Greuter, pioneer of Ego Development Theory and creator of the Leadership Maturity Framework, Harvard University.
The training takes place in Lichtensteig, a small, historic town in the Toggenburg valley of the Saint Gallen canton, and one of the most remarkable stories of civic renewal in Europe. When the textile industry that had sustained the town for generations moved its production overseas, Lichtensteig lost more than half its population. Shops closed. Streets emptied. What remained was a fraction of a community and a question: what do you do when the world your city was built around no longer exists?
What happened next is why we chose to host this training here. Under the leadership of Matthias Müller, the town's President and our host for these two days, the people of Lichtensteig chose to answer that question together. Today, almost every citizen is either leading or actively participating in a local development project. The population has returned to what it was at its peak. The town is alive, not with what it used to be, but with something it chose to become.
We will gather in the former factory at the heart of that story, now transformed into a vibrant space for co-working, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Matthias Müller and his administrative team will join us in the program, not as observers, but as participants: a leadership team already walking the path of transformation, demonstrating their continued investment in their own development as a vital part of the future of the town. The setting, and the people in it, are part of the learning, a rare opportunity to be surrounded by radical transformation in action, across every dimension of these two days.
