Begin Your Journey
CO-ACTIVE® TRAINING INSTITUTE

Let's create a new language of leadership, together!

For the last 30 years the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI) has been offering the gold-standard in coach training and leadership development for individuals and organizations. Now we are creating a new language of leadership. Let's do this together. 

Humanizing the World of Tech Through Leadership Programs

Humanizing the World of Tech

Phillip Cave

With Phillip Cave

Phillip is a leadership coach and consultant with over 30 years of working with individuals and organizations, from tech start-ups to the Fortune 100. His background in tech leadership, including co-creating and co-leading software start-ups, led him to a consulting role, where he supports new and established tech leaders with leadership and human skills development. He’s the founder of DearHuman.LIFE, an organization with the mission to bring more humanity to the workplace through group and individual learning. Phillip is a Professional Certified Coach, a Certified iEQ9 Enneagram Practitioner, and a Leadership Circle Guide.

We spoke to Phillip about his experience of the Co-Active Leadership Program and his quest to humanize the world of tech.

Why did you join the program?

At the time Phillip was a director in the Starbucks technology team and he was going through coach training with CTI to support in this role. From this coaching perspective, he was already aware of the Co-Active Leadership Program, and he’d also read the Co-Active Leadership book. He’d learned about the five-dimensional model of leadership in the book and found the idea of stepping into different aspects of leadership interesting.

So, when one of his front-of-room leaders took him aside during coach training and suggested he’d benefit from the Leadership Program, he seized the opportunity.

“We’d built up a good rapport over the courses so what she actually said was, ‘You have to get your ass to leadership because you have no idea what your impact is.’ So that was the catalyst for it, at the time not knowing what to expect and having no intention other than to understand my impact in a deeper way.”

“The leadership program has its own way of confronting your identity and getting to the heart and core of who you think you are and helping you remember who you actually are.”

What did you discover in the program?

“What surprised me was the depth we went to. There was no wasting time, even from the first day. They put you into an exercise that confronts you straight away. Boom! That was really about starting at the beginning of the identity of who is this person who calls himself Phil — what is he about?”

Phillip’s experience of the program was one of reconnection and self-discovery. He said it forced him to confront his identity in a way that challenged his long-held beliefs about himself.

“The leadership program has its own way of confronting your identity and getting to the heart and core of who you think you are and helping you remember who you actually are.”

The program is designed to break down the barriers we build around ourselves, cut through the noise, the assumptions, the limiting beliefs, and bring us back into alignment with what’s most important to us. For Phillip, it reminded him of something he’d lost connection with over the course of a busy life and career.

“When I was 9 I wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t learn until many decades later that it wasn’t about being a doctor; it was about finding methods and modalities of healing. That’s what I wanted for myself and the program reminded me of that. My 9-year-old self knew it, but I was reminded of it in Co-Active Leadership.”

Over the course of the program, a seed was planted in Phillip — a call to take action on his desire to heal — that would result in his mission to humanize the world of tech.

“When you step up as a leader in tech, often you’re technologically qualified, but you’ve never had the chance to develop the human skills. Leading is not just about results; relationships are just as important. I help leaders see it’s a polarity that needs to have balance.”

How did you start to humanize the world of tech?

Phillip didn’t join the program with a mission or quest; it emerged from the journey he was on and what he’d learned when he directed his attention inward. His background and experience had revealed to him a pronounced gap and imbalance in the workplace, where people from an early age were taught the technical skills to succeed, but none of the human ones. Human was missing, both in education and in the leadership he’d encountered. And it was not that individuals were at fault, but that they’d never received the same attention to and investment in their human skills.

Phillip knew he needed to act on this rediscovered passion, and so he set out on his quest to humanize the world of work through his consulting and coaching business, DearHuman.LIFE.

“DearHuman.LIFE was my quest turned into reality. I’d been in the world of tech — software engineering, program management, start ups — and I was also someone who appreciates the collaborative nature and team aspect of technology. The Leadership Program gave me the seed of my mission — which is to humanize the world of tech. So that’s what I do: I coach tech leaders, start-up leaders, c-suite, founders, and co-founders and all the coaching and programs I do are about humanizing the world of work.”

Phillip’s particular focus area is to help tech leaders find greater balance in how they lead their organizations, bringing more humanity into an otherwise very results-driven world.

“When you step up as a leader in tech, often you’re technologically qualified, but you’ve never had the chance to develop the human skills. Leading is not just about results; relationships are just as important. I help leaders see it’s a polarity that needs to have balance.”

Phillip now has his own leadership program which helps tech leaders pivot into being more human. Many tech leaders don’t get this kind of support as they transition into leadership or agile ways of working: they tend to dominantly focus on operations. Phillip's program helps them do both.

“What I love about the Leadership Program is that it helps you tune into that calling — what’s the stake, what really matters to you — then enables that passion and puts it into action. That’s the cool thing about Co-Active leadership.”

How did the Co-Active Leadership Program help you?

The program helped Phillip identify, at a deeper level, what he wanted to do next with his life and how it could be rooted in the things that were most important to him. The culmination of this was the identification of a clear and meaningful purpose and the founding of a new organization, dedicated to bringing this mission to the world.  

Another area where the Co-Active Leadership Program inspired Phillip in his own program design was in addressing awareness both of self and of others. The program challenges each leader to look not only at themselves but at the relationships and impact they have when they’re with others.

“It takes both contemplation and community in order to really grow — you need both — and that’s what Co-Active leadership gives you. It helps you look at your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others. So consequently, when I design programs now that have a residential aspect, that’s what I do. I help people see who they are in relationship to themselves and in relationship to others.”

In essence, Phillip describes the Co-active Leadership Program as “leading your life.” It gives you a real and whole picture of yourself, uncovers what’s really at your core, and gives you the direction to shape your life into what you want. Even though Phillip now has his own tech-oriented residential leadership program, he’d always encourage people to take the Co-Active Leadership Program because of what it offers people: the chance to discover who they really are.

You can learn more about Phillip and DearHuman.LIFE on his website

This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember you. We use this information in order to improve and customize your browsing experience and for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media. To find out more about the cookies we use, see our Privacy Policy.

If you decline, your information won’t be tracked when you visit this website. A single cookie will be used in your browser to remember your preference not to be tracked.