Centered Leadership

Drawing upon extensive research from McKinsey and our collective experience as leaders, this session introduces a concept called Centered Leadership. The research and application of this concept focuses on Leading with Purpose, Clarity, and Impact and provides a roadmap to achieve higher levels of leadership effectiveness.

Disruptive Thinking

The Disruptive Thinking session will cover how to define it, why we need it now more than ever, various ways it can be developed, and some of its benefits. Participants will be exposed to a Disruptive Thinking Continuum which explains the Three Levels of Disruptive Thinking. Interactive discussions will focus on how to incorporate it .

The Leader Within

All development begins with self-development. In this module, participants will examine some of their underlying beliefs about leadership and how those beliefs shape who they are as leaders and how they choose to “show up” in their leadership roles. They will also identify a set of behavioral habits that may be keeping them stuck in old ways of thinking and behaving that may be minimizing their leadership impact.

Leading with Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

Competency research in over 200 companies worldwide strongly suggests that while 1/3 of the difference between average and superior performance is due to functional skills and cognitive abilities, as much as 2/3 is due to emotional competence (EQ.) This session will overview what EQ is and is not, provide a foundation for assessing one’s own EQ impact, and provide tools and techniques to strengthen its leadership applications.

Mindset and Behavior Change

Participants will explore the highly relevant topic of Mindset and its influence on how we see and interpret the world around us. Most specifically, how it affects our role as leaders. Citing 20 years’ research on the topic, participants will discuss examples of how Mindsets affect all leadership behaviors including communication, decision making and focus. They will also complete a Leadership Mindset Assessment to determine their inclinations toward being a Growth Mindset Leader or a Fixed Mindset Leader – and the impact each has on their own leadership style.

How Culture Influences Everything

Peter Drucker, the eminent scholar and thought leader once said that “Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast.” Said another way, company cultures are enormously powerful forces that exert considerable influence on every facet of organizational life. In this session, using a unique exercise called the Culture Dig, we will begin to excavate the underlying assumptions and beliefs held by participants and demonstrate how those artifacts bear a direct impact on leadership effectiveness.

Strategic Influencing Skills

A recent survey by Deloitte showed that “influencing and interpersonal skills” are considered more important to career success than software or technology skills, and even more important than industry experience. This session will cover fundamental principles of effective influencing behavior and provide a set of tools that can be used to increase interpersonal influence and impact in a variety of situations.

Building a Culture of Collaboration

True Collaboration is much more than simply assembling a group of people to work together. In this session, participants will explore the real behaviors required for building a culture of collaboration; what it takes to develop those behaviors, and what barriers might exist in the culture that would prevent true collaboration from being achieved. We’ll also explore examples of successful collaboration in various parts of the company and complete a Collaboration Assessment tool. Finally, we’ll provide a five-part collaboration framework to identify key behaviors designed to increase influence in different situations.

Building High-Performance Teams

The value of High-Performing Teams is why 90% of savvy investors believe the quality of a leadership team is the single most important factor in funding early-stage companies and evaluating an IPO. It’s also why it’s twice as likely for companies with high-performing leadership teams achieve above-median financial performance. This session provides a research-based, high-performing team framework used to evaluate 5 Critical Team Dimensions that can be used as an ongoing metric to determine team performance and progress.

Leading Change & Transformation

While we know a great deal about what makes change initiatives successes or failures, revisiting and taking a fresh look at what really works is worth the time spent. In this session, we’ll review recent examples that identify the actions that most contribute to successful organizational change and transformation efforts. We’ll also examine the extent to which those actions are present in the company’s current change efforts, and what individuals and teams can do to increase the odds of success. Finally, participants will learn to use a comprehensive, 4-Phase Change Roadmap complete with tools to lead change in their organizations.

Leading Through Focus & Alignment

Without exception, leaders today are confronted with ever-increasing demands and priorities. Indeed, this continuous onslaught of urgent actions becomes moving targets, with leaders not always certain which ones need immediate focus and which can be moved to the “important but not urgent” pile. This session will concentrate on ways to prioritize truly urgent actions; to discuss methods that improve focus and provide a set of tools designed to make faster and more impactful decisions regarding methods to prioritize.

Leaders as Coaches

This session will examine the very important role of Leaders as Coaches. Increasingly, the role of leaders is expanding and emphasizing the development of other leaders as a critical part of their leadership roles. In addition to defining the role of Leader as Coach, we’ll examine the experiences participants have had with coaching others and provide a variety of tools to assist in the coaching process. Participants will be encouraged to share current coaching issues or challenges they are facing, enabling the group to brainstorm potential ways to address those challenges.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution

“Of course, focusing on strategic goals is important, but we have to keep the business running! How do we do both at the same time?” In this session, we will discuss some of the reasons for failing to execute on critical priorities. Using real examples from participants’ experiences as leaders, we will then focus on the Four Disciplines of Execution, drawn from the book of the same name, as a roadmap for successfully executing on priorities.

Anticipatory Leadership

One of the most under-utilized leadership skills sets, but one of increasing urgency is Anticipatory Thinking. This capability is one which enables leaders to see what others do not see, to imagine how unexpected events might affect plans and strategies, and create readiness and adaptive mindsets for what might happen. In this session, we will explore this increasingly important skill set, provide an Anticipatory Leadership Assessment, and recommend ways to strengthen the capability.

Organizational Agility

Organizations face unprecedented levels of change, and the rate and frequency of those changes will continue to rise. The models, practices, and tools we have used in the past to enable and manage change (e.g., action research, Kaizen, lean, process improvement efforts) are valuable tools, but they are not enough to help organizations keep pace with internal and external changes. To become agile, organizations will need to make fundamental changes in how they think and how they work - their mindsets, systems, practices, and their culture. This session is focused on identifying and reinforcing the need for continual organizational efforts to build nimbleness into systemic elements of the organization.

Strengthening Business Acumen

A recent McKinsey report states that “less than 10% of leaders are strategic thinkers.” Today, it’s essential that all employees, regardless of their function, develop and strengthen their business acumen, defined as “Linking an insightful assessment of the external business landscape with a keen awareness of how to monetize a product or service, then executing a strategy to deliver the desired results (e.g., increasing market share, greater profitability, top line growth).” In this session, participants will be challenged to demonstrate their strategic thinking capability as well as complete a High-Performing Business Leader Assessment.