Leadership Development

Leadership development is not about getting the “tips and tricks” of how to lead. It is about developing the most powerful leadership instrument that we possess: ourselves. By better understanding who we are and how we respond to situations, we become better equipped to navigate through adversity, enroll people in our vision, and support others in achieving theirs.

We have broad and deep expertise in the development, design, facilitation and management of a leadership development experiences, each tailored to meet the needs of our clients. Whether it is executive coaching, an in-house course, a strategic international initiative, or a comprehensive program that blends different approaches spanning several months, we will work with you to identify the leadership development approach that best fits your needs and strategy.

We apply a variety of methods of leadership development that we can customize to deliver independently or blended, depending on what your strategic outcomes and goals are.

• Action Learning
• Appreciative Inquiry
• Study Tours and Site-visits
• Experiential Classroom Activities
• Reflective Exercises
• Seminars and Vignettes
• Simulations
• Large Scale Conferences including Open Space Technology

Strategic Change & Planning

Leadership is the most important element in achieving a successful and sustained organizational change. When you include us in the design of your strategic change initiative, we will integrate leadership perspectives and strategies throughout every stage of its design and execution. The result: a greater chance of success and sustainability.

We will support you and your team as you:

• Clarify your mission: determine what unique contribution your organization brings
• Create a vision: articulate clearly where you want to be in the future
• Set goals and objectives: design your strategy and how you will know when you’ve got there
• Conduct an analysis: identify what is opportunities exist, and those you must build in order to develop the capacity you will need to achieve success
• Make your strategy real: identify powerful ways to enroll others, take advantage of opportunities, stay in meaningful action, and overcome breakdowns as they occur
• Articulate the kind of leaders you want and need to be, at every stage of the process, in order to make your strategy a success

Leadership Strategies & Frameworks

Before developing any leadership development program, there is a significant amount of groundwork that needs to happen to identify what it is intended to achieve, what its target audience is, what the strategic outcomes are intended to be, what elements will need to be created to achieve the strategic results, and how you will assess whether you have achieved what you said you wanted to achieve.

This becomes even more complex if you are considering a multi-faceted strategy that includes succession planning, knowledge transfer, partners, complex organisational objectives, socio- and geo-political diversity, and a number of other variables. Not having a strategy and framework in place is a sure path to wasted resources and a likely path to failure.

We will improve your changes of success by working with you to develop an organizational strategy to build your organization’s leadership bench strength by:

• Conducting diagnostiques to identify challenges that your organization may face going forward
• Identifying your organization’s key leadership competencies, including developing tools to assess your leaders against them
• Clearly defining strategic long-term goals and outcomes that will support your organization’s vision and mission
• Articulating the strategy’s benefits to both individuals and to the organization
• Developing clear objectives and approaches to achieve them
• Building evaluation strategies and tools, so you can measure progress; right up to finding out whether the learning is being applied in the workplace

Retreats

Every organization needs to pause from time to time to assess where it is, what it is doing, and how it is functioning. We will work with you to identify the objective of your retreat, who the right people are that should be involved, the right process to apply, and then facilitate your retreat to ensure that you receive the greatest benefit for your investment of time and resources. We will help your team use its time most effectively by suggesting pre- and post- work, capturing the details, and making sure that everyone contributes and feels heard. We will also make sure your retreat is relevant by making sure it is positioned within your organization’s broader strategic goals and objectives.

Short Leadership Workshops

Perhaps you don’t have the time or resources to implement a full leadership development program, or perhaps you just want a flavour of what is possible when your team is introduced to powerful leadership concepts. If this is the case, we can offer short workshops, from an hour to a day in length, to provide your team with some basic leadership tools. These tools will help them practice leading in a way that will have them see possibilities for new and creative action.

Here are just some of the topics of leadership workshops that we have delivered in the past:

• Leading as Being
• Reacting vs. Generating
• The Commitment-Based Leadership Model
• The Speech Acts
• Acknowledgement and Appreciation
• The Perspective Wheel
• The Awareness Wheel
• Change Styles
• Working with Polarities
• Systems Thinking and Working With Complexity

Leadership Coaching

Leadership coaching has become an integral part of the services which individuals access to accelerate and focus their growth. We provide you with confidential, one-on-one development support from a qualified coach that will meet your needs. Our leadership coaches have a proven track record of results through years of experience coaching senior leaders, executives and managers. With your coach, you will commit to a program that is uniquely designed to support what matters to you by incrementally involving you in new ways of being and doing. The topic of your program may relate to the results of a 360º appraisal or any other assessment that you determine is important to you during the course of your coaching program.

Individual & Organizational Assessments

The greatest part of being a successful leader is awareness. Knowing who you are and how you react in certain situations so that you can make choices that will engage others and keep you moving toward meaningful results. We offer a number of individual and organizational leadership assessment opportunities, either by developing customized assessment instruments or by using well-known existing ones, including:

• Benchmarks® 360-Degree Assessment
• HRCI 360-Degree Assessment
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• The Enneagram
• Strengthsfinder
• Emotional Intelligence Assessment (EQi)
• Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI)
• Organizational Climate Survey
• FIRO-B®
• Learning Styles Inventory

Ideally, in order to have the greatest impact on your leadership, assessments would be used within the context of a larger personal or organizational learning strategy.