Leader Development

As leaders face change in their environment either from external forces or internal change, they often need to change what they do or how they do it to drive their organizations going forward. We work with successful leaders and managers to change themselves and to help implement the changes they are making. These leaders and managers often seek assistance when they face new or different challenges which could include:

Growing the organization in a different direction
Introducing new products
Implementing organizational changes that require significant change in what people do or how they do it
Navigating a shift into a new market offering
Building resilience
Aligning staff during significant transition
Building more cohesive teams
Facing increased pressure to make decisions faster and accelerate rate of progress to digital speed
Building a culture and aligning systems and processes to match changing vision
Improved relationship management and employee engagement
Build executive presence
Balance employee demands and leadership demand

Great leadership looks different today than it did even 5 years ago. We use the 5 elements shown in the figure below to define innovative leadership. Innovative leaders demonstrate the following qualities:

Strategic leadership that inspires individual goals and organizations vision and cultures;
Tactical leadership that influences an individual’s actions and the organizations systems.
Holistic Leadership that aligns all key dimensions: Individual, cultural, behavioral and systematic.

We base our model on research from leading thinkers in the business and leadership fields. One key element, but certainly not the only important element, is the idea of leadership maturity that is captured in the concept of “Level 5 Leadership” in the best selling business book Good to Great by Jim Collins. In the model below, this is captured in the category of Developmental Level.

According to Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, all companies that made the jump from good to great were led by Level 5 Leaders during the transition. His work along with the research of Bill Torbert, Professor Emeritus of Leadership at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and author of Action Inquiry, suggest that development as measured by developmental level is critical when transforming organizations and when running large complex organizations. Furthermore, the absence of Level 5 leadership showed up as a consistent pattern in the comparison companies (who were not able to move from good-to-great).”

According to research published in the Manchester Review, 2001, Volume 6 Number 1: “Most exciting of all were the estimates of return on investment. As indicated earlier, when estimates in the most conservative manner, ROI averaged nearly $100,000 for the sample, or 5.7 times the initial estimate.” Other benefits included: