The Center for Character-based Leadership

Great results through great character

Our Offerings

To develop and round out your talent, don’t use yesterday’s forums to meet tomorrow’s challenges.

Firms choosing to be ahead of the curve are recognizing the need to be innovative about how they attract, retain and develop the talent they need to fill their pipeline of future leaders. They create exciting, well-integrated experiences that focus on visible development outcomes, not isolated programs. The goal is to find the right combination of relationships and forums that keep learning alive and active over longer periods of time.

We partner with each firm to construct the right way to integrate development experiences into the day-to-day challenges of leadership.

Individual

Partnerships

Organization

Leadership forums

Teams

 

Individual work

what’s your leadership edge—your personal gateway to real change?

Our approach to individual coaching has edge—the kind of edge that comes from finding what really matters to you.

It is our consistent experience that the power of real change depends on finding your growing edge:

The one change in you that will have the most powerful ROI in both your personal and professional lives.

Once there, we work with you to shift to an entirely new mind-set.

To fundamentally change the lens with which you view yourself, others, and the challenges you face in your current role...

 

Change the lens ... Change the territory

Build the habits and practices that will translate this new view into action... changing your daily routines and priorities.

Rewrite your leadership conversations and relationships to align with and tap the power of this next level.

What’s your growing edge?

 

 

Partnership work—what’s your relationship edge?

One of the great joys of work life is true partnership...

     One of the biggest energy drains in our work life is poor partnerships.

One of our favorite ways of adding value to organizational life is improving partnerships—taking them to their next level—and we’re very good at it.

We customize the process based on the unique context of your partnership…but expect to be engaged, provoked and challenged to use this partnership to develop a whole new mind-set around relationships.

• Engage in a 360 degree character-based feedback survey to get a clear window into your relationship mind-sets/habits and a road map for getting to the next level.

• Share these character insights and personalized roadmaps with each other.   This creates a leveling field in the relationship—acknowledging the reality that we all have ongoing character work in front of us.

• Look at structures, systems and processes that can help create better boundaries and reduce unnecessary noise and tension in the partnership.

Organization Development

All of our character development work is addressed with a keen awareness of the larger performance culture. How does your culture support collective performance success? And, even more important, do you have the kind of resilient culture that sustains organizational success over time?

All our character development work is guided by these questions:

• How will the performance culture support and sustain development of individuals and teams?

• What performance culture variables need explicit attention so that there is greater alignment for achieving and sustaining results?

Our facilitators of individual and peer group character development work are always attentive to the character of the performance culture.

When left unattended, culture can become an unintended barrier to putting new ideas into action. This “cultural drift” gets in the way of action. We work with your leaders to see themselves as active culture builders. We work with you to identify and focus on the cultural levers that will make a real difference to your performance culture. With clear intentions we can focus on the right indicators to help everyone track and have robust conversations about action and accountability for shaping a productive, resilient culture.

 

 

Leadership Forums

Innovative, organizationally-savvy forums for learning

Firms choosing to be ahead of the curve recognize the need to be innovative about how they attract, retain and develop the talent they need to fill the pipeline of future leaders. These organizations attract the best people because of their ongoing commitment to meaningful and impactful leadership development. They also demand that programs are pragmatic and aligned with the culture and strategy of the organization.

We partner with organizations to find the right combination of relationships and forums to keep learning alive. Our approach is to use a series of shorter forums over time that bring leaders together to share what they are learning as they put new ideas and approaches to work.

We partner with each firm to construct the right way to integrate development experiences into the day-to-day challenges of leadership.

Our leadership development architecture follows these simple, powerful guidelines:

 

Character development is foundational. Skills-based work by itself does not go deep enough to support real change. More than a matter of “skills” and “tools,” leadership development occurs through character shifts—shifts in how one holds complexity, works with anxiety, builds and extends trust. We challenge mindsets first; then focus on specific skills.

 

Leverage the power of peers. While individual coaching is one of our clear benchmark strengths, we extend the core principles of development and growth inherent in individual work to peer groups for a deep learning experience.

 

The magic of small groups. The smaller group forum…5 to 7 people…allows individuals to have deeper, more meaningful conversations—accelerating both trust building and personal change. Members of a peer group commit to one another’s success, begin to see a much bigger view of their organization, and shift their fundamental mind-sets from silo success to cross-functional collaboration.

 

 

 

 

Teams

Just as individuals need to build the character muscles required for success, so do teams. We’ll work with you to design a customized plan to build the character strengths that your team needs to take its game up.

You know your work group can use help to function as a team when…

• Meetings or conference calls are low in energy. Status updates replace much-needed team dialogue and debate.

• There is a consistent pattern of accountability to individual metrics/goals, with little allegiance or priority given to the team’s agenda and goals.

• Time together is seen as a distraction to getting things accomplished, rather than a vital opportunity to enrich and strengthen how results are accomplished.

 

Strong team character doesn’t just happen, it is built. Here are some of the ways we work with you to build your team character muscles:

Authenticity in team communication is facilitated by moving the communication from above the line facts, information and status reporting to deeper, below the line conversations about what has personal meaning and impact.

Discipline applied in a way that harnesses energy into action without pouring cold water on passion for emergent ideas.

A climate of trust is built through authentic communication and assurances that team members can be candid with one another in a way that respects different interests, perspectives and stakes.

Dialogue which respects hearing out strong points of view and to generously listen, resulting in a true synthesis of ideas.