Leading on Purpose

Intent
Leading on Purpose is an accelerated program that develops leaders' ability to create high-performance teams which deliver results. The multi-session course takes leaders — as individuals and as part of a team — through a rigorous training process that brings focus to their commitments and priorities, builds upon their personal leadership strengths, and identifies and closes gaps in their leadership skill sets. Leading on Purpose concretely increases leaders' abilities to align their individual and team goals with corporate strategies and objectives to drive success in tasks immediately at hand as well as to build for the future.

Philosophy
Leadership is often narrowly confined to the top few people in a company. However, there are potential leaders at all levels in an organization representing a huge untapped resource of creativity and talent. Winning companies have more leaders at more levels than their competitors.

We help every participant define their own sense of personal leadership, whether it be formal or informal, and we supply these leaders with necessary tools that help them build personal networks, communicate with teams and the larger organization, and deliver exceptional results. This process is necessarily rigorous because most people underestimate either their own leadership capabilities or the leadership potential in others, and even fewer people know how to access and harness these capabilities and potentials and turn them into realizable value added to the company.

Leading on Purpose supports leaders in breaking through limits in perception and replacing those limits with vision, confidence, and sharpened abilities, able to lead their teams through their own perceived limits. In this program, leaders learn by doing. The team of participants in the course learns to function as a high-performance team, practicing together the practical skills they are learning, coaching each other, and holding each other accountable for their individual and team learning goals. The course is also highly individualized, so that each participant can highlight their own particular development needs and path to success.

Objectives
Leading on Purpose represents the leading edge of effective leadership, requiring that leaders attend to their own personal development and bring together 'hard' and 'soft' business skills to effectively and powerfully translate vision into results.

Each participant will have their own specific objectives, which could include learning how to:

• Gain an honest and complete understanding of their own strengths and development needs and the effects of their personal style on the functioning of their team and on the attainment of their organization's goals

• Define personal leadership vision, core values, and core commitments as a basis for prioritizing

• Increase awareness of blind spots, weaknesses, and limiting behaviors and perceptions

• Effectively influence people whether or not they have authority over them

• Creatively resolve conflicts and create environments in which conflicts lead to learning and progress

• Align team and individual objectives and behaviors to organizational goals

• Lead through (and thrive in) change and ambiguity

Overview
Developing leadership skills and attitudes is not a one-off task: the most significant learning takes practice, feedback, and adjustment. For this reason, Leading on Purpose is designed as a six-month to a one-year course in which new topics and skills are introduced each session and the participants and instructors have the opportunity to build facility with the skills over time. This extended schedule is one of the most lauded elements of the program by participants: they often reflect back on how deeply the learning is driven by the multi-session structure that forces them to check back in on and reinforce what they have been learning and applying in real time.

To accomplish this effective learning environment, the course is divided into monthly two- and three-day modules with study and practice assignments in between sessions to insure a high transfer of new skills to daily work. Participants leave each session, and the program as a whole, with an enhanced capacity for transforming business challenges into successes.