You’re the Executive Director of an exciting non-profit, but it’s a little lonely at the top. You love your board, but need more support and accountability in your own development.

You’ve been mentoring a manager in your organization. She’s bright, hard-working, and has the trust of her employees. You’ve given her as much as you can, and now it’s time for her to go even further in her leadership.

It’s important to you that staff in your organization be given every chance to succeed. One of the members in your senior leadership team has the skills and experience necessary to take your organization to the next level. But his good ideas get lost in his aggressive delivery. You’d like him to grow in his listening skills.

Developing and nurturing effective, thoughtful leaders is one of the best investments you can
make in your organization.

Our approach to executive coaching, management coaching, and leadership development draws on the following principles and methods:

• Followers are as important as leaders.  There’s a lot of talk these days about leaders. But leaders can't be developed apart from the context they lead in. For this reason, our approach for leadership development and coaching focuses on the leader as part of a system — not leader as hero or villain.
• Leadership can take many different forms.  Good leaders can be charismatic or reserved. They can make quick decisions or take more time to deliberate. They can be detail-oriented or big-picture thinkers. The issue is not personality or behavior style. It's whether a leader knows herself and how to move an agenda along while inspiring trust and creative work in her organization.
• Assessment is a key component in our coaching process.  For our work with leaders to be effective, we count on being able to gather feedback and perspectives from a leader’s staff.
• Good leaders must be skilled in focusing on both task and process.  Work is about getting things done. But it’s also about paying attention to process — who speaks and who doesn’t; how decisions are made; how to bring a sense of collegiality to even the toughest conversations. We help leaders pay attention to not just what  needs to be done, but to how it can be done with maximum participation and integrity.
• Real-time feedback builds strong and nimble leaders.  If a leader and his team is ready, a lot of growth can happen in a short amount of time if we’re coaching while he works with his team, giving real-time or stop-action feedback. This also builds trust and transparency within the team.
• Workplace coaching isn’t therapy.  It’s not about psychoanalyzing or delving into mysterious motives. It’s about workplace behavior and how that behavior affects an organization’s climate and productivity.

Here’s to developing excellent leaders together.