Leadership is A Verb

We know that you have a vision for the work you do out in the world. You also have constituencies, allies, and obstacles – erected by the very people who want the change. This program helps you see and act on the interrelationships between the larger social system, your organization, your team and you — and to become skillful at mapping these interrelationships and the challenges they pose. Leading requires listening to all of the sounds, discordant and pleasing, and to discerning the way forward.

 Based on the work of Dr. Ron Heifetz, leadership author and teacher, we enable you to diagnose your adaptive challenges and distinguish them from technical challenges. (Adaptive challenges are those for which there is no easy answer, challenges that don’t have an off-the-shelf solution and those which require the system to betray loyalties and act against long-held assumptions. Technical problems have an answer that can be easily applied.) Often, adaptive challenges are misdiagnosed as technical in our quest to just stop the pain and make people happy. The results can range from ineffective to catastrophic.

Ultimately, all of this work is crucial to realizing your vision of building and sustaining a leadership culture that lives in every facet of your work and team. It advances you on the continuum from awareness to action – to first see the most vexing challenges in new and productive ways, and then to see your peers as partners and to engage new tools to address them.

At the end of two in-person sessions, two coaching sessions and the distribution of useable materials over a period of years, participants will be able to:

1. Diagnose their adaptive challenges and separate them from technical challenges
2. Understand the differences between authority and leadership
3. Have a conceptual framework and language you can use as a group to intervene in the system to make progress on adaptive challenges
4. Understand the risks of leadership and how to protect yourself to stay alive