2 Day Offsite Management Team Program: Authentic Leadership Institute

Leadership at Your Best "Accessing Your Strengths as a Leader"

Operating at Your Best as a Management Team

2 Day Offsite Management Team Program

“It is myth that people need to operate from a well-rounded set of characteristics to be a high-performing individual. Skills and capabilities help us perform at a standard level. To become our best, our skills must be combined with our deeper, unique talents.”

Marcus Buckingham, “Now, Discover Your Strengths”

There are many leadership models, each offering a cure-all prescription of skills, competencies, strengths or intelligences. Yet during the last 2 years over 2,600 CEO’s were fired in the U.S. Existing models of leadership development clearly do not suffice.

Our research and practice has shown us that each person has a unique expression of leadership and we show up as a leader when we tap into it. Instead of trying to become a copy of Jack Welch or Larry Bossidy, what would happen if you fully understood and were operating from your unique expression, your genius as a leader? We call this one’s Authentic Leadership or True North.

ALI's mission is to guide our clients to identify and consistently operate from their own unique True North.

How much of your time do you spend doing what you are really good at? What would happen if everyone on a management team were to spend twice the amount of time they spend now doing what they are really gifted at? What impact would that have on the organization’s business goals?

We all want to be on a high-performing leadership team, and we each have a clear view of what that team would look like…and the team we are on at this moment rarely – IF EVER -- fits the bill! The outcome is having meetings that follow a predictable pattern, resulting in an “okay” performing leadership team. The discussions in the hallway after the meetings focus on what is not being said, and who is not “showing up”: on what’s wrong rather than on how to make it right.

Many of the existing approaches to top-team development follow two paths:

Activity-Based Events: Ropes courses, off-site events, and an array of activities that are momentarily satisfying but do not produce lasting change or tangible business results.
Confrontation-Based Events: Feedback sessions on difficult issues and challenges resulting in venting, gnashing of teeth… which can be provoking and highly risky.

The alternative is a Strength and Results-Based approach. In this approach, the assumption is we each have times – as teams and individuals -- when we operate at our best. Understanding what this looks like, how to create the conditions that support it, and how to double the frequency of this highly productive team performance is a far better use of everyone’s time. Rather than directly focusing on the problems and issues, we begin by building the framework for a team of leaders who can then address them effectively.

“In trying to develop leaders, we tend to give them 360-degree feedback with the intent that they identify and work on their weaknesses. Few people think about the possible future or invite feedback on their best self, their strengths. In developing leaders, we need to move away from problem solving towards purpose finding. We need to help people identify their strengths, and we need to help them hold a compelling picture of a better future.”

Bob Quinn, “Building the Bridge As You Walk On It”

Leadership at Your Best introduces a counterintuitive approach allowing a management team to dramatically improve its effectiveness. In this program, team members will:

Create a strength-based model for operating as a management team
Understand how others see them when they are operating at their best
Develop a clear picture of how the management team can operate if all its members are leveraging their strengths
Understand what mindsets have kept each team member and the team from operating at two to three times the current level of productivity

Leadership at Your Best is based on: Nick Craig’s experience applying the Distributed Leadership Model at MIT’s Sloan School; his work in the area of accessing states of high performance; the work of Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey at Harvard on diagnosing basic limiting assumptions preventing change; Jane Dutton’s work at University of Michigan on the Reflective Best Self process; and Marcus Buckingham’s work on operating from individual and team strengths.

The structure of the workshop is as follows

Day 1

Discovering the power of leveraging your strengths
Identifying top team members at their best
Creating an overall map of what would be possible if the team were operating at its best
Uncovering what keeps each of us from being our best
Developing solutions to maximize one’s ability to be at one’s best
Finalizing how the team will work moving forward

Presenter

Nick Craig has a unique ability to help leaders create strong cultures of execution balanced with grace, wisdom, and compassion. Nick serves as a coach on leadership at MIT’s Sloan School. As a director at Truepoint, Nick worked with Mike Beer, Director Emeritus of Harvard Business School’s Organizational Change practice. He has assisted top teams in having honest dialogues about the underlying issues driving competitive advantage. Based on Nick’s collaborations he has developed a body of work assisting leaders’ access their unique state of leadership during challenging situations.

Nick has spent over 15 years consulting on large change efforts and working with executive teams. As a senior consultant with RHS&A he was involved in the creation and implementation of the GE-Workout process across many companies. In addition, he designed and rolled out one of the most benchmarked and studied action-learning program, Siemens Business Improvement Projects. As part of every management development program in Siemens, these projects drove new innovation and business results across long standing organizational boundaries. Nick enjoys working with executives and coaches to access their right- brain intuition and creativity, as well as their fundamental capacity to lead for results.

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