Our Approach

The LeaderWork 12 Program

The LeaderWork 12 Series is our flagship year-long comprehensive leader development program designed to enhance leadership skills and drive business success. The program includes a series of workshops, assessments, and one on one coaching sessions delivered over the course of a year.

Our experienced executive coach provides personalized guidance and support to help leaders develop their understanding of the work of a leader and begin the never-ending process of acquiring skills in each of the 12 units.

Our Process

Inform

Information is the foundation of all change. Through a curation of time-tested fundamentals and direct wisdom acquired from the school of hard knocks, we introduce the leader to the concepts and skills that will guide their actions through the rest of the process.

Practice

Practice is essential to move from mere understanding to mastery. Repetitive and coached practice, especially for new materials, has been proven to lead to skill proficiency.

Apply

Practice is where behaviors start to change, but application is where it is anchored and becomes a habit. For lasting change to occur, the leader must find real-world applications as soon as possible. This is crucial for:

Contextual Learning: When leaders apply what they’ve learned in real-world settings, they are more likely to remember and internalize it because it’s contextual and meaningful.
Transfer of Learning: One of the challenges of training is ensuring that leaders can transfer their knowledge and skills from the training environment to the job. By directly applying skills in a real-world context, this transfer is facilitated.
Feedback Loop: Real-world application allows learners to receive feedback on their performance, which is crucial for refining skills and understanding.

Support

Continued support after training is essential for sustained behavior change. This may include coaching, mentorship, access to resources and opportunities for further learning. Our ongoing support reinforces learning and addresses challenges that arise in real-world applications.

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The LeaderWork 12 Units

We designed the program to define the work of a leader in 12 core competency areas; servant leadership, adult to adult communications, building teams, providing a vision, motivating, measuring, organizing the work, directing daily activities, communications, developing people, developing processes and understanding how finance and accounting provide controls to a leader. The coaching program offers a confidential and supportive environment where team leaders can discuss their challenges, receive objective feedback, and develop actionable strategies to achieve their goals.

Program Core Competencies

Serve

Through the success of others, the leader achieves. The motivation of great leaders is to serve team members because they know that the success of the team comes from the engagement and growth of the team and each team member.

A successful servant leader:

Understands and monitors team and individual needs.
Leads with knowledge-based authority rather than position.
Actively listens, empathizes and aids team development.
Attentively observes the team’s environment.
Intentionally serves their team by listening, empathizing, developing, paying attention to the environment, planning, and building a team.

Adult 2 Adult

Healthy, mature relationships and communications make productive and strong teams. Adult behavior focused on productive conversations and problem-solving reduces the likelihood of conflict and makes conflicts easier to resolve when they do occur.

An A2A leader:

Respects team members’ knowledge and expertise.
Focuses on problem-solving over blame.
Prioritizes asking over dictating.
Maintains a calm demeanor and is even-tempered.
Welcomes and provides honest feedback.
Relies on objective and data-driven insights.

Finance & Accounting

Finance is the common language of business. The story of any company, no matter the size, industry or the country of origin, is told through its financial records and reports. Income, debt, cash flows, revenue versus expenses, compensation, and cost of retaining customers can all be found on financial statements in every country doing business in the world.

Having a thorough understanding of finance:

Ensures the team understands financial indicators and their implications.
Bridges the link between individual roles and financial outcomes.
Actively involves the team in budget creation and monitoring.
Regularly updates the team on company financial results.
Uses financial data for decision-making and development.

Build Teams

Teamwork in pursuit of common goals. Leaders recognize that work in today’s complex organizations is done through teams. They create a team environment of problem solvers committed to a common goal. Leaders also work with the understanding that they are in the middle of a system of interlinking teams, and they manage the connections.

A team-oriented leader:

Creates a team with a clear purpose and goals that drive their actions.
Provides clear team objectives aligned with organizational goals.
Understands and communicates inter-team dependencies.
Cultivates a culture of trust and shared values.
Focuses on continuous skill development within the team.
Ensures open communication and robust conflict resolution.

Lead

A compelling vision and a sound strategy. Leaders provide the vision that will guide the work of the team and inspire commitment. Leaders ensure that every team member knows where the team is going, how it is supposed to get there, and how well they are progressing toward their goals.

A successful leader:

Clearly communicates organizational vision and strategy.
Defines a meaningful and inspiring team purpose.
Coordinates team plans with organizational objectives.
Provides real-time performance feedback.
Encourages understanding of team SWOTs (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).

Motivate

Enthusiasm for the work. Leaders inspire their teams by holding high standards of performance and encouraging members to accomplish more than they ever thought possible. Leaders understand that lasting motivation comes from involvement in the work, its objectives, processes, and results.

A motivational leader:

Ensures a conductive and safe working environment.
Sets and upholds high performance standards.
Involves the team in goal setting and planning.
Provides challenging tasks and learning opportunities.
Celebrates team and individual successes.
Ensures every team member can say, with confidence, “What I do at work matters.”

Measure

Control the work. Leaders keep their teams focused with controls on their work that track progress and results. Measures focus on results, both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the work, and guide learning to better meet the future needs of stakeholders.

A result-oriented leader:

Establishes clear metrics for gauging customer satisfaction.
Implements reporting systems for both effective and efficient outcomes, including leading and lagging indicators.
Guarantees timely and meaningful feedback for team members.
Leverages feedback for enhancing team development and process improvement.

Organize

Work structured for success. Leaders continuously ensure the work of the team is well structured and supported by clear work standards. They ensure the resources (materials, tools, equipment and information) the team needs are available and organized to enable success.

In a nutshell, the leader:

Makes it easier to succeed than to fail.
Structures work to focus solely on tasks that add value for stakeholders.
Ensures essential work streams are recognized, standardized, and documented.
Offers up-to-date and easily accessible information, documents, or knowledge sources.
Supplies all necessary equipment and materials in good working order and when needed.
Ensures all team members are well-oriented and fully trained.

Direct

A leader gives clear direction to their team so they can work with purpose and confidence. They get the right things done because they are focused on work that matters. Leaders facilitate the daily work of the team with planning, coordination and problem solving. To reach their goals, teams need clear instruction, regular guidance, and help when they get stuck.

A successful leader:

Plans and schedules work effectively.
Aligns the team’s work with the company’s vision.
Offers prompt and constructive assistance as required.
Delivers clear instructions.
Enforces accountability among team members.
Skillfully manages changes.

Communicate

Facilitate the flow of information. Leaders keep their teams informed and well-connected to customers and suppliers throughout the organization. Information needs to be accurate and get to the right people when it is needed. Leaders actively manage the communication flow in all directions.

An efficient communicator:

Team members are well-informed about company, department, and team issues.
Current communication methods are effective and time-efficient for the team.
Open to influence and input from team members.
Positively influences all team members.

Develop People

Increased competence. Leaders are committed to the personal and professional growth of the people they lead. People need an environment where they can learn and grow through thoughtful guidance, challenging opportunities, and meaningful development plans.

A committed leader:

Provides effective orientation.
Conducts timely performance reviews with meaningful development plans for team members.
Regularly reviews team members’ performance and development plans in one-on-one meetings.
Understands and supports team members’ career aspirations, facilitating growth opportunities.
Maintains a challenging yet fair process for joining the team and handles terminations effectively and compassionately.

Develop Process

The spirit of continuous improvement. Leaders believe all systems and processes can be made more effective, and they encourage their teams to continuously improve. Quality performance requires clear standards and expectations. Improvement requires effective problem solving and openness to creative, innovative ideas.

An improvement-focused leader:

The team has defined standards for all core work processes.
Team members are aware of the gaps between current and target conditions.
Fosters a culture of continuous improvement and learning within the team.
Challenges the team on a daily basis.
Allocates time for problem-solving within the team.
Encourages creativity among team members.

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