Leadership Development

For executives who want to not only survive, but thrive in their leadership roles.

No matter how you arrived in your position, you need a specific set of skills to be a successful leader for your team or organization.
Deadlines, budgets, daily problem-solving and decision-making will always be a part of our work life. Leaders can add to this a number of more challenging skills: articulating a clear, compelling, inspiring vision, motivating and mobilizing others to achieve that vision, developing and coaching others, and much more.

We offer two highly-acclaimed leadership development programs, each lasting 6-12 months:

Emotionally Intelligent Leadership

Results-Focused Leadership

Leadership is a skill that can be learned and developed. But it takes time. It
doesn’t happen in a one-day seminar, or even in a week-long leadership
training program.

At CEO Partnership, we offer a four-step leadership development program
consisting of: 1) leadership assessment, 2) training, 3) coaching, and
4) follow-up assessment. Our programs last 6-12 months depending on
your needs and interests.

Step 1

Leadership development starts with identifying the skills and strengths you already bring to leadership, and what you need to develop. In short, it starts with a leadership assessment. This can be a quantitative (written, numerically-scored) 360 or a qualitative 360 (a series of in-depth interviews with your supervisor, peers, and direct reports) to gain powerful insights about your strengths, blind spots, and opportunities for development. At the same time, we also identify the leadership skills most important and most in demand in your organization. And finally, we analyze the kinds of shifts in behavior and thinking that will be required for you to become an exceptional leader. (And we have lots of experience with this.)

Step 2

Based on our data gathering, we custom design the training portion of the leadership program specifically for your needs, or the needs of the executives, managers and leaders in your organization. Topics may include managing conflict, motivating and inspiring others, developing and articulating a powerful, inspiring vision, leading high-performing teams, influencing and negotiating, coaching and developing others, and essential communication skills for leaders. We deliver these workshops in short “bursts” that don’t take you or your people out of the office for an entire day (or days). For groups of leaders, these maybe half-day workshops delivered once a month for 6-12 months. For our individual clients, these “short bursts” can take place in a more “coach-like” approach in person at your location or by phone, and generally last 1-2 hours.

Step 3

You guessed it… Leadership coaching! Offered once or twice a month between workshops to support, integrate and sustain new learning. You may recall the research on training vs. coaching from an earlier page on this site. We reported on a recent study of managers where training alone improved productivity 22.4% while training plus coaching improved productivity 88%. (Journal of Public Personnel Management, 1997)

This just plain makes sense. One of the problems with training alone is that, of necessity, executives and managers return to the same old workplace and can easily fall back to the same old ways unless they have the opportunity to work with a coach who reinforces their learning and encourages and supports them in trying new ways of leading.

So, in step 3, on-going leadership coaching is provided to supplement what’s learned in the workshops and to support sustained, personalized learning.

Step 4

In the final step, which occurs 6-12 months after the start of the program, we re-administer the leadership assessment to measure growth and learning. Participants then have the opportunity to continue with the coaching program to continue to grow in their leadership roles, or they continue their learning on their own with the comprehensive collection of the leadership materials provided throughout coaching and training.

Throughout this four-step program we guide senior executives and high-potential managers in developing and speaking their own personal leadership voice, optimizing their authenticity and effectiveness. At the same time, we support them in building a more sustainable organization for the future.

CEO Partnership has developed two excellent leadership development programs for leaders
in your organization, though we always customize our programs to your
specifications. Following are brief descriptions of our
highly-acclaimed leadership development programs:

The Emotionally Intelligent Leadership Program

This popular program begins with one of the emotional intelligence (EI)
assessments (either as a 360 or as a self-scoring inventory), and
continues with your choice of a variety of EI workshops.

These may include stress management, powerful influencing skills, realistic
optimism, honing awareness and understanding of ourselves and others,
teamwork and collaboration, developing and coaching others, managing
conflict, innovation, building trust, catalyzing change, and many more.

On-going coaching in between workshops further reinforces the learning
and supports individual executives and leaders in integrating new
leadership practices in the work place.

The Results-Focused Leadership Program

Our Results-Focused Leadership program is always in great demand. With this
program we work with you to identify the specific leadership skills and
competencies most important and most needed in your organization, those
most likely to bring about the results you are seeking.

These leadership skills may include bottom-line competencies such as
financial acumen, industry knowledge and competitiveness, and driving
execution. They may also include critical thinking skills, high-impact
presentation skills, and skills related to entrepreneurial risk taking.
And finally, they may also include some of the EI competencies such as
developing others, influencing and negotiating, fostering open
dialogue, inspiring trust, innovation, change management and visionary
leadership.

The process of determining which leadership skills are most important for your organization is, in itself, a one-day exercise (often with a core group of executives and HR representatives) that begins to clarify and bring into focus what the organization and its members need to be doing to maximize performance.

The focus is on results – hence, the name “results-focused leadership.”  The #1 reason people and organizations don’t achieve their goals is a lack of focus. Our program focuses on, well, focus. And results.

Based on the leadership qualities and skills determined to be most important to the organization, we custom-design a 360 instrument to measure the competencies you wish to foster in your organization (remember:  what gets measured gets delivered).
We administer this 360 to your executives at the start of our 6-12 month leadership program, use the results to identify the skills and competencies we need to focus on, engage in on-going coaching to support the learning and application of new skills in the workplace, and then re-administer the 360 at the conclusion of the program to measure progress.

Focus. Results. That’s our key differentiator in leadership development programs.