Coaching for Collaborative Excellence
Meet anywhere. All services are currently provided "virtually."
What Needs Your Attention?
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High-Performance
Leadership Culture


Individuals in high-performance leadership cultures are both organizationally and personally empowered to create a future that matters and that they move toward by choice.

High performance accelerates when people at all levels of an organization practice the discipline of focusing attention on achieving results they truly want while doing these two things at the same time:
  • Tell the truth about current reality (without trying to quick-fix it) and
  • Be accountable for their impact.
Senior leaders ensure that responsive, living processes are in place so that the organization continuously evolves its capacity to learn, heal, think systemically and redesign itself over time. Indeed, broad-based involvement is essential for the ongoing renewal of the system.

Is your leadership culture bringing out the best in people?
What’s needed and next for you here?
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Adaptive Strategies & Engagement

Effective strategic planning - especially for complex situations - is a collaborative, emergent process. Participants with divergent experience and perspectives develop a shared vision in dialogue.

Rather than create "shelf-ware," the planning process generates qualitatively necessary conversations, agreements and viable paths forward to bring something new into being, even where some variables may remain uncertain.

Strategic engagement is how groups coordinate and align to author and create a new future together. Practical experience and research both show that early, inclusive and consistent engagement is vital for successful implementation of strategic change. Engagement ultimately generates buy-in, in part by mining the treasure from creative tension, surprise, and conflict along the way.

A multi-staged process for engagement allows for people to connect and build trust; it creates space and safety for ideas, patterns and assumptions to be challenged and adjusted throughout.

Strategic engagement calls forth leadership from all levels of a team or organization. It is an essential element of a high-performance leadership culture.

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Complex problems are a breed apart.

Complex problems are messy. Taking them on means moving headlong into the unknown. You take risks, experiment and retool on the run.

Navigating into the unknown, individuals and groups have to leverage whole-person intelligence to adapt to new experiences quickly. Expertise, judgment, and personal investment are necessary…but insufficient. Resilient, adaptive organizations are made up of leaders choosing to bring out their best under pressure. That takes empathy, resonance, and wisdom. Leaders and teams with a learning stance tend to thrive.
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In my work with leadership teams and organizational systems, we have a dual focus of attention:
  • PLUS - What moves you in your chosen direction with greater alignment and creative engagement
  • DELTA - What undermines your efforts and how can this energy be redirected to support you.
Inquire About…
  • Leadership Team Development
  • Strategic Planning & Engagement
  • Retreats & Off-sites for Conscious Change

All consulting engagements are customized to meet your needs, empowering people to make changes that bring out their best in a sustainable way. Components are designed to identify and address multiple leverage points, while considering the linkages and interactions between various elements that comprise the whole. As appropriate, our work together may include use of powerful tools, such as 360-degree leadership assessments, team or organizational culture assessments, and tools to enhance interpersonal understanding and creative interaction.
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Growth by Design

Business owners, senior leaders, and knowledge professionals partner with me to grow by design.

They grow as healthier, more masterful leaders.

They lead more sustainable and collaborative growth. They create ecosystems for growth and intentional transformation.

Also see BL SERVICES

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Companies are beginning to recognize that the ability to build and maintain relationships is an essential set of skills. They recognize that the collaborative capital of their employees, which is the collective ability of their employees to build effective collaborative relationships, is as important as their intellectual capital and their financial capital.
Radical Collaboration: Five Essential Skills to Overcome Defensiveness and Build Successful Relationships, by James W. Tamm & Ronald J. Luyet
We keep failing to create the outcomes and changes we need in organizations because we continue to deny the ‘the human element’ is anything but a ‘soft’ and not-to-be-taken-seriously minor distraction. We barely manage to survive the seemingly endless procession of organizational change fads and new ideas, each of which promises to make organizations more effective. ...But most basic human dynamics are completely ignored: our need to trust one another, our need for meaningful work, our desire to contribute and be thanked for that contribution, our need to participate in changes that affect us. ...After all these years of denying the fact that we are humans, vulnerable to the same dynamics that swirl in all life (plus some unique to our species), we are being called to encounter one another in the messiness and beauty that name us as alive.
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, by Margaret J. Wheatley
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Cultures and cultural stories provide templates for what it is to be successful in a particular society, to be accomplished, to live a successful life. ... Technical competence can be mastered alone. But its application foregrounds relationship - the context of human systems and cultures within which that competence needs to be exercised. The growing interest in qualities like empathy, compassion and emotional intelligence speaks to this dawning recognition in today's hyper-connected world.
Dancing at the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century, by Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester
The process of change for a corporate culture, as for any culture, is an evolution in which people gradually develop new habits. This effort often meets with ferocious resistance. One reason for this is that people often become frozen in one interpretation of the world, and must have a new possibility revealed to them before they can imagine anything different. The process also requires a great deal of unlearning of old habits. But only this will shift the way people understand their work and the possibilities they see in it. … The organization that is listening, organized for completion and satisfaction, and built on learning will gain a decisive competitive advantage… .
Offering New Principles for a Shifting Business World, by Business Design Associates
Standard social and business practices are built on certain assumptions - shared understandings that have evolved from older beliefs and conditions. And while circumstances may have changed since the start of these practices, their continued uses tends to reconfirm the old beliefs. For this reason our daily practices feel right and true to us, regardless of whether they have evolved to keep up with the pace of change. In just such a way a business culture arises and perpetuates itself, perhaps long after its usefulness has passed.
The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
Lead. Collaborate. Grow. ... to Thrive!