Coaching a leader without seeing the leader in action is a bit like coaching a basketball team without being on the court. You don’t have nearly enough data to identify the leader’s strengths and weaknesses, and you have no way of knowing what is the most important first step for him to take in creating a high-performing team, let alone the next step after that.

We have found in-the-moment data collection on leader/team dynamics to be an incomparably rich foundation for effective coaching of leaders and their teams. With this high-impact approach, we observe leaders and their teams interacting in their regularly scheduled weekly business meetings, then immediately conduct 1:1 coaching sessions with the leader. Through a 6-12 month engagement that includes targeted coaching and feedback, as well as spot coaching for team members and the design and facilitation of quarterly off-sites, expect dramatic—even exponential—improvement in the effectiveness and satisfaction of the leader, the team, and the organization.

The days of strategy being developed by outside consultants in a black box, or by the top leadership team alone, are numbered. When your people have been handed a strategy to implement, they respond to the inevitable barriers to successful implementation by giving up. When they have participated in developing the strategy and have a sense of ownership of it, they use their creativity and skills to turn barriers into opportunities. In our approach to strategy, while still informed by expert analysis, we design the conditions for you and your team to develop and execute on your own strategy. Whether working with an organization or a network, the result is a win-win: a more adaptive strategy and more loyal and engaged stakeholders. Of course, participatory strategy is much harder to do than to say: complex personalities, cultural blind spots, politics, and conflicting commitments are common barriers to true collaboration. That’s why you hire us—not to hand you your strategy but to help you design an effective process of creating it yourselves.

If you aren’t on your own journey to becoming the leaders that the future organization needs, you can’t lead with integrity, won’t inspire others, and definitely aren’t capable of leading by example. Employees will smell their lack of skin in the game a mile away and be unmotivated to make their own changes. Organizational transformation also starts at the top in terms of vision. If you engage the organization in creating a compelling vision for the future, then the required shifts in mindsets, behaviors, culture, and business processes are more palatable. People are motivated because they want to help make the future organization a reality.

Many failed change efforts rely on communications designed to be delivered to employees by leaders. These fail because one-way communications don’t work. Instead, we design organizational change processes as a series of rich conversations between levels and functions, both online and offline. We focus on teaching you how to do what we do, and we design the change process to reinforce the new culture. In other words, the culture change process starts on Day 1, and it starts with you.

Collaboration is an increasingly essential skill in the modern work world. Whether you’re working with project teams, cross-functional collaborations, strategic partnerships, supply chain relations, multi-stakeholder conversations, or network building, the basic challenges and skills are the same.

Effective collaboration begins with creating shared understanding of what each party wants, what you want together, and how you can collaborate toward shared goals. In addition, understanding how each party unintentionally gets in the way of others’ success is critical and often opens up surprising opportunities. It’s a lot easier to turn “accidental adversaries” into “intentional allies” with the support of an outside party. We help you develop specific practices, skills, processes, and structures to foster healthy collaboration. You emerge from our work together ready to bring what you’ve learned not only to your work collaborations but to the rest of your life as well.