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What we do
With Workshops OnCourage™, Coaching OnCourage™, consulting, Team Mobilization™, and Courage Index™ assessments, we equip leaders to…
Build courage. Flip the switch on brilliance. Illuminate new possibilities. Break free of old trendlines when new inflection points require something more, better, faster.
Orchestrate. Mobilize the right players at the right times. Get traction on the right issues. In matrix structures, cross-functional teams, virtual remote global alliances.
Tap diverse perspectives, cultures, backgrounds, personalities. Galvanize efforts, whether your team comes together for a single e-mail exchange or years of close collaboration. Empower. Ennoble. Uplift.
Here are some of the solutions we offer. Click on the vertical headings to read more. To see how they could build courage in your enterprise, click here to start a dialogue>>
The 5 Courage Factors
Build courage with
The 5 Courage Factors
How do uplifting, ennobling, encouraging leaders replace fear and reluctance with action? Flip the switch on brilliance? Illuminate possibilities? Encourage improvisation, problem-solving, initiative?
Decades of research on courage — in business, government, military, sport and medicine — shows that courage is the result of 5 leadership practices. These 5 Courage Factors are your roadmap to build courage and are built into all of our solutions:
1. PURPOSE. To enrich your enterprise and the stakeholders who rely on you. Own audacious goals "Get" why to break free of old trendlines.
2. RIGOR. To mobilize the right players to work the right issues in the right sequence. Orchestrate across boundaries with co-ordination tools.
3. RISK. To stretch comfort zones. Take a leap of faith. Give up control. Trust. Support. Negotiate for mutual gain more than self-interest.
4. WILL. To ennoble, energise, engage. Leap forward. Ignite urgency. Generate passion and pride. Spark confidence and optimism. And resilience.
5. CANDOUR. To pay attention to key success factors. Take feedback to heart. Speak up. Offer good ideas. Sharpen up your teammates' thinking.
Breakthrough business dialogues™
Build courage with
Breakthrough business dialogues™How do you initiate a dialogue that ignites a sense of urgency? Reach out to individuals who are not yet showing up with their “A-game” and are capable of more than they are delivering? Inspire your best and brightest players to take initiative and look beyond easy or obvious solutions? Put tough issues on the table so they are a call to action? Move past defensiveness and excuses to build accountability?
Breakthrough Business Dialogues™ is a special Workshop OnCourage that shows leaders how to ennoble, uplift, inspire. How to encourage people with different personalities and diverse cultural sensitivities. With vivid lessons for savvy and experienced managers to rely on influence, not authority, especially when they orchestrate the activities of people from other silos and business units. It includes case studies, live practice, and interactive simulations. And an action plan that goes from insight to action and workshop to workplace.
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Coaching OnCourage™
Build courage with
Coaching OnCourage™Even the most senior and experienced leaders need a sounding board, a sparring partner, and a source of feedback and wisdom when they face new inflection points.
A single conversation can prepare you for a difficult conversation, a high-stakes presentation, a failure-is-not-an-option pep talk, call-to-action or a change-leadership or performance management dilemma. In extreme situations, you can regain your composure and approach frustrating encounters with a high level of emotional intelligence.
With 360-feedback, you can see your impact on the courage of the people you need to mobilize – and adjust your actions to optimize your impact. With a personalized development plan and shadow consulting to apply your insights and ideas, you can break through your personal barriers and help others break through theirs.
Coaching OnCourage has equipped senior executives to think through and implement organizational changes, and has equipped cross-functional team leaders to step up and take charge with influence not authority. To see how 1:1 Coaching OnCourage can contribute to your success – or the success of high-potential talent in your enterprise.
Team Mobilization™
Build courage with
Team Mobilization™In matrix structures with cross-functional teams, leaders need to know how to form ad-hoc teams, get them moving, and orchestrate activities that go beyond their own departments or silos. It’s not enough to see what needs to be done. Leaders need to know how to step up and mobilize the right people at the right times to resolve a single issue, get traction on a multi-faceted action item or co-ordinate an entire market launch, product development or transformation initiative.
When there are multiple perspectives, insights and conflicting opinions, leaders need to know how to do more than turn up brilliance – they need to know how to bring the stakeholders and moving parts together to create luminous efficiency – so thought-leaders can all be heard in a way that sharpens up each others’ thinking and that gets decisions to stick without residual heat from noise, politics or turf-protection.
Team Mobilization™ is builds matrix and cross-functional leadership with hands-on-experience results-oriented experience. It equips leaders to build courage while driving a particular enterprise-critical priority, such as the execution of a new go-to-market strategy, implementation of a new portfolio-management or supply-chain management system, or getting traction on a product development, safety or QA initiative. It typically includes a series of skill-building and team action planning workshops, for orchestrators and key members of the team, along with action assignments and 1:1 and peer Coaching OnCourage.
Workshops OnCourage™
Build courage with
Workshops OnCourage™Courage-building leadership is the art and science of lifting people above fear, reluctance, defensiveness, inertia — to quicken the pace, solve tougher problems, embrace loftier and more complex possibilities. It’s the art and science of accelerating execution, while wrestling down and solving vexing problems rather than ignoring them and hoping they will go away.
In a single masterclass or a series of workshops with practice in between group sessions, Workshops OnCourage equip leaders to own their power, raise their voice, orchestrate in a matrix or flat structure and expand their peripheral vision. It is an energizing and empowering way to learn-while-doing. With simulations that show how to look beyond the easy or obvious answers and find breakthrough solutions. It gives take-charge go-to luminaries the skills and assurance that’s needed to deal with nay-saying and reluctance, without losing heart and without ignoring risks that need to be mitigated. And sensitizes them to personality differences and cultural sensitivities, so they can mobilize diverse and multi-cultural teams.
Action learning makes the workshop a fast-paced learn-while-doing experience – with simulations, cases, survey-feedback and a mix of small-group, peer-coaching and open-group discussions. Action learning gives every participant a plan for application and pull-through, with a concrete business impact.
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Pirates Cove or Budget-2-Build simulation
Build courage with
Pirates Cove or Budget-2-Build simulationYou raise your team’s courage-awareness in a half-day active, interactive FUN workshop – which challenges them to break free of old trendlines and mobilize a team to achieve breakthrough business results.
Pirates Cove mobilizes crews with 4-6 participants/team. Each crew is given a ship, a supply of capital and a challenge — to return to the Continent within 30 days with the most wealth possible. Along the way, you’ll encounter varying weather, some easy and some treacherous, supply shortages and bands of pirates. It’s a fast-paced change-management, strategy-execution challenge – that tests your ability to build the 5 Courage Factors.
Budget-2-Build mobilizes crews with 7-8 participants/team. Each is given access to a supply of building materials – which can be purchased after budget allocation. It’s a test of courage to compete for scarce resources, with time pressures and limited communication channels, just like enterprises face in global virtual matrix team structures. And it tests your ability to build the 5 Courage Factors.
Each simulation provides practice in overcoming hierarchy traps, breaking free of old trendlines, mobilizing teams to envision a level of success that some outspoken team members may not see for themselves or move out of bystander and wait-and-see reluctance to initiate action and make things happen.
For more information about this or other Courage to Lead simulations,
Orchestrate! Accelerate! Inspire!
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Orchestrate! Accelerate! Inspire!This Workshop OnCourage™ equips leaders to boost the level of “brain engagement” so a collection of bright minds sharpens up each other’s thinking and produces solutions, plans that are better than the easy or obvious ideas. It equips leaders to turn up the level of dynamic tension in a conference, meeting room, telecon or blog-exchange — to produce a high level of Luminous Efficiency™ and a low level of residual heat. It leaves them with practical ideas how to bridge time differences, language and cultural differences, parochial interests or ambitions — to make optimum use of limited resources and negotiate for mutual gain. And do all of this in a way that accelerates timelines and gets deliberations unstuck.
For more information about this Workshop OnCourage™ — and Team Mobilization™ to put it to work with real business impact.
Leadership development that builds courage
Build courage with
Leadership development that builds courageLeaders replace fear with courage — to equip teams to reach higher, dream bigger, learn faster, galvanize and achieve more than they would have chosen to do by themselves.
Leaders get people unstuck — to break free of old trendlines at inflection points where something bigger and better is not just possible, but imperative.
Research tells us that leadership can be taught, developed, strengthened – and that learning to lead comes from experience and practice, not theories or models. That’s why courage-building leadership relies on hands-on, learn-while-doing, application-focused practice — and workshops that prepare leaders to lead, not just talk about leading.
Research also tells us that courage-building leaders need strong self-awareness — to anticipate their impact on the multiple audiences they wish to mobilize. That’s why our programs include hands-on practice simulations, 360-feedback, peer coaching and cross-cultural diversity dialogues™ — to sharpen uplifting, ennobling, inspiring impact.
Click here for more information about our leadership development offerings >>
Matrix management
Build courage with
Matrix managementMatrix management has great potential — bringing together the job functions that have to make good hand-offs and that have to co-ordinate problem-solving to accelerate business initiatives. They also test courage — requiring initiative, peripheral vision, a sense of urgency, collaboration and triage resource allocation rather than delegating the tough issues upward and patiently waiting for solutions to work their way back down. There’s no place for hierarchy traps or for hiding behind the parapets in a matrix. And a high need for trust.
Our courage-building solutions are especially fit for matrix structures – in a single location or a virtual, multi-location, global alliance. They equip the best and brightest players to mobilize and orchestrate, tap diversity and seek more, faster, better performance from one another. Click here for a white paper that describes our unique perspective on courage and matrix structures >>
CFO, CMO, COO change-officer readiness
Build courage with
CFO, CMO, COO change-officer readinessAre you are about to add new thought-leadership to your existing executive team — or push the “launch” button on a new business imperative?
Do you need to ask your founder or CEO to redefine his/her role and hand over the reigns to help the enterprise scale up? Before you go-live on new ways of working, see how to build the courage to embrace and champion new challenges and new ways of managing.
Click here to see how courage-building can help to power change-management, when you rely on new thought-leaders to shake things up by bringing new ideas and new ways of working to your enterprise >>
Diversity Dialogues™
Build courage with
Diversity Dialogues™Role conflicts, personality clashes, divergent technical and business demands. What can you do if conflicts create excessive noise or residual heat — and politicize decisions that should be taken with a rational forward-looking perspective?
Diversity Dialogues™ resolves role conflicts and personality clashes in a way that gets people to come together and make the most of yin-and-yang perspectives — rather than creating truces or turf boundaries. It lowers activation barriers so there is better interaction between interdependent parties and makes it possible for former rivals to challenge and sharpen up each others’ thinking.
We’ve facilitated Diversity Dialogues™ with individual partners or co-founders who have reached an impasse. We’ve used Diversity Dialogues™ so departments like engineering and operations, marketing and finance, quality and commercial confront differences partner and make better recommendations to senior management. Equip CROs and clients to partner better. And bridge gender, generational, and cultural differences. To see how you can use this proven method to get the most from diverse perspectives in your enterprise,
Launching Points for Accelerated OnBoarding
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Launching Points for Accelerated OnBoardingYou’ve hired (or promoted) a brilliant new professional to step up and establish a new function or bring new thought-leadership to your enterprise. Or to lift performance of a function or business unit that has been underperforming. With Launching Points, you can accelerate their onboarding so they get up to speed faster, build bridges with incumbents who feel they should have been tapped for the new hire’s spot, decode and navigate matrix structures and cross-functional teams, identify the key areas where they can make early wins and a quick positive business impact.
To see how you can use this accelerated onboarding process to get brilliant new talent off to a brilliant start, click here >>
Courage Index™ assessments
Build courage with
Courage Index™ assessmentsChange-readiness. CFO-readiness. CMO, CMO, CQO, CIO, CBO, COO-readiness. Does your enterprise, leadership team, project team or task force have the courage to keep pace with growth, embrace new business imperatives, accelerate progress, illuminate key issues, execute? How can you capitalize on existing strengths? Identify fear and reluctance — and replace it with brilliance and initiative? Make conflict and different perspectives an energizer rather than a show-stopper?
A Courage Index™ assessment tells you where your team is engaged and poised to accelerate execution and tells you what is inhibiting or blocking forward progress — so they know what they need to “get on with it” and accelerate execution.
In addition to profiling the culture of a leadership team or work group, a Courage Index™ assessment can also include feedback for individual leaders. And there’s room to ask about your company’s values and success behaviors.
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For a change-readiness assessment for US healthcare institutions,
click here >>
To preview the online survey and the interview, feedback and call-to-action process,
click here >>
Human Capital Consulting
Build courage with
Human Capital ConsultingInflection points test courage. They push you further and faster than gradual incremental improvements. They rely on imagination, vision and possibility thinking to break free of old trendlines.
To make the most of inflection points in your enterprise and your career, you may need to re-define your role. Re-architect your organizational structure. Add new functions. Recruit new talent. Shed excess expense or outsource non-core functions. Revamp your business model or your go-to-market strategy. Set new performance benchmarks and change the complexion of your performance management system.
To keep pace with growth and make the most of the new talent you recruited, you may need to promote yourself to a new role. You may need more peripheral vision and a bird’s eye perspective with well-placed dives to ground level. You may need to rely on your reports for brilliance rather than being the luminary yourself. And delegate, empower and get people energized about urgency and accountability.
To design, implement and get the right business impact from these changes, and others, you need to design them in a way that can build courage. And bring them online in a way that flips the switch and unlocks that potential. As part of the Human Capital Consulting Partners network, see how we can help you make that happen Click for more >>
