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Leadership Development

Our leadership development services help individual leaders and teams OWN + MODEL + DRIVE the optimal leadership capabilities and culture to grow the potential of their business and their people.

Our Core Offerings

Leadership Coaching

Successful executives know that leading effectively is a journey of learning and growing. Whether you are a C-Suite member seeking an objective sounding board or new leader seeking coaching and mentoring, AO provides individual leaders with the experienced coaching support you need.  Our individual coaching engagements often occur as part of an executive team’s development designed to deepen the team’s relationships, learning, and effectiveness.

Our Coaches
We have assembled a diverse team of highly experienced and accredited leadership coaches who bring substantive leadership experience spanning multiple business disciplines and industry sectors.

Our Process
Our Client Services Team is dedicated to supporting each of our coaching clients throughout their coaching engagement.  Supporting our clients includes:

  • Helping each client prepare to get the most from their coaching experience
  • Handling all aspects of administering their Leadership Circle Profile 360-assessment process
  • Assisting leaders with the coach selection process
  • Coordinating between clients and sponsors to ensure support for achieving objectives
  • Facilitating leadership team sessions designed to enable sharing of individual learning and peer support

Leadership Team Alignment

Whether you’re looking to scale, merge, or transform your business operations or culture, the alignment of your senior leadership team is a key factor in success. Building and sustaining a cohesive, high functioning executive team takes hard work, collaboration, respect, healthy communication, and rigorous accountability – both personally and collectively – to deliver on strategy and scale success.

We make this happen through our:

  • Extensive executive business experience
  • Deep understanding of team dynamics, strategy, and organizational development
  • Expertise in change management, coaching, and facilitation
  • Use of the Leadership Circle Profile as a common framework to examine effectiveness against business objectives

Cohort-based Learning

The experience of learning with and from others in a group setting is a powerful and efficient way to develop individual and collective leadership capabilities.  Cohort-based learning is especially effective in nurturing core leadership competency traits such as empathy, adaptability, collaboration, communication, and emotional intelligence.  Whether the purpose is to develop a group of emerging leaders or prepare a group of senior leaders to tackle specific strategic changes, cohort-based learning done well is a powerful leadership development approach. 

We support and reinforce a company’s desired leadership culture, strategic business and organizational goals, core leadership capabilities and the vital role senior leaders play in owning, modeling, + driving the leadership development agenda.

Our approach includes: Six-, nine-, and twelve-month programs that integrate individual and group feedback using the Leadership Circle Profile 360-assessment, individual and peer coaching, and experiential learning tied to strategic business objectives or initiatives. 

Leadership Culture Integration

Developing capable, effective leaders at scale in your organization requires more than individual and group development activities. The leadership mindsets and behaviors that produce sustainable results must be intentionally fostered as a function of your organization’s culture of leadership.

AO first works with executive leaders to assess their current and desired leadership culture and define leadership principles aligned to company core values. Then we collaborate with HR, L&D, and executive leaders to integrate the leadership principles and competencies into methods and tools for talent selection, development program design, and measurement – ensuring that the principles serve as a foundation to guide the way the company selects, develops, and measures leadership development and performance.

What this can look like:

  • Helping executive leaders develop leadership principles that are based in the company’s core values.
  • Designing a talent selection process for senior level candidates that integrates a company’s leadership principles and competencies into the candidate interview and selection decision process.
  • Providing individual coaching skills training for leaders and managers to help them feel more comfortable and skilled in development-centric conversations with direct reports to support both performance and development as leaders.
  • Providing peer-to-peer coaching skills training that fosters supportive peer relationships and practices that enable peers to help each other navigate and seize opportunities for everyday learning and growth.

The Leadership Circle®

We take an integrative, systems approach to leadership development.  Using the Leadership Circle Profile™ as both a 360-assessment tool and leadership competency framework, we help our client leaders create a common leadership language and practice at the individual, team, and organizational level. 

Delivering results for our clients means helping them deliver results for their business and their stakeholders.  Our leadership development offerings aim to help our leader clients:

  • Learn what it means to be a conscious leader and see leadership as a daily practice
  • Experience tangible improvements in leading effectively as individuals and as a leadership team
  • Learn to use the Leadership Circle Profile framework as an individual and collective leadership approach
  • Gain individual and collective ability to Own + Model + Drive leadership development
  • Explore leadership topics tied to the company’s strategic objectives and initiatives
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE LEADERSHIP CIRCLE PROFILE

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The Leadership Circle

The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) is the only instrument that measures the two primary leadership domains — Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies — and integrates this information so that key opportunities for development immediately rise to the surface.

The Leadership Circle Profile assessment and debrief process is specifically tailored to every individual’s development.  The LCP is designed to measure both behavior and thinking. In addition to measuring key competencies, it measures underlying beliefs and assumptions—the habits of thought that run much of our behavior. The LCP is unique in that it reveals a leader’s Operating System: Internal assumptions (beliefs) that run behavior in both domains. This allows the manager to see how his/her inner world of thought translates into a productive or unproductive style of leadership. In this way, it naturally leads to insight into the underlying emotional/cognitive process that runs patterns of behavior. When you can get insight into this, you are in a much higher leverage place to make transformative change.

Widely embraced as a universal model of leadership, the LCP integrates the best theory and research on leadership development available today.  The science behind it magnifies why leaders do what they do and how they can transform the way the lead. 

Creative Competencies

Well-researched competencies measuring how you achieve results, bring out the best in others, lead with vision, enhance your development, act with integrity and courage, and improve organizational systems. The next step on your pathway to Integral Leadership.

Reactive Tendencies

Leadership styles emphasizing caution over creating results, self-protection over productive engagement, and aggression over building alignment. These self-limiting styles focus on gaining the approval of others, protecting yourself, or getting results at the expense of others.

Internal Operating System

A leader’s unique Operating System: Internal Assumptions (beliefs) that run behavior in both domains. See how the inner world of thought translates into a productive or unproductive style of leadership. The Leadership Circle Profile increases awareness to create change in behavior.

Offboarding

Embrace the opportunity to grow your brand and reputation as a company that truly invests in helping employees grow their capabilities – even and especially during an employee off boarding experience. When viewed through the development lens, this is a valuable opportunity for employers to learn and improve organizational and people development practices, build brand ambassadors, and enable departing employees to reflect on gains in skills and capabilities.

Strategy

Facilitate strategic conversations with senior leaders to explore and define ways conscious people development can be integrated into the culture and daily workflow to power your business, your people, and your employer brand. 

Retention

Incorporate learning and development objectives into retention activities to prepare employees for new roles and opportunities. This can be done through engagement and feedback surveys, recognition and rewards programs, promotion, succession planning, and more.

Social Contribution

“Build it so they will want to come, flourish, and stay, knowing that someday they may leave.

Thus, it is imperative to define what you want them to say about their growth experience with your organization and what you want the outside world to say about how you invest in and contribute capable people to society.”

-Ed Offterdinger & Catherine Allen
Conscious, Capable, and Ready to Contribute. (p. 173)

Integrated Capability Development and Performance Management

Integrate learning, growth, and capability development goals and activities into your performance management rather than relying on day-to-day responsibilities alone to create a more engaging, productive, and helpful process.

Onboarding

Adapt onboarding to set new hires up for success in a continuous learning environment through orientation activities that introduce the principles and practices that support everyday learning and development for each employee.

Recruitment

Integrate practices, principles, and tools to better evaluate a candidate’s orientation to continuous learning and development as a factor in their overall fit for a position. This provides:

  • Improved candidate interviewing, assessment and selection practices
  • Better candidate selections with learning and growth mindset
  • An early introduction to your company’s development culture focus

Attraction

Embed messages about commitment to people development to attract your ideal candidates.