Your managers each lead their own way. The people you promoted for being great at the work are struggling to lead. Or you need a leadership, training or certification program built from how your best people do the work.

Leadership Development

Build your next leaders from what your best ones already know.

Including training and certification programs built from your own expertise.

Book a conversationThirty minutes by video, and it's free.

What you get

Your framework — what good looks like, written down, named and yours
The program design: what people learn, in what order, and how you'll know it worked
Your own people ready to teach it. Your designers build the materials.

How long

Set by the size of the program — scoped on the first call.

It feels like whack-a-mole.

What it looks like now

Each their own waySomething new came down, and people pushed back. Whether each manager gave in, and how, came down to that manager: how comfortable they were with it, how well they understood it, and whether they saw why it mattered.
The trainingEveryone is trying hard, and your leaders have been through the training. You still aren't seeing it in the results.
Carrying itYou keep putting out fires that shouldn't exist if your managers were doing their jobs. You've started to ask why they don't care about this as much as you do, and why it feels like you're the only one carrying it.

What it usually turns out to be

It can look like people don't care. Often it's a skill gap, and a skill gap is hard to see, because nobody raises their hand to say they have one. It comes out as "I don't believe in this," or as a different leadership style.

Or they don't have the information you have. People can't be held to a story they've never been told.

Where you end up

Your leaders can name the moves that get their people doing the work well, and they hold people to those actions, not to a mindset. The action comes first, then the evidence that it works, and then the mindset shifts.

The hard conversations get planned together and ahead of time: what you're watching for, and what you'll do when you see it. You're no longer the only one carrying it.

How Leadership Development works

Whole Room™ — my change management method

I'm not the only expert in the room.

The Organizational Assessment, sized to the program

Find what's already working, and say it out loud

1Diagnose the CageI start with what you already have: the handbooks, the training materials, the numbers. Then I gather what's missing.

I take the questions that material can't answer and design interviews, focus groups and a survey around them, and I host those conversations with your leaders, the people they lead, and the people they report to.

I also watch the work alongside your leaders, tracing what the people they lead are saying and doing back to the moves that led to it.

An organization can have pockets of real leadership excellence and no shared way of talking about the moves those leaders make.

Then I analyze all of it, looking for the connections that are hard to see from the inside. I bring it back as one synthesis: what your strongest leaders do, where the others are starting from, and what they need to be able to do by the end.
The design
1. They decide what good leadership looks like here
  
  2Facilitate the BreakthroughYour leaders decide together what good leadership looks like here — down to the moves a leader makes, and what the people they lead are saying and doing as a result.
  
  Then it gets made concrete: actions specific enough that someone else can do them, and clear enough that you can see whether they're done well. It gets a name, and it's yours.
  
  Because your own people built it, with the research behind it, it stands on more than one person's opinion, and it's less scary to learn.
2. The program design, and what has to be true for the learning to last
  
  3Co-Architect the Path ForwardThen I design the program with your people: what people learn, in what order, and how you'll know it worked. Telling people doesn't get them there. They need an experience that changes what they see, so the program is built around practice on the real work.
  
  The design also covers what has to be true for the learning to last and to change how people work.
  
  Sometimes that's as small as the meetings your leaders already have: they become the place to rehearse a hard conversation, script the words together and plan for how people will react.
  
  Often the design is a pilot: a first group made up of people who are eager to try it and a cross-section of everyone else. It tests the framework and the program and works out the kinks.

Then, the handover

I prepare the people who will teach it, so the program is in your own people's hands. Your designers build the materials from the design.

Then you decide what happens next

Your team takes it from here
The framework and the design are yours.

Leading the pilot yourselves works when your team has the room for it on top of the work they already do: other priorities paused, some roles shifted, and one person named who has the time and the authority to carry it forward.
Or an Implementation Partnership
When your team needs a hand carrying it, we build it together — with an end date — until they can keep it going on their own. That can mean leading the pilot with you, building the materials, and preparing the managers who back it.

In practice

St. Martin Parish Schools · 888 employees

Before: When the work began, the district didn't think it had a leadership problem. It had a new curriculum that teachers weren't using the way it was meant to be used.
What was in the way: Its principals and coaches felt isolated and ill-equipped to lead the change, and there was no shared language for what leading and coaching well looked like.
After: With the district's leaders, I built their own model of leadership: what leading and coaching looks like in their schools, what it looks like as a leader grows into it, and step-by-step guides for the classroom visits and team meetings where it happens.; It began as a pilot, then scaled across the entire district. By then, what would have stopped the more hesitant people was already out of the way.

Read the St. Martin Parish case study →

The district's Director of Curriculum and Instruction:

Her level of knowledge and expertise in leadership training is expansive and has brought a new level of leadership development to our district.

Dr. Gail DalcourtDirector of Curriculum and Instruction, Saint Martin Parish Schools

This is also how a certification program gets built from one expert's own method. Read the Doster & Hoffman case study →

What I need from you

Your sign-off on the design before anything is built, and again at the handover.
A few hours with the people who do this work best.
Protected time for the people whose view the work needs — on the calendar before the work starts.
Access to what already exists: the handbooks, the training materials, the numbers.

Is this the fit?

It isn't if you're looking for a leadership course to send people to: you want the people who offer one. Or if the design already exists and you need the courses produced from it. That's a good position to be in, and you want a builder.

It is if the gap is bigger than one or two people: many of your leaders are being asked to lead in a way nobody has shown them, often because a change has made their jobs different. And you'd rather get the outcome than protect how it's always been done.

Start with a conversation.

Thirty minutes by video, and it's free. You tell me what you're seeing in your leaders, or the program you need built. I tell you how I'd approach it, and you decide whether there's a next step.

Book a conversation