Leadership Development

Storytelling as leadership

If you are engaged in public work or leading an organization, you have the responsibility, to offer an account of who you are, why you do what you do, and where you hope to lead. If you do not author your own story, others likely will, and it may not be as you wish.

Based on ICL’s core public narrative course of personal story development, this program focuses on using stories in leadership practice. Participants will increase their capacity to lead others using the public narrative framework. Public narrative skills help leaders: inspire others to take action on shared goals; build team cultures where people are valued; and possess a strong understanding of their own values, strengths, and growth edges.

This customized program engages leaders where they are, relating the value of story-telling to their personal leadership style and experience and providing practice opportunities with 1:1 coaching with an experienced ICL facilitator. This groundbreaking approach has proven an invaluable tool for leaders across a range of organizations.

Odds are, when faced with a challenge, we already have the answer(s) inside us. The word “education” comes form the Latin word, “educere” which doesn’t mean to teach but to “bring forth.” Leadership is enabling others to take responsibility for shared purposed in times of uncertainly. Coaching enables others.

Not career or life coaching, the Ganz model of coaching is a leadership practice. Coaching is a direct intervention that helps individuals and teams improve the effectiveness to overcome the motivational, strategic, and/or informational challenges that hinder progress and success. Coaching builds trust, engenders long-term success, and builds relationships. Highly effective coaches embrace curiosity and ask questions to illicit understandings rather than provide advice or solutions.

Participants in ICL’s coaching program will learn concrete skills to identify the main forms that most challenges take; establish effective coaching strategies; and help people solve key issues themselves with maximum impact. Participants will also receive 1:1 coaching from an experienced ICL coach and practice coaching others.

Our interactions with each other can seem more and more like transactional these days. As humans, we are “hard wired” to build relationships. Transactions are exchanges in the moment. Relationship are commitments to work to see what can be build together.

This way, relationships increase capacity and foster growth. But are we willing to risk our time to pursue and build relationships? When should we? How do we know?

Using concrete frameworks from the Ganz model at Harvard, participants in this ICL program will: learn the different forms of relationships and “ties”; explore and identify the shared values that form the basis of relationships; and practice how to meet with people in ways that build relations, share resources, and invite them to make commitments taking action together. Participants will receive expert 1:1 coaching and coach each other.

Let ICL build on your leadership and organization’s ability to expand its foundation and increase its resources by intentionally establishing and fostering meaningful and effective relationships – not just limited transactions.

Most challenges in teams are not because of personalities but are due to structure. Leaders create teams. Teams recognize and use peoples’ unique talents and produce more vibrant, engaging, and impactful strategies than leaders on their own. Teams also increase capacity and a foundation for growth. We hear a lot about “team work” these days, but what does the most effective teams look like? How do they work?

With lessons from the Ganz model at Harvard and the Obama 2008 campaign, participants in the ICL effective teams program will learn to: identify and manage the common barriers to teams and team work; increase their skills to structure and launch collaborative teams with the shared purpose, ground rules, clear roles, and leadership development that create bounded, stable, and interdependent teams; and learn to identify and monitor team effectiveness over time – as real as a Soccer Team!

Participants will also receive 1:1 coaching from experienced ICL coaches and coach others on structuring and managing effective teams – if in a group session.

So many challenges don’t come with a road map or instruction manual. Leaders run towards problems. Based on the work of Ronald Heifetz at Harvard, this program embraces the “messiness” of leadership: uncertainty, informal authority, and changing group dynamics.

Participants will develop their leadership capacity and drive their communities forward from a place of trust and empathy.

They will build the foundation to: explore the role that they play in their teams and communities; identify the roles they ideally want to play; and identify avenues to grow, push, and take smart risks to increase success. Participants play a critical, interactive, engaged role in the program serving as coaches for each other and building a community of peers.