Leadership Workshops and Expeditions

What is your organization doing to build better leaders?

My team and I have been developing leaders and running team building workshops and leadership expeditions since the mid 80’s. We evolved from the world of Outward Bound into a higher level of academic and experiential education. Pulling from our experiences, our networks and our studies, we offer two types of opportunities to help your organization build better leaders.

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Leadership Workshops:

A workshop needs to be engaging to deliver results. Groups respond to gripping stories of teams overcoming improbable odds to reach their goal. It takes powerful themes of dangerous, unproductive, dysfunctional behaviors causing the deaths of team mates, the failure of dreams and the shame of  hollow victories to get people to look critically at their own team. We believe (and the data backs us up) that behaviors are the most important driver of results in organizations. It is through a mind opening and mind absorbing workshop that groups make powerful shifts towards demanding behavioral changes.

These workshops are excellent stand alone, or complimentary, additions to any leadership conference. We customize the workshop to your organization’s needs. Workshops can be as short as ½ day or as long as two days. You can host this workshop in any conference room or facility. And no: people will not get dirty or be physically challenged during these workshops, but they will get emotionally and intellectually stretched.

The outcome you should expect: your team will identify the behaviors that are causing conflict and hurting productivity within your organization. They will identify the behaviors that can, or do, unite them. They will compare these values with the core values your company promotes. They will re-examine your company’s mission to make certain that it motivates everyone in the company. They will learn the 4 critical capabilities shared by all High Performance Teams and they will develop basic skills required to judge their own actions and those of their team mates by in their renewed commitment to building better leaders and teams. Quite often organizations make powerful shifts following these workshops, shuffling teams and personnel to align themselves towards a more compelling future.

Here are some slides from the workshop.

 

Leadership Development Expeditions:

Look back upon your leadership journey. Few of us see steady, incremental growth. Rather we see moments of intense conflict or challenge resulting in tectonic improvements in our leadership abilities. We also see that when a mentor was by our side, our growth was most profound. Warren Bennis, the leadership expert, calls these crucible moments. Intense experiences are needed to open our minds and skilled mentors help us transfer the learnings towards higher performance in our careers and personal lives.

We have been delivering life-enriching, leadership development expeditions for decades. Our clients include the Wharton School of Business (over 70 international expeditions since 2000), Google and the US Intelligence and Defense Agencies. We operate these programs, each customized, in wilderness areas in North America, South America, Africa, the Himalayas and Iceland. The goal of each program is to create and lead a high performance team. We combine powerful narratives, improbable challenges, technical skill building, risk management and organizational development tools to create the most powerful learning experience imaginable. In the words of Google’s leadership development staff: “It blows me away that you are able to give others such incredibly rich experiences.”

Programs can be as short as two days or as long as two weeks. Take a peek at these slides  from some of our programs. Do not be fooled by the beautiful pictures into thinking these are just amazing adventure travel vacations. What allows these teams to reach the summit is a proven process of leadership development.