Enlightened Leadership Courses are named according to the context you most need.

Get Measurable Results, Build a High-Performance Team, and Develop the Leadership Abilities of Your People While Getting an Immediate ROI

Introducing! What has been the heart of many successful turn-around projects over the last seventeen years is now available as a standalone leadership development seminar that guarantees immediate results.

“Whatever money we spent for this (workshop), it was worth far more.
This is the best thing we have ever done at Allen-Edmonds.”
– John Gantner, Director of Operations
Allen-Edmonds Shoe Corporation

LOOKING AT LEADERSHIP SIMPLY– the only way it will work!

There are two parts of any organizational process, the Hard part and the Soft part. As seen in the graphic, the Hard part includes the processes, procedures, structure, metrics, tools, etc. The Soft part is the people side, including attitudes, creativity, buy-in, resistance to change, commitment, enthusiasm, etc.

The Hard part — controlling processes, procedures, metrics, “things”– is the Management side of our job.

The Soft part is the Leadership side of our job because it is about bringing out the best in people.

Which is more challenging, the Hard part or the Soft part? We would be willing to bet that you would say the Soft part is more challenging! How do we know? Simple – because managers from over 65 countries have answered that question during our leadership development, team-building and change management programs over the last 17 years with a resounding, “the Soft part is much more challenging than the Hard part.”

And it is how you deal with the Soft part, the leadership piece, that is so critical because that is almost always the difference between a wildly successful business or project, and mediocre success or even failure. One of the reasons this is so often true is because you usually have the Hard part handled pretty well.

Think about the reason. Because most of you are NOT psychologists. You might be educated as general business people, engineers, IT professionals, manufacturing experts, scientists, hospital administrators, finance experts, mathematicians, sales people, accountants, doctors, nurses, etc.

You are thoroughly educated and trained, as I was, in the technical aspects of the jobs you have had. In fact you probably got promoted into “management” because you did so well on the Hard part. Yet you have spent precious little time formally learning and practicing the subtleties of working more effectively with people.

I remember very well what started me on the path that led to co-authoring the book Enlightened Leadership: Getting to the Heart of Change and starting the learning and consulting business. It all began when I was promoted into my first management role at Hewlett-Packard. I was so excited because I had worked very hard in my individual contributor role to get to this promotion.

I thought for sure that life would get easier because now I could tell other people what to do instead of doing everything myself. I thought I would have a lot more time for family, golf, tennis, flying and other things I enjoyed doing outside of work. What a shock I was in for, because I soon discovered that getting things done through other people was much, much more difficult than just doing it myself. Can you relate?

Fortunately, the engineer in me saw this situation as a challenge (a problem spelled differently), and I was really good at solving problems. So I launched onto a quest to understand how to bring out the best in people, then teams, then organizations, because that is what it would take to solve the problem facing me. At some point I began to realize I was learning about practical leadership. I have personally been on that quest for nearly three decades now, and I and my teammates at Enlightened Leadership Solutions can honestly say – we don’t have all the answers yet! But we have learned a lot, and we keep on learning, which is a good thing, because the world of business keeps on changing.

Our core work that has evolved over the years is so powerful because it is built from the most impactful, effective and practical tools we have out of a very large arsenal. These proprietary tools have been tested in the toughest situations with extraordinary success in supporting many organizational breakthroughs in many industries.

What one executive said recently about our workshop:

“I will someday look back on the last two days as a turning point for greater success in my personal and professional life because this was, by far, the most useful course I have ever attended.”
–Director, major pharmaceutical company

A $100 million software development project was in trouble. With 10 months to go on a 48 month government contract, the project was 18 months behind schedule. Waiting one day late was a $30 million penalty! It was a hopeless situation, and everyone felt it. Yet, when the critical mass of the 400 people working on the project went through a shift of how they saw the situation, they literally turned the project around and finished on time. Heroes came out of that situation.

Our workshop creates that mindset shift, just as co-author Doug Krug did in that challenging situation.

What are some of the people/leadership challenges you face? In working with thousands of large and medium-sized organizations since 1987, we have heard a lot of consistency about leadership challenges. Let’s see if you can relate.

TYPICAL LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES:

• Getting people to step up to greater personal responsibility and self-initiative.
• Building innovation in the culture of the organization.
• Having people work more effectively in a team environment.
• Dealing with personality conflicts.
• Overcoming resistance to change, getting buy-in for the needed changes.
• Retaining the right people.
• Dealing with difficult people.
• Getting and keeping people aligned with business objectives.
• Solving problems of all kinds.
• Developing other leaders.
• Resolving conflicts.
• Generally bringing out the best in people.
• Improving communication within and across teams.
• Turning around failing projects.
• Motivating people in special situations.
• Getting cross-functional teams working well together.

If you could take any seven of these challenges, and in just two days, have a number of your people dealing with them more effectively than they ever have before, what would be the value to your project or organization?

A Fortune 500 computer company used an Enlightened Leadership workshop for a team of managers, supervisors and key contributors responsible for inventory control, which was facing some pressure from finance. Within six months of experiencing the workshop, the team celebrated because they had saved over $9 million utilizing the practical tools they learned from Enlightened Leadership.

While we tend to focus more attention on the Soft part, the leadership part of our roles, the Hard part is certainly impacted, often dramatically, because the people working more effectively get better results.

Also, what leadership challenges would you add to our list? This is an important question because every workshop we do includes a simple Discovery Process. We do this because we want to make the biggest difference for your team or organization. Our intent is to provide a value of at least ten times the cost of our work.

Do you have a team(s) of key contributors, supervisors, managers and executives who could be much more effective if they could consistently provide the leadership to overcome these kinds of people problems/challenges? Do you have a difficult situation that has high visibility? We love challenges and visibility!

The Enlightened Leadership solution to the leadership/people challenges:

Enlightened Leadership workshops are generally named based on your needs so the context is right. It is typically a two to three day workshop which concentrates our most consistently and powerfully successful tools and our proven learning process into an inspiring experience that solves your real issues while learning the tools.

The entire team learns how to:

• Get all your team members on the same track and committed to the results you need.
• Lead the team through resolving challenging problems.
• Set the best, most inspiring goals and get full buy-in from those that have to make it happen.
• Start-up new projects in an inspiring way while getting the entire team fully on-board.
• Resolve conflict between people or teams in an empowering, lasting way.
• Align team members’ energy, creativity and commitment to the same action plan.
• Streamline and improve any process and keep improving it.
• Take your negotiation skills to whole new levels of effectiveness.
• Do effective strategic planning easily and smoothly.
• Solve problems more quickly and easily, while gaining full buy-in for the resolution approach.
• Accomplish inspiring, innovation-filled project reviews.
• Execute Rapid Response Teams™ for critical problem situations.
• Team members will have a whole new sense of clarity about how to bring out the best in themselves and others.

The value was so great for one of the largest county governments in the U.S. after just one two-day workshop with 20 of their managers that they soon committed to doing custom workshops for over 2,200 executives, managers, supervisors and team leaders. The result was a major shift to a more “Forward Focused™” culture and numerous anecdotal and measurable examples of successes and breakthroughs. Leadership evolved from all levels of the organization.

Why have over 2,300 organizations chosen to work with Enlightened Leadership Solutions for their project turn-around, leadership development, innovation, change management, and high-performance team needs over all the other options available?

Why are we different?

We don’t do training. Instead, we create an environment where learning happens while you are solving the challenges and problems facing you. There is high buy-in for using the tools we offer because of the approach we take to the learning environment.
We are behind the scenes, demonstrating leadership and supporting your people to get their own answers and solutions. Many clients want to “private label” and “own” the change and development work we do. No problem for us, because our reward is seeing major measurable results and inspired people. That’s why we cannot use company names in many cases.
All our concepts and tools are simple and practical and immediately useable. We insist on that because we believe you won’t use them if they aren’t. Taking complex subjects and breaking them down into simple ways of looking at them and dealing with them is our forte.
We literally wrote the book on Enlightened Leadership, the leadership that recognizes that the answers are available in the organization already, if you just create the environment and ask the right questions to get to them. We don’t show up as experts to tell you how to do it differently because we know it is far more effective to support your people finding their own answers.
No matter what the application or desired outcome, we come from a place of helping you solve the problem while you learn the tools that got you to the solution because that assures long-term value.

A Paradigm Shift – an old word, but still valid!
Joel Arthur Barker, author of “The New Business of Paradigms” video, said, “What is impossible in one paradigm can be easy in the next.” This work creates a paradigm shift in how people see projects and situations. This shift is away from the traditional view of finding problems and fixing them and toward continually focusing on the next steps that will get us closer to a solution, while celebrating the successes we are already having because that is key to unleashing the natural talent of your people. It is the fundamental shift that has been paramount to the success of many turnaround situations with which we have been involved.
The leadership tools learned in the Enlightened Leadership workshops are “simple, but profound.” This is a quote from clients that we have heard a number of times over the years. It is fundamental to our success. The engineer in me cannot accept any other way.

Okay, so you’re still reading and haven’t contacted us yet. So, we have some bonuses. These are extras you get without any extra charge – if you buy today! JUST KIDDING! JUST KIDDING! Seriously, these are a few added value items that just happen naturally due to the dynamics of the workshop:

• Participants will have a deeper level of appreciation of the talents and contributions of all other team members.
• Real issues specific to the organization will have been moved substantially toward resolution with next steps clear.
• An enhanced level of appreciation of the specialness of the organization will be realized.
• Team members will be operating at levels of effectiveness more consistently matching their best past performance, or even better.
• Individual relationships among participants will be taken to new levels of effectiveness.
• Individuals will be committed to providing greater levels of leadership, with higher personal responsibility and commitment.
• Family relationships will be enhanced.

And much more…