Constructive AgilityⓇ for Leaders

A Curriculum for Creating Better Leaders at All Levels

A course that composed of bite-sized pieces, is interactive, is based on respected research, and is focused on today’s issues.

Discussions with leaders have told us that today’s leaders must:

Create trust, transparency, and psychological safety.

• Generate effective communication.

• Have empathy and a high EQ.

• Provide direction and provide the right amount of sense of urgency (“heat”).

• Create an esprit d'corps.

• Treat all outcomes as learning opportunities have a growth mindset.

• Build trust.

• Have a willingness to try new things.

• Ask challenging questions.

• Be humane.

• Ask others what is possible.

• Listen to those who will be affected before implementing a decision.

• Recognize risks.

• Apply strategic thinking.

• Have patience.

• Be willing to adapt and iterate on strategy.

• Have good listening skills.

• Have an ability to sell a strategy.

• Know how to create a roadmap.

• Be genuine.

This course provides you with the preparation that today’s leaders need — leaders at all levels, because merely sending executives to a Harvard seminar will not be enough. All leaders in your organization need to be effective.

Most leadership training focuses only on soft skills:

• Inspiration

• Listening

• Empowerment

• Growth

• The People side of things

That’s great stuff, but it is not enough! Much more is needed:

• Excellent insight about the market.

• Learning mindset.

• Identify issues, as soon as they arise.

• Generate effective discussions.

• Know who to pull into a discussion.

• Decisiveness, but with a mind toward experimenting.

• Outcome-focused, and ready to pivot.

• Set high expectations, so that people will behave in these ways.

• Advocate, evangelize, intervene.

This course is designed to provide the full range of what is needed for effective and agile leadership in today’s goal-oriented and fast-changing organization.

The course Core Curriculum includes models of leadership theory, and what leadership behaviors are effective in different situations and what behaviors generate agility. It also includes elements of behavioral psychology and cognitive science because these are important for understanding how people collaborate, think, create, and communicate. Lastly, important models from operations research are included and linked to Lean, Theory of Constraints, and DevOps, because these models and patterns are important areas of knowledge that leaders today must have. Crucially, participants are shown how to use critical thinking to select from and use these ideas intelligently.

The Management Curriculum adds practices pertaining to management activities, but with a Lean and agility focus.

Textbooks

Some people learn better by reading than by listening. And for many people, a combination is best. That is why in addition to the pre-recorded lectures, we created a textbook that covers each Topic. The textbooks can be obtained from Amazon.

Critical Topic Workshops

We run workshops on critical topics related to leadership, collaboration, and effectiveness. The topics and schedule are listed here.

Questions?

Want to enroll a group? Or want to arrange for something customized? Or just have a question? Contact us!

And this is not just about you: this is about all of the leaders across your organization, at all levels.

We will help you to make sure that your people are up to the task.

Overview video here.

Get a “taste”:

We run free “Intro” workshops for those who would like to get a “taste”of our content and approach. That way you can sample the content for real. You can sign up to be notified here.

Core Curriculum

The Core Curriculum provides a leadership foundation that everyone needs. Each track consists of several 4-hour workshops. Each workshop includes handful of short (5-15 minute) pre-recorded lectures, written reflective questions that stimulate individual thought, followed by multiple small- and full-group discussions in which people examine their own behavior, share experiences, and apply what they have learned. This structure is designed to get everybody to engage and particulate.

Track 1: Leadership and Decision-Making – Behaviors and Psychology provides an understanding of how effective leaders behave in a range of situations relevant to technology, including effective decision-making processes. It covers widely researched models of leadership, as well as leadership styles that are effective in various situations.

Track 2: Communication, Collaboration, and Teaming explains how groups of people collaborate effectively over time, accounting for cognitive diversity. Ways of discussing difficult topics in an “appreciative” way, and the psycho-dynamics of decision-making.

Track 3: Developing, Supporting, and Managing People is about how leaders can support and develop their people, so that people have the capabilities and motivations that we need.

Track 4: Culture and Transformation is about how behaviors and “how we do things” become embedded in an organization, driven by leaders’ expectations and behavior. It covers “system’s thinking” and organizations as a complex adaptive system. It also provides practical techniques for leaders to shift behaviors and culture.

Track 5: Lean, Agility, and Flow From an Operations Research Perspective is how to make things go fast, but also manage risk in “real time”. Flow enables agility, by positioning you for flexibility and speed.

Management Curriculum

The Management Curriculum builds on the Core Curriculum by providing techniques for planning, measuring, and execution, but in a way that is far more effective than traditional purely top-down and calendar-based techniques. We draw from Theory of Constraints, Beyond Budgeting, and other established schools of thought. The modules are,

M14: Business Value provides a way of viewing every decision from a value-based perspective.

M15: Goals, Strategies, and Measurement is about how to define goals and strategies, identify what indicators matter, and how to make those visible and make them people’s focus.

M16: Planning and Execution tie everything together, enabling people to create flexible forward plans and manage dependencies.

Training Your Teams

This course is designed to be especially effective for organization teams. Please contact us here and we will discuss specifics and choose the days and times. Each of the five tracks can be done at a different time. However, we recommend the above sequence.

Developmental Workshops

Learning about leadership is a critical step for accelerating one’s leadership development. However, there might be specific leadership area that are critical for which an immersive approach is justified. Toward that end, we offer 2-day workshops as a followup to the course topics. These immersive workshops are designed to give someone practice in one or more leadership situations.

Upcoming Public Workshops

We run public training sessions when enough people have registered. Please register your interest here: