How can I tell if this is really for me?

In principle, Designing Leadership can be used by any leader to generate new ideas and adapt to new circumstances.

I should say that I don’t mean “leader” in the sense of “everyone in our organization can be a leader sometimes.” Sorry, no. In the course, I define leadership as the art of getting specific groups of people to do specific things that they wouldn’t do without your intervention.

In most organizations, that’s not most of the people — and there’s nothing wrong with that! But at the same time, leadership is rarely confined to an organization’s highly visible executives. Usually anyone with direct reports needs to exercise some kind of leadership. Other people may need to exercise leadership among an organization’s customers, members, or community stakeholders.

So to me, it all comes back to this: do you have specific groups of people who would look to you as a significant influence (even if you are not their “boss”)? Can you name those groups and say what you wish were different about your relationship? If you can, Designing Leadership will work for you.

Okay, but can you give me some specific groups who you think really need this?

Sure. A good quick test is whether you feel that leadership training you may have received through your organization or your education was particularly well-suited for you. If the answer is “yes,” I am very happy for you. But in my experience, for most people the answer is “no.”

Here are some groups who are almost always ill-served by existing leadership training and who would benefit from the more customized approach of Designing Leadership:

• Women and minorities, particularly in positions that require “code-switching” in relationships with different groups

• Professionals such as nurses and teachers who are guided by professional ethics and methods, not just the metrics of their organizations

• Leaders in nonprofit and government settings balancing considerations of mission and values with the stewardship of their organizations

• People whose jobs require leadership of groups who are not direct reports, such as volunteers, association members, advocacy groups, or segments of the public

• People exercising leadership outside the context of traditional organizations, such as leaders within social and artistic movements

• Broadly speaking, anyone in a new or nontraditional role within an organization

If that’s you, I want to hear about your experience, because you are the people who motivated me to create this new approach.

Why doesn’t most leadership training and literature serve these groups well?

There are many reasons, but two stand out.

The first is that a lot of the literature on leadership was meant for men from dominant social and ethnic groups leading hierarchical organizations, such as the military and traditional business firms. Most of today’s leaders aren’t those people. But more importantly, most organizations can no longer be run in a strictly hierarchical way. Even in the military and corporations, leaders must exercise skills of persuasion, flexibility, and coalition-building to get anything done.

(Not to the mention the fact that much of the time this is just the right thing to do, damnit.)

The other problem is that a lot of the material in leadership training isn’t really about leadership. Topics covered can include everything from fiscal management and ethics to personality testing and public speaking. Some of this stuff is useful and some of it is crap, but the problem is that when leaders trained this way face significant challenges, they reach for the wrong tools. This is one of the reasons why we so often see executives who reactively defend their organizations’ images and finances in the face of a crisis. They have no idea what else a leader ought to be doing in such situations.

In Designing Leadership, we think differently. If conditions change, you become the leader the new situation requires, then face it with confidence and creativity. I don’t know how to do it in every situation you might face, but I can give you tools to help you figure it out.

Hey, but what if I have a book on leadership I really like? Are you going to make me through it out?

Of course not. Your preferred ideas about leadership can be woven into our process together. I particularly love hearing people’s stories about the individual leaders who inspire them, as these provide a kind of design template we can adapt to your current situation.

Some people have compared my ideas to servant leadership, and I think that connection is valid. Human-Centered Design starts with the needs of the people being served. I would say that servant leadership is more of an ethical outlook while Designing Leadership is a process focused on outcomes.

I see you offer coaching. Are you planning on adapting Designing Leadership to other settings, like a group workshop or a self-directed course?

Yes, just about everyone I meet asks me this question and I am considering which additional approaches I should prioritize. If 1:1 coaching doesn’t meet your needs, let me know, and we’ll see what we can build.

Tell me more about the coaching program. What do we actually do?

I subscribe to a “flipped classroom” teaching philosophy where I give you activities to do ahead of time, then we discuss the results together over Zoom. So for each of the four Designing Leadership sessions, you’ll receive a short video lecture from me and some written tasks in a workbook. Some people invest heavily in the writing, treating our live sessions together as a workshop to refine what they’ve developed. Others spend less time on the workbook, preferring to do more of the thinking together with me in real time. I am fine with either approach!

How much does this cost?

Let’s book some time to talk about it.