Leadership Coaching
To stay at the top of their game, leaders must continuously assess and develop their leadership and interpersonal skills. An ever-changing marketplace and workforce demand it! Just like professional athletes, leaders need ongoing support as well as honest feedback to fine tune these skills.
LeadQuest’s coaching process is built on mutual respect and honesty – a must in any coaching process. It guides leaders while, at the same time, challenging them to raise their own performance bar by assessing their current state and determining the specific behaviors that will drive future success. Since behaviors produce business results, and leaders develop productive and unproductive habits of behavior, LeadQuest’s coaching process is designed to disrupt and change unproductive habits of behavior that get in the way of achieving outstanding performance results.
At LeadQuest, we utilize our on-line 360° Feedback Instrument to assist in assessing a leader’s current state. This instrument is based on LeadQuest’s research-based 10 Principles of Personal Leadership™. We also use interviewing and other data-gathering techniques, as needed, in the assessment process. Before working with a leader to create a 60, 90, 120, or 180-day development plan (Note: length is based on the need), the desired future state of the leader’s performance is defined and documented. To close the identified performance gap, an individualized coaching plan becomes part of the documented development plan referenced above.
Team Development
Most teams aspire to become high-performing teams where: 1. members are truly committed to one another’s success as well as team success, and 2. they demonstrate this commitment by communicating openly and honestly in all situations including when delivering routine performance feedback to each other.
To help teams achieve this desired state, LeadQuest offers highly customized, instructional, interactive, engaging, and challenging team retreats and workshops designed to jumpstart the process of becoming a high-performing team. The LeadQuest process uses personal accountability as the cornerstone of this work. Personal Accountability is Principle 7 of LeadQuest’s research-based 10 Principles of Personal Leadership™ which are foundational to LeadQuest’s team development process. Additionally, depending on the team’s needs, LeadQuest often employs its “action learning” methodology to accelerate team development. As the term implies, in this methodology teams are required to use and learn The 10 Principles of Personal Leadership™ as they work together on making a real-life, meaningful team decision or solving a real-life, meaningful team or organizational problem. During this process, the LeadQuest facilitator acts as a valuable coaching resource to the team helping them, in real time, learn how to work more efficiently and effectively.
Change Management
As a U.S. President once said, “change is the law of life.” He could have said, change is the law of business. Every company must continuously improve and change, or risk becoming irrelevant and die. In business, the successful implementation of most change efforts depends on the people responsible for executing the change or transition.
The discipline of Change Management focuses on how people and teams are affected by an organizational transition; e.g., from a shift in business strategy to a reduction in the workforce. How people are affected determines how they perceive the merits of the transition and, consequently, whether or not they will support it and make it successful.
Sadly, as ample research data have revealed, organizational transitions are often met with active and passive resistance, and viewed negatively by workforces. Why? Because leadership often underestimates and underprepares the people who will be most affected by the transition or change. At LeadQuest, we specialize in helping leaders use research-based principles and tools from the science of Applied Behavior Analysis to minimize the disruptive impact that an organizational transition can have. We use our behavioral approach to change management to proactively plan for any transition that will affect people. Since people “vote for proposed change(s)” with their behavior, and behavior drives results, the LeadQuest approach must be considered.
Culture Transformation
There is an old saying, “organizational culture eats strategy for lunch!” Leaders spend a significant amount of time researching and determining how to differentiate their company from the competition (i.e., creating a business strategy). They establish goals, priorities and initiatives to implement their strategy, and measures to keep score of how well they are executing it. What is often missing in this process is the “people factor.” In other words, people execute business strategies; their behaviors determine success or failure!
At LeadQuest, we define organizational culture as “learned patterns or habits of behavior.” If a company has a culture where 20% or more of its people are disengaged and don’t behave accountably (i.e., they are checked out), the successful execution of its strategy will be at risk and results will likely suffer. A key root cause of this phenomenon is that most business leaders focus their time and energy on achieving results and not on shaping the desired behaviors needed to produce them; i.e., they don’t focus on shaping the organizational culture required to drive the very results they desire. What is hard to understand about this is that, in practically every company, 100% of its business results are achieved through human behavior – what people say and do on a daily basis. Sadly, leaders view human behavior as being the “soft stuff” when, in fact, shaping productive habits of human behavior (i.e., culture) that drive high-performance is the “hard work” that requires leadership commitment, perseverance and a proven, evidence-based change methodology.
At LeadQuest, we have such a methodology and have been using it successfully for the past 25+ years to help business leaders and their companies achieve even greater results through culture transformation. Our 12-Step Culture Change Process is research based and provides a detailed roadmap for achieving sustainable change. Our process is based on the sciences of Applied Behavior Analysis and Cognitive Psychology; these disciplines, combined with research from the fields of Organization Development and Change Management make the LeadQuest approach a comprehensive and holistic one!