ABOUT GIFTED LEADERS LLC

OUR APPROACH

Gifted Leaders is a collaborative and diverse network of talented coaches and consultants who can help you realize individual and collective potential. We’re known for our emphasis on a positive, strengths-based, team approach that capitalizes on the power of coaching and strategic collaboration.

Our unique approach means we understand that learning to become an effective leader starts with examining your beliefs and assumptions about leadership and evaluating your current leadership mindset. It requires curiosity, a willingness to ask questions instead of giving out answers, and a commitment to do the reflective work required of all successful leaders who realize that leadership development is an “inside-out” journey.

WE'LL HELP YOU WITH ...

Finding personal fulfillment.

We believe that successful people don’t set out to be successful. Success ensues when they pour their lives into things that matter to them. They don’t settle for doing what they don’t love. They turn their passion into performance, likely agreeing with John Wesley’s statement, “Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come from miles around to watch you burn.” Success has to do with becoming aligned with a cause that’s greater than the individual.

Achieving professional success.

We believe that extraordinary people, teams, and organizations are simply ordinary people doing extraordinary things that matter to them. The message here is that you have it within you to live an extraordinary life. You have the choice to embrace a personally meaningful journey, integrating your personal and professional lives in ways that make a lasting difference. And when you do that, you have the potential to create an organization and a legacy that can serve the world long after you’re gone.

Making a lasting difference.

We believe that healthy, sustainable societies require the creation of healthy, sustainable organizations, and great organizations and societies can only be built by human beings who can grow and create meaningful success.

Becoming a better leader.

Effective leadership is a journey, not a destination. On your leadership journey, we’ll serve as your expedition guide, walking side-by-side with you through unfamiliar country. We’ll help you to:

Become an authentic, values-driven leader who is experienced as genuine and honest by others and who inspires confidence from them. This involves being open to the influence of others and fostering an environment of safety and trust.
Develop emotional intelligence and effective interpersonal communication skills.
Understand and act on a new metaphor for leadership - symphony - where the goal is to have “all voices sounding together.” Beautiful music results when each individual musician comes together and functions cooperatively to achieve a common purpose. Leaders must learn to tap into the collective intelligence represented in any group of people while bringing out each person’s unique gifts and talents. They orchestrate movement from “me” to “we.”
Take a more “coach-like” approach to leadership. This means moving away from the old “command and control” paradigm to a style where leadership is equally distributed throughout the team or organization thus creating a culture of true empowerment.
Equip teams and organizations to have “conversations that matter,” conversations about who they are “being” together, not just what they are “doing” together. In the process, better relationships lead to better results.
Connect people to something much larger and more meaningful than themselves. Leadership is about creating meaning.
Be a boundary crosser and bridge builder, having the ability to handle creative tension and paradox. Today’s leaders must learn to reject either/or choices and become masters of the “both/and”, seeking multiple options and blended solutions. The ability to make big leaps of thought is a common denominator among originators of breakthrough ideas.

Creating sustainable personal change and transformation.

The effectiveness of most educational “experiences” has little to do with the student; it is mostly about the teacher’s communication abilities as evidenced by student’s test scores. Unfortunately, we have very little evidence that academic or conferential learning actually changes behavior. The issue has to be whether any life transformation is occurring! Is there any evidence of personal development? Are learners committed to making behavioral changes, interacting with other learners, being open to coaching and accountability, and being an active participant in their own life learning?!

Facilitating sustainable change and transformation for teams and in organizations.

In a connected, relational economy the key to individual success is no longer an individual matter – it’s about teams. So why shouldn’t our educational methodology match up to the challenge that confronts us all – working with other people to accomplish work and life? The development process preferably should involve other people. Other people provide the challenge to character development, especially if their personalities or ideas are very different from our own. Team learning environments are a powerful forum for both individual and collective growth.

In today’s organizational settings, the complexity of tasks, the interdependence of functions, and the rapid pace of change make it important, if not crucial, that people work well with each other through an entire team or organization. High performance teams make this necessary communication and collaboration seem seamless.

WE DIFFERENTIATE OURSELVES BY ...

Serving as your personal “learning facilitator,” helping you in framing your learning agenda and discovering appropriate learning opportunities.

The academic model for the last several hundred years involved an expert (teacher) who had information and disseminated it to less-informed people (students). This was the basic plot that developed into millions of episodes of death-by-lecture, and more recently, death-by-PowerPoint.

This story line is increasingly disintegrating. Students can now obtain more information over the internet overnight than a teacher can deliver in lecture form in a month’s time. The issue now is learning, how to make sense out of and apply all the information that is available. The agenda is more and more being set by the learner.

Facilitating your learning through coaching.

The curriculum-driven and text-driven approach to learning is deeply ingrained in us but, think about it, if the world could be changed through class-room training and seminars, wouldn’t it have happened a long time ago?! In today’s world, the curriculum approach to helping people grow is increasingly viewed as a supplemental strategy to another approach: learning agendas driven by practical life issues and informed by life experiences. Take Jesus for example. He facilitated spiritual formation in his disciples by introducing them to life situations and then helping them debrief their experiences. He taught them to pray. He did not lead them in a study course on prayer. He took them on mission trips; he didn’t read books to them on the subject of missions. You get the idea.

Being a “thinking partner”, helping you evaluate your choices and develop your leadership mindset.

Helping people grow is about unpacking life: challenging our emotional responses that are destructive (envy, bitterness, malice); challenging our biases (prejudice, social and economic elitism, intellectual snobbery); challenging our assumptions (believing that “my needs are the most important” or ascribing negative intent to the actions of others); challenging our responses; unpacking our frustrations, our hopes, our dreams, and our disappointments; actively examining our behaviors and actions, rather than just teaching about them.

More About GL - Our Vision, Mission, and Values

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