Leadership and Professional Development
What type of leader do You want to be?
Don’t expect the company to hand you a development plan. You need to take responsibility for developing yourself."
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David Dillon – CEO, Kroger
Let's talk about Leadership and Professional Development
Debbie established her learning and development business to help you to thrive at work. She believes that every professional, regardless of their leadership position, needs to master leadership skills to be successful in their careers.
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Debbie specializes in professional development that builds essential soft leadership skills and competencies, such as communications, assertiveness, executive presence, and emotional intelligence.
Depending on your own requirements, development can be achieved via executive coaching and / or classroom based training.
Browse through the sections below to help you focus in on your own development needs and how she can best serve you:
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Leadership and Professional Development
Leadership is as individual as the leaders who embody it and the situations they face. As such, there is no "one size fits all" approach to leadership development.
Fortunately, there is consensus over key attributes common to great leaders, such as open communication skills, the ability to influence people and situations effectively, the learning agility to leverage previous experience in novel situations, and emotional effectiveness in interpersonal and social interactions.
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When Debbie first starts to work with you, she will spend time talking with you to understand your business challenges and unique development needs. Working together closely, we will identify the learning and development objectives and design the most appropriate learning solutions. The process may include gathering further information and using assessment tools or surveys to refine the goals and plans. The solutions generated to meet those needs will be as unique to you as your situation. The breadth of options are extensive, including recommended training programs, individual coaching, self-guided learning or different work experiences.
Once a plan has been formulated, Debbie continues to partner with you while the plan is executed and evaluated.
All of us have the spark of leadership in us, whether it is in business, in government, or as a nonprofit volunteer. The challenge is to understand ourselves well enough to discover where we can use our leadership gifts to serve others."
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Ann Fudge – CEO and Chairman,
Young & Rubicam
Keeping abreast of leadership topics
Debbie ensures that her leadership and professional development services are robustly grounded in research and established theory and practice rather than responding to the latest fads.
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As leadership trends emerge, Debbie turns to trusted sources, such as the Center for Creative Leadership, the International Coaching Federation, Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Harvard Business Review for reliable information and resources that will stand the test of time.
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As a business owner, Debbie makes considered choices for investment in her own professional development. She carefully researches the most useful and effective assessment tools before she gains certification and recommends them to her own clients.
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Let Debbie leverage her experienced and pragmatic approach so that you don't have to do all the preparatory work!
Popular leadership development topics
Clients work with Debbie, in individual coaching and classroom settings, to help them master many areas of leadership, including the following:
Communicating with clarity
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Communicating with ease and confidence to achieve mutual wins
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Presenting powerfully in public
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Building strong networks and business relationships
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Building high performing teams
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Creating strong collaborative cultures of trust and respect
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Encouraging respectful candid conversations
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Holding people accountable
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Motivating and inspiring a team to work together towards success
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Coaching others to help them realize their own potential
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Providing constructive feedback to promote growth
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Leadership brand
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Honing your authentic executive presence
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Developing consistency between your core values and actions
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Managing yourself and your reputation ethically
Managing change
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Leading people through organizational change while maintaining engagement and productivity
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Helping people process change in a healthy way
Assertiveness at work - Learning how to comfortably behave assertively in more situations with more people
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Speaking up in meetings or with senior managers
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Saying no when you need to
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Working effectively with co-workers who are aggressive or very passive
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Personal effectiveness and time management
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Mastering the art of time management
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Getting yourself organized at work
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Emotional intelligence and emotional effectiveness
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Developing self-awareness and self-management
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Leveraging self-awareness and self-management in your social interactions
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Managing yourself in times of stress
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Managing your decision making under stress
Influence
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Building your internal and external professional networks
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Influencing without formal authority
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Levering your listening to build collaborations
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Learning agility
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Develop habits of reflection and self-evaluation that help you learn from and leverage previous success and failure
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Develop an openness and eagerness to learn new approaches and tackle novel situations
When the 75 members of Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness."
Discovering Your Authentic Leadership, George, Sims, McLean and Mayer
HBR Press, Emotional Intelligence Series, Authentic Leadership
