Leadership

Striking a balance between focusing on the excellence of the mission and focusing on the flourishing of your team members.

Mission

Training organizations to excel through the power of character-based leadership.

How many great bosses have you had?
What made them great versus good?
How did you respond or react to these great bosses?

Caring for Your People Personally

Awakening virtues and habitualizing virtuous actions is our first topic. Great leaders VALUE their teammates and the organization simultaneously, first and foremost, and certainly above themselves.

Caring for Your People Professionally

Goal #1: Teammates flourish personally and professionally. Goal #2: Organization pursues excellence. How to meet both these goals is our second topic.

Caring for the Mission and Execution

Coaching skills is our third topic. Great leaders stay engaged and coach their teammates and organizations over the long term.

Empowering the Team

Identifying and developing key skills are our fourth topic. Great leaders become and stay great by fine tuning their skills. Why? Because they motivated by their value system, their character, by seeing teammates flourish, and by seeing their organization progress toward excellence...and knowing that being more skillful helps teammates and the organization.

Character is the foundation to being a great leader

Character is a puzzle of virtues, and a virtue is an excellence of character. Virtues are: being patient, trustworthy, caring, temperate, honest, prudent, being courageous and having integrity. Virtues are elements of our overall value system. Character defines who we are, not what we do. What we do illuminates our character.

Who we are drives what we do!

Virtues (combined with character) define who we are! We all expect our leaders to be virtuous (honest, trustworthy, patient, courageous, caring, and have integrity), but we never think about it directly in those terms...if we expected our leaders to be "un-virtuous" (dishonest, un-trustworthy, impatient, uncaring, lacking of integrity, lacking courage, etc), we would probably not follow them. And neither would the people who follow us!

If we want real behavioral change, the fundamentals of who we are need to change first.

Changing the fundamentals of who are can be done two ways: awakening and fostering virtues and frequently practicing virtuous actions so that they become habitual and part of who we are.

FAQ

How is character developed in adults?
Developing character in adults is not easy. Developing character takes time. Sometimes a significant event in one's life has such an impact that it affects one's character. Recognizing those two points, TLI attempts to "awaken" critical character traits or virtues (excellences of character) like honesty, integrity, caring, and several others. We do this by looking at leaders who impacted us and discussing how we are emulating them.
How long is TLI's leadership development program?
TLI's leadership development can last as long as the leader wants. The program has three parts:

Part 1: addresses character and discusses the character traits (virtues) our teams naturally expect from us and goes about awakening those virtues so that we know ourselves better and are consciously working to develop those traits. This accomplished in a three to four hour seminar.

Part 2: looks at key activities that great leaders participate in that have very positive impacts on their teams. These activities are discussed from the team members' perspective as the recipient of the leader's actions. The idea here is for leader's to be aware of how team members react and respond to their leader's actions. In this way, the leaders grow to understand the actions they can take that have the biggest positive impacts on their teams. This accomplished in three-day seminar.

Part 3: provides coaching to leaders who have gone through Part 1 and Part 2. We all need to have someone come along and coach us tin honing our skills. Leaders need a coach to help them use what they learned from Parts 1 and 2 and to continually improve leadership skills.
Can leadership really be taught?
To a large degree, yes. Leadership skills can be identified, discussed, and role played. Long-term leadership capabilities have to be continually practiced and improved upon, and over time, these skills will become second nature. Developing one's leadership capabilities takes time and these skills mature and become second nature. Coaching can last as long as the leader is receiving benefits from the coaching sessions.