On an early Florida winter morning, January 18th 2020 to be exact, our dream became a reality. Seven young leaders trusted us enough to commit to one Saturday morning a month, 6-8 hours of prep, and a monthly one-on-one coaching session. We had our first LEADERSHIPTEN cohort. We interviewed approximately fifteen young leaders, but we saw something in these seven that said, “this is the perfect time and place for them to be.” Our participants were thrilled to be selected. Programs like these normally cost $5,000-7,000 and LEADERSHIPTEN’s model was, and is, to do it for free!
We had our purpose, vision and mission and the beginnings of a plan. And now we had a group of people who were eager to grow as leaders. We had a banker, Director of Admissions at a Christian School, C.F.O of a large cabinet company, an Air Force Pilot, Interior Designer, a realtor, and a local school district leader. We were off!
We knew self-leadership was a missing piece for us when we were just starting out many years ago. The more we talked, the clearer it became, this is where we must begin.
Each leader completed a behavioral assessment prior to that first session. They were given several hours of reading material, which included a couple of chapters of Mark’s book “Setup” and Robb’s published article, “Leadership Economics.” We spent that first day talking about their definitions of leadership and success and what personal values are and how they affect leadership. They were given a values exercise to complete before their first coaching session.
Now that we’ve facilitated this session many times with both new and experienced leaders, throughout our cohorts and business clients, this session is the one that stops leaders in their tracks. They’ve never thought about it. From their reactions at that first session, we knew we had found one of the weak areas of leader development, and it is an area we are very passionate about!
We all have values, but the majority of leaders have never taken the time to distill their values down to find those five to six, core values that truly shape us as individual, as leaders. It’s not LEADERSHIPTEN’s goal to tell people what their core values are, we just believe that knowing our own core values affords leaders the opportunity to live and lead authentically around those values. It’s also a huge exercise in understanding why people are so different—everyone has a different set of core values.
Yes, that first session was powerful! As were the subsequent ones. We’ve learned a lot in the last year–starting a company in the midst of Covid isn’t for sissies! We truly believe we are learning more than our young leaders and clients. With that learning comes growth, improvement and proprietary content for us to share with future cohorts and clients.
As you may have guessed “being who we needed when we were younger” is at the heart of our core values!