This is an elite training and coaching program for department heard and directors, offering a challenging curriculum with far-reaching implications for change and renewal. The program consists of a two-day Executive Retreat followed by monthly Directors’ Circle meetings. Participants make a six to eight-month commitment to the program.

Learning Outcomes

Overall, the Directors’ Circle works to create a culture of increased responsiveness and commitment. Specific program outcomes are crafted to meet your needs, and could include:

• Identify “quick wins” to mobilize change and ultimately, ensure the success of your strategic plan.
• Create an environment that supports Directors to effect change.
• Define cross-functional role relationships and improve coordination among departments.
• Increase accountability and ownership.
• Enhance skills: problem-solving; communicating effectively to get the outcomes you want with elected officials, citizens, and other stakeholders; negotiating fair outcomes in conflict situations; installing transformative change at the department level.
• Use leadership techniques that encourage employees to contribute more, and adapt more quickly to everyday changes and stress, while maintaining productive working relationships.

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for senior leaders, department heads and directors: CAO/City Manager, Chief Librarian, Police Chief, Chief Financial Officer, Fire Chief, Public Health Managers, and Commissioners. These senior managers want practical “just in time” solutions.

Program Content

• The Accountability-Based Organization; Management by Commitment – An accountability-based culture is one where employees know: 1) precisely what they’re responsible for, and 2) that you hold them accountable to get it done.
• Three Tier Management – A powerful concept that differentiates the accountabilities of your directors and the managers they manage, to enhance productivity while improving trust and job satisfaction.
• Appreciative Leadership – Based on the practices related to Appreciative Inquiry, the cooperative search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them.
• The Atom of Work – This robust tool clarifies the “Language for Action” to make the commitments we make to each other more visible, ensure that stakeholders have shared an interest in the matter at hand, and improves the effectiveness and efficiency of work. It also provides a shared vocabulary that is easy and intuitive to acquire.
• Gap Analysis – This intuitive and easy to use tool allows users to identify specific next steps to close the six possible gaps: satisfaction, value, do things right, do the right thing, process and change.
• Leadership and Employee Engagement Skills Inventory – Evaluate current working relationships with staff and supervisors, and apply new productivity-building techniques into the workplace immediately.
• Chunk Outline – It is possible to create a document or presentation in half the time people are taking now, and double the chances for a successful outcome.
• Ideas that Stick – Anyone can consistently create messages that are “sticky”: remembered and acted upon. Simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories make the difference.
• Curiosity: the Art of Probing – The “secret” tool that diffuses potential difficult situations, especially in presentations to challenging audiences.
• Switch: Leading Immediate and Lasting Change – A results-focused step-by-step tool that enables leaders to identify the most powerful and highly-leverageable actions to take immediately; quickly overcome emotional barriers; and, shape a path to a new way of behaving and working.

Contact us for additional information.