THE ART OF LEADERSHIP GROUP COACHING PROGRAM
The Art of Leadership Program takes a cohort of leaders through six months of workshops, coaching and practice in the fundamental skills that they need to be highly effective now, and that set a strong foundation for their future.
I coach emerging and established leaders in the tech world every day. In my operational career, I spent twenty years as an engineer, manager and executive in successful software startups.
The Program focusses on the skillsets that regularly show up in my coaching practice as foundational for Director and Executive level leadership.
The Goal is to greatly accelerate the growth that happens naturally, but haphazardly and slowly, in a leadership position. The end result is a cohort of leaders who are fluent in a set of fundamental tools and techniques, who share a common language of leadership, and who can be radically more effective now, and into the future.
WORKSHOPS: THE SKILLSETS
One workshop per month (2-4 hours), on the following topics, for six months. Work continues between workshops with a mobile app facilitating homework, preparation and mentoring.
MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP
Management and leadership are different, and you need both.
The crucial job of a leader: providing clarity - the what, why and how of the work for the team.
Self-reflection on current skills.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The EQ model: self-awareness - what it is, and how to get it.
Self-management: how to separate from our instinctive reactions,
How EQ permeates the leadership role.
FEEDBACK
The Feedback Paradox: why Feedback is necessary, but hard to do.
Feedback models: giving and receiving. Situation, behavior, impact.
The EQ of feedback: personal barriers to feedback.
DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS
Models of difficult conversation: emotion vs logic, what lies beneath the words.
Getting to “shared truth”
EQ in hard conversations: self-management when things get difficult.
COACHING VS DIRECTING
The difference between coaching and directing.
When to coach, when to direct.
How to have a coaching conversation: open questions, the power of listening.
PRESENCE & AUTHENTICITY
What is presence? How to develop our own personal version.
Authenticity and presence: building an authentic voice.
ADDITIONAL TOPICS
The topic set can be customized to suit the specific needs of the group and company. Additional emphases might include:
trust, risk-taking, listening, accountability and others.
Additional one on one coaching can be added for each cohort member to personalize and emphasize the work.
FOUNDATIONS
Each workshop, and follow-on set of homework, is built on two fundamentals: Emotional Intelligence, and Practical Tools. The two approaches work together: the Practical Tools suggest mechanisms, Emotional Intelligence builds the skills necessary to make the tools work.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Leadership is about people. The Emotional Intelligence model is foundational in providing an understanding of the self and relationships to other people at work.
The Program devotes a workshop and a month’s practice to the Emotional Intelligence model, and then returns to it in each subsequent workshop, looking at how Emotional Intelligence underlies every area of a Leader’s work.
PRACTICAL TOOLS
The cohort is expected to leave each workshop with a set of language around a topic, a collection of practical tools they can use, and experience in practicing with those tools.
The tools are selected from a wide body of material and are usually the simplest possible ones that work!
They are designed to be practiced, remembered and used.
SUPPORT
Learning happens through repetition, the experience of practice in real work situations, and “social learning” in community. The Program is supported by a micro-learning app which supports “classic” learning in the workshops in preparation, practice and community between workshops.
PREPARATION
Short video lessons, reading and light- weight tests are available before the workshops, so learners start with familiarity with the material.
COMMUNITY
Between workshops, learners keep in touch with each other through the app, or Slack, so can share their experiences work with new approaches.
PRACTICE
Each workshop ends with “homework” assignments, which are set up as further, trackable, “micro- courses” in the app.
JOE DUNN - WHO I AM
I’m a leader, mentor and coach with over twenty years of experience in fast-moving software startups.
Three became successful public companies, and fourth sold for $250M+
My experience covers everything from being one of “three guys in a room” to an officer of a public company. (And a traveling surf bum, barely capable yoga student, skilled improv performer, and twenty-five year student of meditation).
I coach leaders of all kinds (CEOs, CTOs, Engineers, Sales, Marketing) in rapidly-growing tech companies in San Francisco and the Bay Area, from seed-size to “unicorns”.
