Leadership Development / Team Effectiveness

The Clearing offers customized leadership development programs, training, and executive coaching from certified leadership coaches and expert advisors as a catalyst or complement to individual and organizational transformation. The Clearing’s leadership development program and executive coaching support leaders in aligning their behaviors and actions with achieving the results that are most important to their long-term success and to the success of their organizations.

Our leadership development training serves different points in a leader’s growth – leaders in transition, leaders guiding organizational changes, leaders dealing with succession planning, as well as up-and-coming leaders, and high performers. We coach leaders one-on-one or with their teams to create greater awareness of their strengths and blind spots, increase their effectiveness, and achieve their goals and desired outcomes.

Our one-on-one and team leadership coaching can be coupled with our larger leadership development program. Leadership development is a key part of any large-scale organizational transformation.

The Clearing’s founder, Chris McGoff, wrote the book “The PRIMES: How Any Group Can Solve Any Problem” (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., © 2012). The PRIMES are patterns of behaviors that show up whenever groups of people gather together. These patterns are simple and consistent, unchanged by time or societal evolution. Groups and leaders can use The PRIMES as a shared language to effectively communicate and solve business problems in ambiguous and challenging environments.

Every leader has felt the effect of these patterns throughout their careers, but our research shows that only a few leaders have the resources to recognize, anticipate, and manage them. Unmanaged, the issues that are identified in The PRIMES will put any leadership agenda at risk. Mastered, The PRIMES will become a force that drives date-certain, intentional outcomes.

The Clearing’s consultants conduct interviews with organizations to determine their unique leadership challenges. We then design a customized PRIMES session to train leadership teams and their organizations with skills to lead and operate powerfully, master ambiguity, align fragmented teams and stakeholders, and design strategies that work.

Whenever groups get together, they often fail to reach the full potential of meeting outcomes, or even fail to come together at all on important initiatives. Participants may be unclear on the importance of why they are meeting, what their role is in the conversation, or if they can safely share their point of view. Oftentimes even when these elements have been made clear, participants may have competing priorities that are unknown and go unaddressed.

The Clearing views facilitation as the process of designing and running a successful meeting of the minds, and the management of a process to meet the goals of a group. We facilitate to unleash a series of powerful conversations that increase clarity about important issues. Our facilitated sessions allow participants to exchange information, engage in meaningful dialogue, and discuss actionable matters. In each session, The Clearing will work to balance the passion of the group, the agenda, and the leaders’ needs to guide the group to the intended outcome.

We facilitate senior leadership discussions, meetings and off-sites, as well as negotiations in, and across, organizations.

Graphic recording is the translation of conversations into images and text on large sheets of paper during meetings and events.  Seeing the essence of a conversation captured visually in real time, allows a group to quickly gain a shared perspective on what they are trying to accomplish and what is making it difficult.

Our graphic facilitation and recording services help to document and guide group conversations and key ideas in real time – allowing the group to see and understand complex concepts, flows of dialogue, decisions, agreements, and specific solutions. Our graphic facilitators produce shareable meeting renderings and documentation after each meeting. Our expert facilitators and designers integrate facilitation, interactive graphic recording, and client-tailored graphic templates to lead groups toward agreed-upon and outcome-based goals.