Services   >   Developing Leaders & Teams

Many consultancies and coaches offer leadership development. Most of these approaches focus on developing the individual in isolation, a common practice that comes from the view that leadership is exercised by special individuals.

Caliber’s research and practice has shown that this approach leads to a lot of wasted investment. When the isolated individual tries to implement new leadership practices, effectiveness is undermined by organizational procedures, systems or other barriers including peers and direct reports. However impressive the individual, his or her abilities and contributions are constrained by the people and processes working within the organization.

At Caliber, we develop leaders as part of a collective and key aspect of the organization’s system for leading. As a result, we don’t just focus on behaviour or skills; we look at the individual, the team and the organizational processes that are required to support their effectiveness. Our approach ensures that these elements – the people and the systems – are integrated into the growth of the leadership ability and impact throughout the organization. This distinctive approach ensures that we maximize your return on investment in leadership development.

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Leadership Team Development

At Caliber, we understand how to build and strengthen the effectiveness of leadership teams, whether the team is new, evolving or even, at times, dysfunctional. We offer customized solutions that focus on what your organization is trying to achieve while also considering your culture and the dynamics of how you, and your people actually work. We focus on practical, workable, effective solutions that you and your team can draw upon every day. Simple, sensible solutions that reflect the unique needs of your business.

We offer a range of customizable approaches and programs. The right approach for your team is determined by the current experiences of the team and the challenges or frustrations that you are facing as its leader:

Facilitation of Team Offsites / Retreats, Team Meetings
Development of Team Charters, Planning & Accountability Processes
Team Issue / Conflict Resolution
Eliminating Leadership Team Dysfunctions
Rapid Development for New Leadership Teams
High Performance Team Development
Achieving Team Potential (workshop)
Team Coaching

Discover which approach is right for you and your team by emailing us, [email protected]

Leadership Skill Development

Until recently, leadership development programs have been based on a predefined list of behavioral competencies that ensured the company achieved its desired outcomes, and that some degree of consistency of values and behavior existed amongst the ranks of leaders. Many leaders experience moderate degrees of success with these approaches, but without including the personality of the leader who is “behaving,” it is a model of trying to be a type of leader, instead of just being authentic. One size does not fit all.

At Caliber, we offer a variety of customized leadership development programs that challenge leaders to develop their authentic capacity from the inside out. We start with fostering self-awareness and challenging a leader’s preconceived ideas about what they should or should not be doing. We show them how to move past their own resistance and break habits, such as permissiveness, excessive collaboration, bullying or wanting to be liked, that undermine their effectiveness.

Unlike other programs that focus on teaching leadership skills, our model ensures leaders are challenged, held accountable for behavioural change, and able to tangibly increase their impact. We offer a wide range of customizable programs, focusing on a specific aspect of leadership that an organization needs to develop, to our more general Leadership101 program which includes a series of 2.5-hour workshops conducted every 2-3 weeks.

Leadership Alignment

Through times of difficult transition, rapid organizational evolution or growth, leaders need more than skill development or being told what to do. At Caliber, we understand that limited leadership capacity requires a more hands-on approach to leading leaders, through individual and group coaching, design and implementation of management systems and the facilitation of strategy development and execution.

Different from typical leadership development, this model recognizes that when leadership teams and practices in organizations are undeveloped or dysfunctional, the leaders need resources focused on leading them – directing, coaching, building skills, designing process, tools and facilitating the leadership teams through the normal stages of development – in order to make progress quickly, to close significant gaps, or address leadership risks associated with the strategic plan.

Lined Up Pawns - Different Leadership Styles

A key aspect of our approach is the integration of assessments to ensure understanding of individual and collective styles, approaches and the resulting dynamics. This allows leaders and teams to develop rapidly and address misaligned behaviours more readily. In addition, Caliber provides its clients with comprehensive measurement tools to understand the current reality of its leadership systems as well as to track progress and ROI of its leadership investments.

All of our leadership processes are customized to meet the organization where it is at, then move it towards the desired state. We focus our efforts on those activities that quickly provide tangible results and add value to the business.

Defining and building the culture that your organization needs to go from ‘good to great’ requires a behavioural approach to shifting the culture, rather than just relying on communication, training and /or changes to systems. Caliber’s approach recognizes this and addresses critical elements behind successful cultural change.

Leadership Coaching

Not all coaches are created equal. In a field that is unregulated and where anyone can profess to be an executive coach or to provide leadership coaching, finding a coach to meet the unique needs of executives and senior leaders, especially in entrepreneurial environments, can be challenging.

At Caliber, our coaches have significant business acumen as well as an understanding of organizational systems, culture and the context in which a leader works. This is in addition to having extensive training in emotional and social intelligence, psychological dysfunction, group dynamics, brain development and behavioural change. 

Because we specialize in working with CEOs, entrepreneurs and senior executives, our coaching is usually done in the context of organizational growth and change. Without the systems in place to support behavioural change in leaders, leadership coaching can fail to have any impact on implementing new behaviours. Our process involves scoping the context for the leader, and the assessment of their personality, beliefs and current practices before their coaching program begins.

Coaching at a distance...

Want to work with us but not located in the Toronto area? We provide coaching services by telephone or Skype. We use exactly the same process as in face-to-face meetings to ensure that the quality of our coaching services remains as high as ever.

Leadership Readiness Development

Effective leadership transition is not easy. It takes courage, commitment and creativity as well as objectivity to ready the next generation of leaders for progression. It also requires expertise in assessing leadership, defining requirements, determining development options and facilitating opportunities to test the ability of succession candidates to perform at the next level.

At Caliber, our focus is on developing the readiness of succession candidates and ensuring successful transition by providing candidates with the necessary experiences prior to advancement. We ensure that an objective perspective about the strengths, development needs, potential and readiness of individual leaders is at the forefront of all succession discussions and decisions.

As well, we appreciate that many of our clients struggle with having honest, objective discussions with their direct reports about career progression and what an individual leader needs to do to progress further. As a result, we conduct feedback sessions, define performance expectations and development plans to further facilitate the review of leadership talent within an organization.

Leadership Diagnostics

Before beginning any leadership initiative, Caliber conducts a comprehensive review of the current leadership climate and dynamics. We have a complete suite of leadership diagnostic tools including:

Leadership Style Assessments: using the Striving Styles™ Personality System, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) and Emotional Quotient Indicator® (EQ-i®), the personality styles and behavioural competence of the organization’s leadership can be examined.

Benchstrength Indicator: examines the leadership breadth and depth of the organization to support succession planning and growth. This may include a comprehensive leadership talent review based on organizational needs.

Leadership Systems Audit: looks at the people, processes and practices in place in the organization to deliver leadership to the business; rather than strictly examining skill, this audit considers the leadership model, infrastructure, talent systems and dynamics behind the organization’s leadership culture.

Business Team Assessing company data

360 Feedback Tools: gathers feedback on indicators of effective leadership based on Caliber’s standard approach which uses a double anchored scale for best results, or a customized model developed for the organization.

Employee Engagement: provides input from the employee perspective on the strengths, gaps and opportunities for enhancing leadership practices within the organization.

Leadership Relationship Indicator: specifically used for leadership team development; examines the nature of the relationships within the team, the stage of the team’s development and the underlying dynamics.

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Leadership
Anne Dranitsaris, Ph.D.

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