Many contemporary leadership models obscure the essential actions necesssary to create "high performance" environments.

Leaders either build trust through personal accountability, ethical conduct, and integrity - or erode it through actions, decisions, and behavior that do not align with the core values.

Crane Consulting offers the following consulting services:

Coaching Cultures | Team Performance | Leadership Development

Leadership Development

Crane Consulting delivers custom-designed learning and alignment workshops for all levels of leadership teams – from executives to and including first line supervisors. Depending on your needs, we offer engagements as short as a weekend retreat and up to a year-long series of workshops.

In our work with leaders, teams, and organizations, we stress three competencies for leaders to become conscious and effective at leading the teams that they have the privilege of leading:

• Set the Strategic Course
• Role Model Cultural Values
• Coach for Development and Performance

We all have read books on leadership that profile qualities and characteristics of outstanding leaders. Many contemporary leadership models obscure the essential actions necessary to create “high performance” environments. We distill the following model for Effective Contemporary Leadership

1. Leaders Set the Strategic Course of the organization – as collaboratively as possible – because they know: people support what they create. If all decisions are imposed from the top – commitment and creativity suffer. The best they can get from people is “compliance” and that is insufficient for sustained success. A ‘command & control’ style may achieve short term efficiency, but does not foster long-term capacity.
   
   The Course is composed of strategic layers that put the flesh on the bones and can serve to inspire high-performance – Purpose, Vision, Mission, Strategy, Objectives, Prioritized Goals, and Action Plans. The ‘heavy lifting’ for leaders is getting all of this defined and into vertical and horizontal alignment.
   
   
2. Leaders are the Role Models of the cultural values – they teach by their actions – consciously and unconsciously. They set the tone, pace, and expectations for the entire culture. Their self-awareness and willingness to become positive role models becomes critical to their effectiveness.
   
   Leaders either build trust through personal accountability, ethical conduct, and integrity – or erode it through actions, decisions, and behavior that do not align with the core values. Trust – the currency of leadership – hangs in the balance.
   
   
3. Leaders Coach (provide developmental and performance feedback) to build people’s confidence, competencies and their capacity to sustain their contribution to the organization. Coaching is simultaneously a long and short-term vs. an either/or proposition. We broadly and expansively advocate what it means to be a coach – significantly that one “shows up” as a coach vs. learns coaching “techniques” to use on people.
   
   Our book, “The Heart of Coaching” introduces the mental model for leaders to move from being THE BOSS OF PEOPLE to THE COACH FOR PEOPLE. It shows how to create coaching partnerships and organize and conduct coaching conversations that lead to inspired action that both the coach and the coachee can support.
   
   The leader’s robust coaching ‘agenda’ becomes all of the team competencies contained in our team effectiveness model – “The 7 C’s of High-Performance Teams” – Course, Commitment, Communications, Character, Change & Creativity, Collaboration, Coaching.