The Challenge: Technical training alone doesn’t build the leaders we need.
Too often, leadership development focuses on teaching observable behaviors and skills without addressing the deeper personal obstacles holding leaders back. Leaders who apply technical fixes to adaptive challenges—those that require a shift in the way we see ourselves and the world—will not make long term, sustainable impact (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002).
The Solution: Go beyond technical skills to develop emotional intelligence.
Our approach operationalizes the concepts of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management from Goleman’s (1995) work on emotional intelligence—and is centered around personal values. This provides leaders with a road map for shifting the way that they see themselves and their roles in order to address adaptive challenges and make sustainable impact.
The 5 Square Methodology
Our 5 Square framework effectively operationalizes emotional intelligence, making it accessible to leaders in a way that they can apply in their day-to-day work. The model is anchored in core values—why we care and what drives us—because we believe that our values are the source of our power as leaders and human beings. Our job as coaches and facilitators is not to teach others how to lead, but to surface the power that they already have in their core.
The left half of the 5 Square focuses on self—what we need to know about ourselves and how we show up before we ever engage with others. This helps us explore and manage below-the-surface internal obstacles to development that we are likely unaware of, and that are connected to deeply-ingrained self-limiting mindsets and behaviors. The top right quadrant, social awareness, focuses on what we need to know about others—gathering data—before we take action. Finally, the lower right quadrant, relationship management, traditionally the primary focus of many leadership development approaches, guides us to engage others to reach our goals.