Peter Bregman

• What’s your industry? What are your organization’s priorities?
• What’s your company’s recent history? What’s it’s culture?
• Who are your colleagues on the leadership team?
• What are the challenges your employees are facing?
• Where are you in the hierarchy?
• What are your strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions?

Even in a group setting, our leadership work is specific to each individual, situation, and organization.

2. Leadership is about making choices and taking risky actions. Sitting in the safety of a classroom thinking about leadership doesn’t help people become better leaders. The real challenge of leadership is the challenge of behavior. It’s the challenge of making, following through on, and learning from hard choices and complex decisions.

• When push comes to shove are you willing to take the difficult and risky actions necessary to grow your organizations?
• Are you willing to commit to a big idea?
• Are you willing to push a risky strategy through to execution?

Our leadership work focuses on taking difficult actions, with support, inside and outside of the classroom.

3. Leadership is personal. There is little difference between who you are as a person and who you are as a professional. Leaders bring their whole selves to work and are adept at managing all different aspects of themselves. Leadership is not just a mental challenge, it’s emotional, physical, and even spiritual.

• Do you know what you are feeling at any given moment?
• When you feel strongly about someone or something, are you able to unpack the emotion?
• Are you able to identify what’s going on and distinguish between a trigger and useful data?
• Do you know your limits and move through your activities with energy and presence?

You can bring all parts of yourself to our leadership work.

4. Leadership is about relationships. Your ability to lead is directly related to your ability to connect with others, inspire them, and motivate their action. Leaders know how to develop the kinds of relationships that build loyalty and commitment in those around them.

• Do you trust yourself enough to act courageously?
• Do you accept and appreciate others as they are, bringing out their best without trying to fundamentally change them?
• Are you willing to be vulnerable?
• Are you committed more to the collective than you are to your own interests?

Our leadership week operates in a group setting so participants can experiment with, gain insight from, and be challenged by their colleagues in real ways.

We strongly encourage people to attend with their colleagues. When people who work together risk being real and vulnerable in front of each other in the program, then they’re far more likely to be real with each other and take appropriate risks at work after the program. The dividends in terms of collaboration, transference, and changed behavior are huge. That’s how learning moves from the classroom to real life. And that’s what we care about.

To encourage people to attend with their colleagues, we are providing a discount of $500 per person for multiple people from the same organization.

And, when we need to, we’ll go deeper. For example, at a recent workshop, one CEO talked about how, even though she knows her team is capable, she avoids delegating. And now she is exhausted from carrying the weight of her company, saving everyone from making mistakes, and doing their work for them.

Here’s where it got interesting: she didn’t just talk about her exhaustion; she felt it. Soon, she began to speak about her brother who killed himself years earlier and her regret at not being able to save him.

It soon became evident that, unable to save her brother, she is trying to save everyone else, a habit that is draining her and could prevent her company from succeeding. How much more powerful would the CEO be if she could convey her trust for her very capable people, delegating with the confidence that they will accomplish their tasks?

This is not a leadership knowledge issue. She already knows everything there is to learn about delegation. But until she faces — not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally — that she couldn’t save her brother, all the delegation skills in the world will not help her.

Being a great leader. What makes you a great leader?

Creating a self-motivating culture. How are you leading to get the most out of people’s internal drive?

Building an independently capable team. How can you help people learn, think, and act for themselves?

Clarifying the roadmap for success. What are your explicit and implicit expectations and how can you best communicate them?

Influencing strategically. Who do you need to persuade, about what, and how can you approach it most effectively?

Flexing your leadership style. How do you show up and how can you flex your style to be most effective?

Leading change and gaining ownership. How can you get the right people to take accountability for the change you are leading?

Getting the right things done. How can you reorganize, re-prioritize, and react more efficiently to achieve your objectives and the needs of the business?

Conveying the right messages in the right ways. What’s your plan for making sure you communicate with the right people in the right way with the right timing?

Managing conflict and difficult situations. How can you resolve conflict in ways that build commitment and enthusiasm amongst everyone involved?

I want us to understand ourselves – and each other – better. I want us to develop the courage to live our lives in ways that make us proud and ways that support ourselves, the people around us, and the world. I want us to stop getting in our own, and each other’s, way with clumsy communication. And to be strong enough – in skill and in confidence – to navigate each other’s clumsy communication without getting thrown off balance. I want us to develop patience, empathy, clarity, and caring. I want to us to feel – to know – that none of us is alone in our fears and our dreams and I want us to draw strength and conviction from knowing that.

I want us to take chances and fail and get up again. And I want us to understand – or at least consider – what’s important enough to do, that we are willing to fail in pursuit of it. I want us to feel our own emotions deeply and become comfortable sitting with each other’s emotions – even if that means anger directed at us. I want us to experience rising above our emotions – not repressing them – but acting deliberately while in full feeling of them – to do things we know are right even if we are afraid or uncertain. And I want that to engender a deep trust in ourselves and in the people around us. All of this is part of being a leader.

I want us to be real human beings – with cracks and challenges and emotions – and to stand strong as leaders, not despite our humanness but because of it.

That’s the world I want to live in. Those are the leaders I want to lead with. That’s what I want to help create in our week together.

He is the author, most recently, of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, winner of the Gold medal from the Axiom Business Book awards, named the best business book of the year on NPR, and selected by Publisher’s Weekly and the New York Post as a top 10 business book. He is also the author of Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change and co-author of five other books. Featured on PBS, ABC, and CNN, Peter is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, National Public Radio (NPR), Psychology Today, and CNN as well as a weekly commentator on Fox Business News.

Peter began his career teaching leadership on wilderness and mountaineering expeditions and then moved into the consulting field with the Hay Group and Accenture, before starting Bregman Partners in 1998. Peter has advised CEO and senior leaders in many of the world’s premier organizations.

Peter bases his work on the notion that an organization, at its core, is a platform for talent. By unleashing that talent, aligning it with a compelling vision, and focusing it on business results, both the individual and the organization thrive. Since 1989, Peter has trained and coached all levels of management and individuals to recognize their leadership, exhibit leadership behaviors, model and stimulate change, and foster their own development and growth as well as that of their teams and colleagues.