Update on Leading by DESIGN and LEAD 365

We’ve had an exciting year, and this seems like a good time to update all of you LEAD 365 alumni on how our purpose and vision is progressing.

I’m guessing that most of you remember our purpose/mission (the reason Leading by DESIGN exists), which is to make West Michigan the Silicon Valley of leadership. Our region ought to be filled with so many great leaders that the rest of the country starts to recognize that something real and special is happening here—beyond the already great things that people already see.

In order for this to become true, thousands of leaders will exhibit three things:

1. Each will be a person worth following. These are people who have integrity in their words and deeds and a love for others that is as strong as their drive for making their organization successful.
2. Each will do the hard work to develop an amazing team. They will hire really well. They will develop individuals really well. They will move people off their team when deemed appropriate and do it really well. And they will also develop their team as an overall unit with a healthy and productive culture.
3. Each will do the hard work of creating clarity for their organization’s purpose, values, and vision.

The vision we are pursuing, which will cause us to fully lean into our purpose, is to have one thousand participants in our LEAD 365 learning community by 2027.

Of course just achieving this goal won’t make our purpose happen. We not only have to have a thousand leaders participate in LEAD 365 by 2027 and benefit from the alumni activities that follow, but each participant will also have to exhibit the traits we covered in class:

• It’s easy to know that its important to listen, but it’s hard to become a good listener.
• It’s easy to know that people tend to be dysfunctional when systems get anxious, but it’s hard to learn to stay calm when your system is getting fizzy.
• It’s easy to understand that clear vision and values are important, but it’s really hard to figure out how to create them and then shape a culture that lives true to them.

The list goes on! At the end of the year we’ll send you our self-audit so you can assess how you’re doing in each of these topics—and the thirty other topics we cover in LEAD 365.

So, you may ask, how is our progress? Last March we launched three new cohorts of LEAD 365, and then in September we launched another four bringing us to a total of sixteen. This puts us one cohort ahead of the plan, which will get us to over a thousand participants by 2027.

Next March we will launch another four cohorts, maybe even five, which we will duplicate again next September. This growth is challenging us to create new systems and find new people to join our team.(Yes, I’m talking with someone right now about joining us in March—stay tuned). It’s been a great and worthy challenge and we’re excited for how we’re growing.

Assuming we can keep up our pace, which seems very possible at this stage of the game, the only question about our mission coming true is how are you, our alumni, doing at becoming the kind of leaders who will shine when compared to other leaders in our country? We can only assume that you are continuing to grow as leaders, just as we too are working to model the topics we teach. (Modeling what we teach is one of our ten core values.)

It turns out, you are as much a part of our purpose and vision as we are. We need you! As such, please let us know if there is something we can do that will help you continue your growth as an amazing leader.

Thank you for your commitment to our mission!
Rodg

Image by Tate Nations. Used under Public Domain Mark 1.0 license.