Are you the leader you always wanted to be?

Click here to download a printable version of the Lead Like an Expert Program explanation

To become the leader you want to be is essential to both your own success and to your organization’s success. Yet, every day is another set of derailing challenges and blazing fires to extinguish. As an owner or executive, spending time on yourself seems like a luxury you can ill afford.Yet to become the leader you want to be takes an extraordinary focus on your own growth, a focus based on what the highest performing leaders do every day.

As an owner or executive, you need a leadership pathway, direction and focus that actually works. You know how hard it is to find out exactly how to lead your organization to the highest performance levels you and your team deserve. Even so, as a leader you may stumble, head down dead ends, or find yourself back where you started. We all do it!

Why do you need to become an expert leader?

In the absence of expert leadership skills, you suffer because you know your team can do so much better. You may have great people, but something is lacking.

Without expert leadership skills, you experience sub par performance and unexpected profit drops. Without high-performance leadership, profits shrink and expected growth never occurs. Everyone becomes frustrated including you. I’ve seen it in my customers, and I bet you have seen it in yours.
Without expert leadership capabilities, you end up taking on more and more of the work and feel less satisfied doing so. You work late and on weekends making up for what your staff fails to do. You feel bad because your team is already overloaded so you pile more and more on your own plate. You’re headed for burnout.
Without expert leader skills, your people don’t feel the same passion for your business as you do. When problems occur, they throw up their hands – blaming others or simply giving up. You want your people to feel the same ownership, the same feeling that the buck stops here, as you do. Yet that passion is missing, and you feel frustration.

What you want instead

You want a fully engaged team that has a powerful passion for your business. You want problem solvers who take on challenges without you having to ask.
You want to focus on and grow your business. You want time to move your business to the next level – stop having to put out fires and stop being the stand-in when employees don’t get it done.
You want to take your organization to the next level and higher. You want to move from mediocre performance to the highest levels of effectiveness, profitability, growth, and expert performance. You want your business to grow to match the dreams you had when you started it.

So what do you do now and how do you make it all happen?

‘Lead Like an Expert’ – the Expert Leader Program

‘Lead Like an Expert’, the expert leader program, is a nine-month program focused on owners, executives and their team. It is designed specifically to create highly functioning leadership teams that trust, embrace conflict and hold each other accountable for expert performance results. The program teaches the powerful skills that leaders need to be top performers.

‘Lead Like an Expert’ combines multiple approaches that ensure sustained leadership growth, change and learning. Using a combination of focused workshops and individual coaching, you experience business changing insights that forever alter the way your team leads and performs.

Why ‘Lead Like an Expert’, the expert leader program, is unique

We emphasize strengths. Our program stops the “weaknesses” madness and puts the energy of you and your team’s strengths to work so you function at your best. Your entire leadership career as well as your team’s has been a lifetime of overcoming weaknesses and only infrequent acknowledgements of your incredible strengths. This is wrong – you know it, and research confirms it. The strengths of you and your team compel you forward, not your weaknesses.

‘Lead Like an Expert’ uses the power of your leadership team to create the needed change and elevated performance you expect. Many leaders feel a sense of loneliness – they are the only ones who “get it." You are not alone. Our program promotes complete team buy-in essential to expert leader performance. In contrast to traditional executive coaching, we engage your entire team not just one or two people. With your whole team involved, you move much more rapidly down the path of true top performance and quickly realize powerful performance gains.

‘Lead Like an Expert’ offers insightful one on one executive coaching for you, the owner or executive leader. In combination with team events and workshops, you receive individual coaching that enables you to more effectively grow your team and move your organization forward. You learn more of the seemingly magical capabilities of Expert Leaders all in the context of applying these secrets to your own team.

Our program is research based. Unlike other programs, ‘Lead Like an Expert’ is based on twenty years of research on Expert Performance Leadership. Our proprietary Leadership Inventory helps you to tap into your emerging leadership strengths. We have uncovered the remarkable differences that make a difference between ordinary leaders and the very, very best. You get the benefit of that research, the many shortcuts and amazing capabilities of expert leaders taught and experienced in an action based setting.

The main benefits of ‘Lead Like an Expert’

Here’s what you should expect from the program:

You will experience performance growth. You will realize overall performance growth, whether marked by increased revenue, profit, or other measures; your team efforts become more streamlined and more effective, spending less and less time on meaningless activities that fail to advance your business. Important goals are achieved on time.
Your team will focus on solutions and problem solving. Your team will stop the blame game and take responsibility and ownership for its problems. It solves its problems without your intervention.
You will find more time to work on your business and not in your business. You will experience less need to focus on diversions like emergencies and firefighting and more time on tasks that significantly grow your organization.
You will find expert leaders spread through your organization. Not only will your team grow its leadership skills, your organization’s culture will become more solutions oriented and performance focused as new capabilities spread throughout your organization. You increase engagement, retention, and overall organization performance.

What’s in the ‘Lead Like an Expert’ program?

We use a multi-staged approach to create high-performance outcomes:

Discovery and Focus. We begin by exploring with your team what they believe are strengths and challenges of your part of the organization. Through team conversations, you capture your powerful strengths as well as uncover frustrations that prevent high performance. These frustrations become topics during stages 3 and 4.
Measurement. Using our proprietary expert leader skill inventory, we benchmark you and your team against our 50+ item expert performance Leadership Strengths Inventory. We identify the team’s top strengths as well as those that are emerging. These emerging strengths become a basis for additional Expert Leader development in stage four below.
Five steps to a cohesive and powerful team. During this stage, we engage with you and your team in five two-hour expert leader sessions held every other week all designed to emphasize cohesiveness, high function, high-performance and top team achievement. Each executive training session engages you and your team in interactive exercises and discussion on topics such as team trust, conflict, accountability and results. Each session includes a focus on real time issues related to each topic.
Performance stage. During this stage, each two-hour executive training session builds on the previous foundation of the five steps to a cohesive team. By using actual challenges and/or unmet goals, we address each outstanding issue, create a pathway to success, and solve vexing existing problems. Each session includes a focus on one of the emerging Expert Performance Leadership skills uncovered through our Leadership Skills Inventory.

‘Lead Like an Expert’ program bonuses

Individualized executive coaching. We include individual leadership coaching for you the owner or executive of your organization as a component of the program. In part through your executive coaching process, we help you to create a powerful personal dream, a compelling vision, a serious plan and a high-performance team that explosively launches you to the highest levels. Your commanding future will draw you to it so completely that nothing else will be acceptable. Not only will you be drawn to it, you will have the tools and plans you need to reach it.

As part of the executive coaching program, you can also include key team members to participate in leadership coaching. You have the option to select individualized coaching for other members of your team who can benefit from one on one development.

Recommended reading. As we progress through the program, we recommend optional reading that assists in you and your team’s personal growth. Included are books, articles, and web publications.

Is the "Lead Like an Expert', the Expert Leader Program, right for you?

This program is particularly valuable for small to mid-sized organizations. Our clients who benefit most from this program lead 30 to 400 people. Owners and executives, who find themselves particularly frustrated by slowing growth or profitability, discover that our program reverses these lagging indicators.

We’ve worked in many industries. Your business is unique but most of the leadership issues you have recur across multiple organizations. You are not alone.

What about you? We work best with clients who are passionate about growing and improving their organizations. They are innovative, creative, collaborative and embrace hard work. They look inward to their processes and team leadership and create powerful outward changes that grow performance. If you wish to take your leadership to the next level, work more on your business, and create a top-notch team, we are likely what you are looking for.

What do you do next?

You should consider this program if you are frustrated that you are not getting the results that you want from your team and your organization. You want to spend more time working on your business and not having to put out fires and handle emergencies.

I invite you to contact me personally for a complimentary ‘Lead Like an Expert’ strategy session. This is a no-obligation hour long session and a way to find out more about the program, whether what we offer meets your needs, and whether there is a good fit between us. You’re sure to come away from our meeting with at least one or two great expert performance skills that you can practice.

During the session, we find out what strengths you and your team have and what challenges you face. You will understand whether the two of us and your team will be able to work together. You can contact me personally, Vince Racioppo, at 847 831 3182, [email protected] or click on this contact link.