A Focus on Leadership Principles That are Both Proven and Pragmatic
The key to realizing your potential as a leader requires targeting your aims with clarity, a noble purpose, and practiced precision – whether what you are leading happens to be an organization, a nation, or simply just your own life. The impact of being a fully competent leader creates ripples of influence that contribute to making for a more functional, just, and joyful world.
Transformational Programs that employ the concepts, methods and smart systems that have proved successful in the field for more than 50 years throughout the world.
At ALPS Leadership’ our purpose is to provide business leaders with powerful and proven ways to help you become a more competent leader and help you transform your company into a high-performance organization.
Our aim is to increase your capacity to benefit society through the pursuit of significant, positive and meaningful accomplishments. It is in this, your pursuit of competence that we make the world better because of your efforts than it would otherwise be without them.
The ALPS Leadership Advantage is all about preparing and equipping leaders for the challenges of the journey that is necessary for any worthwhile undertaking.
We are driven by our core values and beliefs about the potential impact of fully competent leadership on human potential, organizational performance and the joy we experience in the world.
Our noble purpose is to cultivate true-virtuoso leaders who aim to build and grow sustainable high-performance organizations and change the world.
We combine proven methods and tools with coaching and mentoring to help ensure that they are suitable and successful for your aims. In doing so, we help build sustainable fully competent organizations that challenge the status quo and set their own standards for performance exceptionalism.
Successful business leaders are heroes who strive to lead truly competent organizations and leverage that success to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the people they touch. They understand that their abiding sense of duty and their commitment to their purpose is both the cause and effect of their success. These are men and women who do more to benefit the social, economic and cultural needs of our communities and the society as a whole. They accomplish more than government, politics or public policy ever has or ever will. — P. Liebman
Four Guiding Principles Adapted From Lee Thayer That Inform our Processes
Dr. Thayer first observed the world and tested his own thinking while a distinguished professor at the top business schools around the world – and since leaving academia has developed the current operating system around “Thinking, Being, Doing” – by working in the trenches with CEOs to help them build fully-competent high-performance organizations.
The foundational thinking behind ALPS Leadership was developed by Phil Liebman and adapted from his several years of study and mentorship with Dr. Thayer, resulting in his earning an MLAS (Masters of Leadership Arts and Science from The Thayer Institute.
1. Competence is the basis for all performance (and our joy in life).
Competence may be cultivated in our acquired “competencies” —our knowledge, skill and talent, but requires much more. Talent and skills without knowing what to do with them – or what must be accomplished – are nothing but an empty vessel of unemployed potential. We must have a clear understanding of what we are capable of – and need to become capable of before we can ever accomplish and sustain anything worthwhile. But this understanding of what is necessary – and what we choose to make possible – still does not demonstrate competence – until we actually achieve our aims.
Dr. Lee Thayer proffers that we are all happiest when we are engaged in what we are most competent at doing. If you want to add more life to living – increase your own competence. And if you want to add more life and happiness to others – ensure that they do the same.
Most people and most organizations lack these basic competencies. And even few ever achieve the mastery that enables us to consistently and repeatedly accomplish what needs to be accomplished. And even fewer challenge themselves to continuously grow and improve their competencies based on their internal drive for excellence. Those who do are the true virtuosos.
2. There are no quick-fixes and no recipes for building a sustainably successful company.
The responsibility of leadership is to ensure that the organization we lead maintains a sustainable competitive advantage. It is in how we understand and perform in our role that determines whether or not we will be successful.
ALPS Leadership approach and processes form a smart system designed to facilitate nimble adaptation, continuous improvement and purpose-driven growth.
This system, The ALPS Leadership Advantage is based on programs that deliver intensive learning and self-discovery through mentoring that follows the working principles, methods, and practices that Dr. Lee Thayer developed and employed for more than 50 years.
3. Competent organizations require competent leadership.
Ultimately it is the organization that makes the leader successful, not the other way around. It is the leader’s responsibility to provision and guide the organization in order to ensure that it maintains a sustainable competitive advantage.
ALPS Leadership’s unique programs were designed to help you reach your own personal potential as a leader through coaching, mentoring and self-directed learning – in order to become the kind of leader capable of:
- Building and growing a fully-competent, operationally sound organization,
- Replacing ineffective/inefficient systems that impede competent people and breed incompetence with smart systems that enhance individual and organizational performance;
- Ensuring that your organization’s leadership and rank and file is staffed with effectively competent, conscientious people and
- Aligning your people and organization around a focused and compelling, worthwhile understanding of the worthwhile purpose guiding the organizations actions and objectives.
Fully competent leaders develop and enable competent people and smart systems that support performance to the fullest potential – and drive the constant improvement that is the cornerstone of High-Performing Organizations (HPOs).
4. Learning is the key to growth, and growth is the essence of life.
Learning is the essence of real leadership, to be an effective leader we must first be an effective learner.
Leadership is a function of learning. Everybody must learn to lead. At the core, to be a fully competent human being ( one that is capable of performing the most basic needs of life) – we need to successfully lead our own lives. When we fail to lead our lives well we become prisoners of one kind or another. We can lead our lives into heaven or lead them into hell.
We must learn that we are all leaders and all followers – as professionals, as parents and spouses and members of society. To lead we must learn how to follow guidance – whether that is external or intrinsic. Following your heart, following your beliefs or following the leader – all require discipline and sacrifice – if we are to achieve our aims in life.
Part of The Problem is that Learning is a Lost Art…
Children’s curiosity is freely sacrificed today for rote education that measures retention and recitation. – Imagination is all but extinguished in the pursuit of cataloged knowledge.
As adults, we are measured by what we know relative to what is expected of us – and as we become more and more successful – we also become far more concerned with knowing (or demonstrating what we know) than open to learning. And at the extreme, leaders often find ourselves validating, embellishing or otherwise confirming what we are already believing ourselves to be most expert at.
The Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus wrote, “A person cannot learn that which he thinks he already knows.”
Beginning in the most formative stages of our formal education, we have all been systematically conditioned to believe that there is safety in knowing – and to infer that not knowing makes us vulnerable. We are rewarded when we demonstrate the correct answer and punished when we do not. It’s hardly any wonder why we cling to what we think we know with dear life – when the real risk is in our failure to learn. Mark Twain famously wrote, “rarely is it the things I don’t know that get’s me in trouble, it’s the things I am certain about that turn out not to be so.”
Today we increasingly live in a VUCA World –
One that is defined by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.
According to the Harvard University studies by Kegan and Lahey, we cannot rely on reactive thinking to advance against these conditions; we must cultivate creative solutions. It is less about what we know – and everything about what we can quickly learn and use to adapt that matters most.
Our entire focus, and the principles and methods we employ are designed to develop highly effective creative leadership, exceptional leaders and High-Performance Organizations.
At ALPS Leadership we are dedicated to learners and growers –
and to lifelong learning in pursuit of a better life and a better world.