For organizations
Leadership development for nonprofit, corporate, public-sector, and mission-driven organizations.
Leadership development should do more than inspire people for a day. It should strengthen how leaders think, communicate, decide, and lead others.
I partner with organizations to develop leaders who are equipped for the responsibility they carry now, and ready for what comes next.
The challenge
Most leaders already know the concepts. The hard part is using what they know while juggling competing priorities, a difficult conversation they keep postponing, a team that is reacting to change, and decisions where no option is clean.
Development that works gives them room to think and someone willing to push back. Judgment sharpens. Patterns become visible. Insight turns into something they actually do on Monday.
Where this usually starts
If one of these is happening in your organization right now, it's not unusual, and it's not unfixable.
A high performer becomes a manager and suddenly has to lead people who used to be peers.
An executive is carrying decisions that keep getting harder to talk about internally.
A manager avoids the accountability conversation, and the team knows it.
The leadership team is capable individually and misaligned together.
Emerging leaders need development before their responsibilities grow, not after.
The organization is growing, restructuring, or changing hands, and leadership has to hold steady through it.
How I can help
01 / Leadership solution
Confidential one-to-one work with executives and senior leaders. The agenda is whatever is actually in front of them: a consequential decision, a relationship that isn't working, a role that grew faster than the person had time to grow into it.
02 / Leadership solution
Development built for your leaders and your context. Communication, decision-making, emotional intelligence, accountability, and strategic thinking, practiced against the situations they are already dealing with.
03 / Leadership solution
Facilitated work with a leadership team. Where trust is thin, expectations are unspoken, or the hard issue keeps getting tabled, we put it on the table and work it through.
04 / Leadership solution
For high-potential employees and new managers. The gap is rarely knowledge. It's practice in the conversations and judgment calls the next role will require.
05 / Leadership solution
Sessions built around what your people are actually wrestling with. Interactive, specific, and useful the following week.
Why my approach is different
Leadership problems rarely stay in one category. There is a business decision in there, and people, and culture, and whatever was said in the last meeting.
I bring more than 20 years of executive leadership, an MBA, graduate training in human services counseling, and the perspective of a CEO still in the seat — currently running a $13 million organization with nearly 180 employees across 10 sites.
I understand organizations. I understand people. And I know what leadership looks like when a decision carries real consequences.
Meet Charity →The business case
Strong leadership affects more than the person being developed. Its influence shows up in engagement, retention, culture, how teams work, how decisions get made, and how the organization performs.
When an organization invests in the people responsible for leading others, the effect reaches well past the coaching conversation.
Performance
70%
Gallup finds that the manager accounts for roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. Whoever is leading the team largely determines the experience of working on it.
Source: Gallup, State of the American Manager
People
62%
In organizations with strong coaching cultures, 62 percent of employees rated themselves highly engaged, compared with 50 percent in other organizations.
Source: ICF and Human Capital Institute, Building a Coaching Culture for Increased Employee Engagement, 2018
When leaders strengthen how they think, communicate, decide, and develop the people under them, the effects carry into the teams and the organizations they influence.
So this is not only an investment in one person. It's an investment in how much leadership the organization has.
International Coaching Federation and Human Capital Institute
Building a Coaching Culture for Increased Employee Engagement (2018)
Survey research on organizations with strong coaching cultures and employee engagement.
View sourceGallup
State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders (2015)
Gallup's analysis attributes about 70 percent of the variance in team engagement to the manager.
View sourceThis research was conducted by the organizations named above. It is cited here for context and does not represent research conducted by Charity Russell, or a guarantee of results for any organization.
Next step
If you're weighing executive coaching, leadership development, or something built for your particular situation, start with a conversation about what your leaders and your organization actually need.
Charity@charityrussell.net