Examples of GLP’s “Deep Dives” for Organizational and Leadership Development

GLP Deep Dives are one to two day workshops delivered on site or remotely with your boards and team. These are customized, high impact, and time efficient learning experiences that develop talent and build capacity in your organization.

Better Boards: Reimagine Governance for Your School

Effective boards for today and the future don’t look like the boards of the past. High performing board leadership is critical to a thriving organization, but so often what makes boards effective is ill-defined, and what sustains healthy board performance is hard to achieve within traditional structures.  Historically viewed as “volunteer leadership,” we advocate for repositioning boards as “unpaid professional talent” forming a mission critical leadership team worthy of effective professional development investment. 

This Deep Dive is designed to help your board reimagine itself as it professionalizes its role and its practice. GLP’s approach offers guidance and resources that go well beyond traditional governance training, rules of the road, and “best practices”. We journey with you into the deeply nuanced, risky, and complex territory trustees must now navigate with their leaders, asking: What do modern boards need to know  about the externalities impacting their communities and leadership?  What do trustees need to be able to do? What is the unique role of the board in developing policy, strategy, and people in your organization?  What are the skills, dispositions, structures and practices that our not for profits need to succeed and thrive? Even seasoned trustees are often surprised by the answers!

We’ll share our philosophy, frameworks, and tools so you can translate theory into practice. You’ll build an agenda for board evolution, for research and development, for scenario planning and policy design. Get ready to kickstart new ways of thinking, working and leading as a governing team.

Strategic Design: How to Create Strategy - and Plan Accordingly 

Strategy and strategic planning are related but not the same. We’ve always believed that a great strategy can be articulated on one page and that execution - or planning - is a dynamic, rigorously reviewed process that adapts as you learn, design, and implement. 

This deep dive workshop works with a team at your school to prepare them to lead a process of researching, designing, drafting, and adopting a formal but nimble vision and strategy – one that guides and endures even as conditions (and your plans!) change. We’ll equip you with the tools and techniques to build institutional capacity and ownership. We’ll scaffold a process with you to engage stakeholders; develop clear internal and external communications; define strategic questions and problems, conduct research, articulate your strategy, and develop milestones and metrics for successful execution. You’ll draft early and draft often, using our signature process of revision and iteration to drive hard conversations and increase the clarity of choices and decisions.

Institutional Qualitative Research: Collect, Analyze, and Actually Use Great Data!

Many clients collect lots of data, but find themselves overwhelmed once they have it. Others rely on observation and anecdotes, which are potentially helpful, but not sufficient! Generic or standardized survey tools often provide limited value, suggesting takeaways that may be disconnected from the larger context and resulting in poor root cause analysis.

In this deep dive, GLP teaches a team at your school to conduct and analyze qualitative and quantitative research – allowing you to custom design a version of GLP’s Powerful Learning Survey© to fit your school's unique needs and context.  Our Deep Dive curriculum is customized to your organization’s needs and objectives, supported by our tools. We share our methods for effective design, analysis, and follow-up research. Together, we jumpstart the institutional research capability you need to make good decisions, grounded in high quality data and analysis.

Leading at the Enterprise Level: Teams that Thrive and Drive! 

One leader is not enough, and building a team is no small feat. Powerfully coalesced leadership teams working towards a common purpose always have the economic and social mission of the organization as their highest priority – and they spread and scale leadership as a united entity – so your organization succeeds. 

Learning to be a team is not easy. And the work of leading a school or organization is complex, requiring strong, healthy dynamics for teaming, strategic clarity, a wide and deep array of leadership skills, and shared expectations for results.  

This deep dive engages your team in a retreat-like format to develop the mindsets, norms, expectations, and practices that will bolster their sense of purpose, joy, and efficacy – centered on the specific needs and issues of your organization. We’ll ground your work in your mission and strategy, and practice new ways of thinking and behaving that strengthen team members as leaders and as a collective. Your team will emerge with clarity about who they are, how they will work together, and a road map to success for the months ahead.

Coaching: Leadership Superpowers

Coaching skills are essential to effective leadership, management, and talent development inside organizations.  We believe that coaching skills are the foundation for effective delegation, mentorship, facilitation, problem solving, feedback, and decision-making. When leaders develop the skills to coach, everyone benefits.

Consider this deep dive a jump start in developing a coaching capability that can scale through your organization. Learn what coaching is and is not, how to coach, when to coach, and how to practice these skills in a range of contexts.  All participants will be equipped with guides and tools for practice and reference so they can apply and hone their coaching skills, and learn to model and teach coaching to others. Any cohort of emerging or seasoned leaders, regardless of role, will benefit from this highly interactive workshop, and will be ready to advance into deeper mastery of leadership and organizational transformation work. 

Leadership From the Inside Out

The best leadership development happens in a virtuous cycle of reflection, intention-setting, practice, feedback, and iteration. The best leaders do this as they integrate their personal and professional selves – building a leadership vision that aligns authentically with their work, their organizations, and the people they serve. 

This Deep Dive uses GLP’s proprietary MAB (Mindsets, Abilities, Behaviors) Framework© to explore and center leaders in who they are, who they are becoming, and how that intersects with the needs of their organizations. Our curriculum is grounded in GLP’s Leadership Lab©, and is uniquely suited to leaders ready to take personal charge of their growth, within a supportive cohort of colleagues. We’ll teach leaders how to create their own disciplined practice for development, and how to grow in the mindsets, abilities, and behaviors that comprise both the hard and soft elements of effective leadership. Participants emerge with an action plan, protocols and structures for peer support, and a new awareness of their leadership potential.  

Would you like to learn more about our Deep Dives? Please click here to share more about your interests and we will reach out to connect!