As leaders, most of you are currently in a transition moment. Markets are opening up after a difficult few years and most of you are having to shift from survival mode into growth mode.
The risk is that the thinking that got you through the downturn is the same thinking that will slow you down now.
Jennifer's mindset traps map directly onto that. Below is what she'll be working through with you.
TRAP 01
The Simple Story Trap
The founding narrative, the thesis that raised the money, the pipeline story that held the team together, it served its purpose. Now it stops you seeing what has actually changed in your market and your company.
TRAP 02
The Rightness Trap
Scientific conviction. The same certainty that built the company makes it hard to hear a new board member, a public market investor, or a CMO who sees the competitive landscape differently.
TRAP 03
The Agreement Trap
Acute in founding and core leadership teams. People who survived the hard years together have a loyalty that makes genuine challenge almost impossible. Cohesion becomes the problem.
TRAP 04
The Control Trap
Rational when the CEO was the company. At fifteen people you were in every room. At eighty you cannot be and the ones who keep trying will lose their best people.
TRAP 05
The Ego Protection Trap
Possibly the most pressing one right now. CEOs who performed certainty through the downturn - for the board, the investors, the team - now have to lead a stage they have not led for a while or haven't led before. The ones who stay curious rather than defend it grow into it. The ones who don't become the ceiling.
At the end of this session you will (hopefully) have a clear sense of which trap you are caught in, how it is shaping your behaviour, and what to do about it.
Jennifer Garvey Berger believes that leadership is one of the most vital renewable resources in the world. At a time when organisations are often forging the path rather than following the path of others, leadership is about creating the conditions for people to be their most creative, connected, intelligent selves. She is a founding partner and CEO of Cultivating Leadership, a consultancy that serves executives and executive teams in the private, non-profit, and government sectors around the world. Her clients include Google, Microsoft, Novartis, Wikipedia, and Oxfam International. Jennifer designs and teaches leadership programs, coaches senior teams, and supports new ways of thinking about strategy and people with clients facing these dramatic shifts in complexity, volatility, and change in their workplaces and markets. She blends deep theoretical knowledge with a driving quest for practical ways to make leaders’ lives better.
Jennifer also supports leaders one-on-one as a leadership coach. She supports clients to find their current growing edge and then make choices about how they want to grow, and she teaches coaches around the world transformational and developmental coaching approaches in her Growth Edge Coaching certification series. Jennifer speaks at leadership and coaching conferences, and she offers occasional courses for coaches at universities all over the world like Harvard University, the University of Sydney, and Oxford Brookes University.
Jennifer holds a doctorate in adult development from Harvard University, where she studied under and worked with acclaimed developmental psychologist Robert Kegan.