“A leader is a dealer in hope.”  —Napoleon Bonaparte

Elements of Leadership Development

The heart of any organization is its leadership. Companies that are not actively developing leaders are doing a great disservice to their stakeholders and customers.

Kelleher Associates assists companies in achieving their business goals through leadership development and team building. Our professional staff brings both depth and breadth to our clients by combining expertise in multiple industries and disciplines with practical business and executive management experience. Our skilled consultants work with upper management in defining organizational objectives, facilitating meetings, and effecting change.

Each Leadership Development Program is a customized, confidential management process that strengthens the executives' abilities to lead and manage in dynamic environments while building a strong, supportive team. This comprehensive program begins with an extensive assessment of a company's current management and leadership style, and the creation of a personalized leadership development program. Our consultants then assist in the development and deployment of the action plans that operationalize the development program.

We teach management teams how to use coaching techniques to enhance productivity, retention, teamwork and business results. We develop team effectiveness, build relationships, align goals and improve working processes. Our experience and expertise ensure accurate diagnosis and the design of effective organizational change strategies. We help identify and build the corporate culture of choice and bolster the company's core competencies. We explore and discover the individuals in the company who have the potential to develop into great leaders.

What is a great leader?

As Jim Collins defines it in his book, Good to Great, “a great leader is an individual who has the unique ability to blend extreme personal humility with intense professional will. He or she is self-effacing and displays the fierce resolve to do whatever is needed to make the company great. He or she sees that the company is more successful in the next generation.”

What makes a great team?

A great team is a group of individuals who are energized and aligned to work together toward common goals. Team members have clear roles and expectations. Decision-making and communication processes are clear, and individuals are skilled at making the most of each other's styles.

Kelleher Associates Leadership Development Program improves:

• Leadership competencies
• Leadership approaches and behaviors
• The coaching skills of managers and HR professionals
• The assimilation of newly promoted or hired leaders
• The succession of newly hired managers
• The development and support of top performers and future leaders
• Team building
• Business growth
• Productivity

Contact Us for more information on how Kelleher Associates, LLC can implement a customized Leadership Development Program for your organization.

Team Building

In sports and business, a team is a group of people working toward a common goal. Team building is the process of enabling that group to reach their goal by working together and creating a climate that encourages the contributions of team members. The team’s energies are focused on problem solving, task effectiveness, and capitalizing on team member skills and capabilities to achieve the team's purpose.

Kelleher Associates works with client companies to determine if:

• the team leader has the right leadership and interpersonal skills
• there is a well defined team purpose with goals aligned with that purpose
• there is a high level of interdependence among team members
• there is a mutual trust and sense of required contribution among team members
• team member roles are clearly defined
• goals and objectives are transparent and viewed as important and achievable
• teams can evaluate and respond to conflicts and, working together, create new approaches
• each team member has appropriate influence in the agenda and feels control within the team
• team members collectively and individually monitor progress against goals
• risk taking and creativity are encouraged

Where deficiencies are identified, we offer constructive solutions for improvement.

Contact us for assistance in successfully building teams and starting them up to ensure that you maximize opportunities to meet your business objectives by creating a high performance organization.

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Team Alignment

More businesses than ever are realizing the benefits of forming high performance teams to effectively run divisions and business units, key functions, and pursue enterprise-wide initiatives.

Managing and coordinating the efforts of these high performance teams is a responsibility assigned to senior executives or high potential managers. Yet, these executives can often be preoccupied with or distracted by other priorities or daily business activities that prevents them from focusing much needed attention on this critical task.

Kelleher Associates helps its clients by transforming disjointed team efforts into coordinated, cooperative, and cohesive activities. This is accomplished by making sure team members are working with the same information, understand the relationship between their efforts and corporate, business unit, or functional strategy, share plans and results formally and informally, eliminate competition for resources within the team, and unify efforts to achieve group goals and objectives.

Kelleher helps clients form and energize teams composed of the right leaders who oversee and orchestrate team efforts. Leaders are trained in conflict resolution, cross functional representation, estimating and allocating resources, seeking reinforcing synergies and behaviors, and consistently reporting on outcomes.

Contact us to learn more about our Team Alignment techniques and experience to help you transform your organization.

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Core Competency Development

The keys to core competency development are identifying the critical skills and behaviors needed to optimize an organization's performance. We do this by developing specific criteria for required performance in each competency and assessing key executive capability levels in each competency area.

Kelleher Associates works with senior executives and human resource management to define specific competencies necessary for successfully executing the strategies needed to fulfill the mission of the enterprise to achieve its vision.

Kelleher Associates will help deliver the following:

• A comprehensive definition of core skills, behaviors, and attitudes unique to your organization's success profile.
• A process of evaluating senior executives against measurable competencies.
• A tailored plan for each senior executive to improve key competency levels.
• A set of tools to use when assessing external candidates for key positions.
• Higher levels of executive performance in the long term.

Contact us for assistance in identifying the skills and behaviors needed to optimize your organization's performance.

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Succession Planning

Succession planning that actually works is an ongoing process of systematically assessing and developing talent to ensure leadership continuity for all key positions in an organization.

Succession planning is highly integrated with an organization's strategic objectives and reflects the competencies needed to succeed in a competitive marketplace by promoting the kind of skills, training, and behaviors that may be different from those of the current corporate culture.

Kelleher Associates will challenge your company by asking the following questions:

• Does your company have a plan for leadership growth to keep pace with business growth?
• Who is being developed and groomed to become the next generation of company leadership and how is this development being executed?
• Is leadership keeping pace with current and anticipated strategic needs?
• Do you have bench strength for key positions?
• Do you have a plan to maximize the human asset potential and allocation for the best alignment with and support of your strategic objectives?
• Is the process open, allowing executives to take genuine responsibility for their career progress?

Contact us for assistance in launching your succession planning process or refining the one you already have to ensure your company performs to stakeholder expectations.

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Derailment Coaching

What can be done with an under performing executive? Too often, the response is termination which leads to high exit costs, lost continuity, training and development costs, lower team morale, possible termination litigation, and recruiting, hiring, and retraining costs.

But, Kelleher Associates knows there is a much more efficient and effective solution.  A derailment coaching program produces much better results. In most cases underperformance is not due to an ability gap. Rather, it is often attributable to an executive who is:

• Insensitive or isolated
• Too cautious and risk averse
• Too detail-oriented and lacking strategic grounding
• Overly dependent on one skill
• Not skilled in adapting to different management styles
• A poor communicator
• Too inclined to staff in his or her image.

Kelleher Associates addresses these issues through a combination of executive assessment, 360 degree feedback, building rapport and credibility with the client, creating an accelerated development program, and eliciting true behavioral change. We perform a four step process to assess, plan, act, and refine with the goal of rebuilding the confidence and credibility of your employee.

Let us help you restore the performance of key contributors and optimize their potential before you resort to a costly, difficult, and irreversible termination process.

• Improving and building organizational relationships
• Business strategy
• Board management and governance

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Improving and Building Organizational Relationships

Kelleher Associates is often called upon to help executives improve and build organizational relationships. We work with executives to build a professional community within and outside an organization and maintain a positive personal relationship within the organization. Areas in which we help clients focus include:

• Cultivating a broad network to exchange ideas and rally support.
• Staying in touch with people at all levels of the organization.
• Relating well to all levels of management—subordinates, peers and colleagues, upper management—and outside stakeholders.
• Respecting and appreciating individual perspectives and backgrounds.
• Recognizing and responding to the needs and concerns of others.
• Acting to maintain relationships even under difficult or strained circumstances.
• Promoting collaboration and removing obstacles to teamwork across the organization.
• Improving how the management team works together.

Business Strategy

When top line revenue and profitability growth slows or declines, when a new management team starts to coalesce, when marketplace changes necessitate a rethinking of a company’s business model, or when an organization needs a high level kick-start, Kelleher Associates can help the senior team of a company or a business unit rethink its business strategy. We typically use a four stage approach:

• Phase I: Prework—At the direction of Kelleher Associates, each member of the client’s senior team would answer a series of questions designed to clarify the company’s current strategic profile in terms of the key areas of the internal and external environment such as products and services offered, geographic competition, external opportunities/threats, and potential strategic vulnerability areas.
• Phase II: One Day Offsite—At this facilitated offsite, Kelleher Associates would secure leadership team agreement on the current profile and the current forces driving the business, review all the strategic inputs, agreeing on the 2-3 most important ones in each category. Additionally, Kelleher Associates ensures that all relevant materials from this meeting were summarized and distributed to the group.
• Phase III: Second One Day Offsite—About two weeks later, Kelleher Associates would facilitate a second meeting using strategic inputs from Phase II to choose the 2-3 potential forces driving the business, develop profiles for each driving force and compare them to the current profile, looking at strengths and vulnerabilities. We would then help the leadership team choose a tentative strategic profile and bring critical issues to the surface. Included in these discussions would be considerations of service or product offering, funding mechanism, employee management, and customer management. Finally, we would help shape and mold a final strategic profile. Again, Kelleher Associates would ensure that all relevant materials from this meeting were summarized and distributed to the group.
• Phase IV: Third One Day Offsite—About a month later, Kelleher Associates would meet with the Leadership Team for a day dedicated to developing operational goals for each function to support the new strategic profile and to identify resources, alignment requirements, dependencies, milestones, and timetables needed to ensure execution against the new strategic direction.

Board Management and Governance

Kelleher Associates knows that the CEO of a company and its Board of Directors must positively relate to each other as equals in the operation and oversight of the enterprise. To operate effectively, they need to trust and respect each other. Collegiality and cooperation need to be present for the CEO and the board to properly discharge their respective responsibilities. Kelleher Associates has a track record of contributing to the productive engagement of the CEO and the Board of Directors by:

• Assisting CEO’s in identifying, describing, and positioning tough issues wit the board committees and the board as a whole.
• Assisting CEO’s in planning the agenda for individual board meetings (including decisions the CEO is seeking from the board) and for the annual board meeting cycle.
• Working with CEO’s to enhance relationships with individual directors.
• Evaluating the CEO’s performance.
• Ensuring the CEO is receiving honest and pertinent feedback from the directors on his or her performance including advice designed to improve board involvement and performance.
• Evaluating individual director and overall board performance and helping determine what talents, skills, and expertise are missing from the board.
• Working with the CEO to create a talent management process for the senior team.
• Helping the CEO evaluate the senior management team.

Resume Preparation

The most critical tool an executive in transition needs to ensure a successful job search is a powerful resume that communicates essential information to a potential employer in 20 seconds or less. A resume is a positioning document of relevant work history and accomplishments that supports the executive's career objective. A resume should not be confused with a biography or a sketch of personal characteristics.

Kelleher Associates assists its clients in creating clear, concise, comprehensive, and inviting resumes that truly reflect the new position the client is seeking and provide the support needed to secure that position. Development of the resume is the end result of a detailed personal assessment conducted by our senior consultants that identifies a client's passion and interests, skills, and experience that addresses available career opportunities. This is done on a 1:1 basis and is customized to meet the client's unique needs and aspirations.

The key questions we will seek to answer in working with you to prepare your resume and display your "best self" will include:

• Does your resume contain the appropriate contact information?
• Does it provide a clear objective statement indicating what you want to do?
• Does it feature your experience and highlight strengths and qualifications appropriately positioning you to match your prospective employer's needs?
• Does it describe professional activities and accomplishments?
• Does it provide personal information that shows who you are in addition to what you do?
• Is it visually appealing, easy to read, and reproduced in a high quality manner?
• Is it completely free of any errors: spelling, typographical, punctuation, or grammatical?
• Is it succinct and well organized?

Contact us to help you develop your resume as a critical part of an integrated career campaign. We can help you launch and sustain your career campaign until you have obtained the position you want.

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Interview Skills

After deciding on your career objective, creating your resume, developing contacts, and launching your career campaign, all of your efforts have now opened the door to an interview, or a series of interviews, for a position that seems to meet all of your criteria. What now?

Kelleher Associates knows that successful interviewing skills are the final key to obtaining the offer you have been seeking. We work with our clients on a highly personal basis to ensure that they do well from the first to the last interview and through the process of negotiating all the elements of an offer package. Along with using personalized, videotaped simulations that result in natural and polished interview skills, we work with our clients on:

• Personal presentation and behavior.
• Researching the company and its history, the industry in which it participates, its competitors—and most importantly—its needs, problems, and opportunities.
• Understanding how the position fits into the organization.
• Clarifying roles and responsibilities.
• Understanding what the interviewer really wants to know about you.
• Anticipating and answering interviewer questions.
• Asking questions critical to your decision to accept an offer.
• Handling requests for references.
• Following up with persuasive thank you letters.
• Do's and don'ts in an interview situation.

Contact us for assistance in developing your interview skills as part of an integrated career campaign. We can help you launch and sustain your career campaign until you have obtained the position you want.

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Restructuring and Downsizing Services

Most companies will need to restructure and downsize because of a weak economic environment, a changing competitive landscape, or the implementation of a new business strategy. But downsizing a workforce can be an overwhelming task associated with significant risk if executed without the appropriate planning, expertise, and resources.

Kelleher Associates successfully addresses this difficult challenge by helping its clients:

• Develop a comprehensive downsizing plan in advance of its implementation that includes assembling the right transition team, complying with appropriate laws and regulations, and assessing future critical staffing needs.
• Determine the appropriate strategy by location, function, and management level by assisting in the design of voluntary separation programs and severance packages as well as retention plans and packages.
• Create the appropriate communications strategy for both internal and external audiences.
• Design, staff, and operate career centers either on a company's premises or off site, depending on how to best serve the affected employees.
• Assist in implementing the downsizing plan through separation notification training for managers, conducting employee transition meetings, conducting career management workshops and seminars, and providing the appropriate career transition services.

Hiring the right business partner when making restructuring decisions, doing the important upfront planning, and executing well creates the best possible conditions for achieving a company's short and long term business goals. Avoiding costly lawsuits, lost productivity, and lowered employee morale are important byproducts of this process.

Contact us to capitalize on our Restructuring and Downsizing experience and expertise which will allow your company to successfully manage through one of the most challenging business tasks any management team and organization will ever face.

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