Do you keep facing the same business challenges year after year, no matter how many peer advisory groups you attend? Do all those referrals and strategy sessions seem to fall away in the face of deadlines, employee conflict, or high-stress challenges? There is a reason why peer advisory groups fail leaders. Cognitive-based approaches to business leadership are focused on only part of the problem. Stanislaw Consulting’s Developing Reflective Leaders offering will give you a new perspective, so you can approach things differently.
Stanislaw Consulting’s Developing Reflective Leaders Program Isn’t Just Another Business Development Group
If you have been a business owner or leader for a while, you know that eventually everyone recommends you join a peer advisory group. Sometimes called “think tanks” or “masterminds”, these small groups of business leaders struggle to pull from one another the solutions to their companies’ biggest problems. Unfortunately, these peer advisory groups often fail to meet their goals. Over time, you will find yourself getting less out of them, and may begin to see the same or similar problems cropping up again and again in different forms.
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At Stanislaw Consulting, we want to give you a better option. We’re debuting Developing Reflective Leaders, an innovative program that is one part peer advisory group and one part like group for business leaders. Facilitated and moderated by David Stanislaw and Karen Sherwood, both experienced psychotherapists and coaches, this group is designed to succeed where other peer advisory groups fail. It will give you the understanding and insights you need to better engage with your employees and overcome the obstacles facing your business.
Why Peer Advisory Groups Fail Leaders
You may well have attended a peer advisory group before. But, like most people, you likely found it had diminishing returns and ultimately failed to get to the root of your company’s problems. Often, peer advisory groups fail when:
Participants Lack Commitment
Most peer advisory groups fall to the bottom of busy business leaders’ to-do lists. Participants may come and go, only to find themselves out of the loop in group discussions. Without a commitment from their members to show up and put their all into the goals of the group, peer advisory groups fail to deliver on their promises of meaningful change. Developing Reflective Leaders asks every participant for a minimum six-month commitment, meeting every two weeks, so that the group can build trust through their shared experience.
Lack of Diversity Promotes Same Thinking
Some peer advisory groups define “peer” too narrowly. When participants all share the same industry, life experiences, or demographics, those similarities can limit the group’s ability to consider new perspectives on the problems at hand. Developing Reflective Leaders groups will be intentionally diverse; allowing members who have different experiences and perspectives from their own, that will enrich the total experience.
Solution-First Frameworks Provide Shallow Answers to Deep Problems
It is easy to assume that one size will fit all when discussing business challenges in a peer advisory group. Have problems keeping track of leads? Here’s a contact management software. Need to resolve interpersonal problems in the office? Try hiring an outside facilitator. But this solutions-first framework operates as something of a bandaid. While it provides action items a business leader can use to feel like they are addressing the problem, it does nothing to uncover why it occurred in the first place. Developing Reflective Leaders takes a different perspective, and a deeper approach to problem-solving. Members develop insight to allow them to address why the same problems keep emerging, rather than providing a shotgun approach to solving them.
Lack of Confidentiality Creates Barriers to True Problem-Solving
Many business leaders come into peer advisory groups anxious that anything they say can and will be used against them in the competitive market. They may be afraid of damaging their company’s reputation by admitting that all is not well behind their public-facing facade of success. This results in superficial sharing and allows the deeper issues to be ignored, or worse, smoothed over in the interests of keeping up professional appearances. Developing Reflective Leaders addresses this challenge by requiring every participant to agree to a pledge of confidentiality, deepening trust among the members, and making space for openness and vulnerability.
Unskilled Moderation Limits Useful Dialog
One of the biggest weaknesses of most peer advisory groups comes from the leadership. Masterminds and industry-specific groups may be led by facilitators with little to no professional training, causing the conversation to wander aimlessly, or become an echo chamber of the same thoughts and ideas. Other times group leaders’ training may be primarily in facilitation. While this can keep the conversation going, it still may not delve deeper into what is behind the struggles participants face.
The Biggest Reason Developing Reflective Leaders is Different: Emotion
Stanislaw Consulting’s Developing Reflective Leaders groups aren’t just a variation on the theme of a peer advisory group. Instead, they promote an entirely different, emotion awareness first approach to business challenges.
In their combined 50 years of psychotherapeutic and business coaching experience, David Stanislaw and Karen Sherwood have repeatedly seen business leaders try to think their way out of problems, ignoring the deeply felt emotional drives that led them there in the first place. After all, for all their training and study, business leaders are still human, with human brains, limbic systems, and thought processes.
What sets Developing Reflective Leaders apart is that it encourages its members to come at business challenges from an emotional perspective. Participants will be given space to express and understand the emotional roots of their struggles, as well as how positive emotions fuel their success. Other members of the cohort will be invited to share their own analogous experiences to find connections, all with a goal of developing insight into the emotional underpinnings and drivers of business decisions. Through openly sharing, under the guidance of skilled facilitators, Developing Reflective Leaders will help members uncover and develop meaningful solutions that come from their own internal, emotional, and cognitive selves.
The inaugural group of Developing Reflective Leaders is forming now. Participants in this initial offering will pay a discounted rate, furthering the affordability of this group executive coaching experience.
We are offering leaders a 30 min complimentary meeting to discuss and explore a current challenge. We believe this introduction will offer you a taste of the group experience. Contact us to sign up for the Developing Reflective Leaders experience today.
This post was written by a human without the use of AI. Stanislaw Consulting does not consent to the use of its online content to train large language models or other forms of artificial intelligence.
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