Why Open Courses?
We just launched registration for our first Leadership Intensive (new name! thanks for the votes) and I’ll be honest - it’s terrifying. I refresh the “payment” screen every 20 minutes on the off-chance that a payment went through and I didn’t get an email notification (spoiler alert: when payments have gone through, I get about 5 email notifications and pop-ups, so I’m well alerted of the need for a happy dance). I wake up at 2am thinking about other ways I should be describing the course in marketing materials.
But this course wasn’t built out of panic. It was built because there’s a real gap in how we support people learning to lead.
If you’re a senior executive or work at a Fortune 100 company, you probably have access to world-class leadership development. But for everyone else - the nonprofit manager, the HVAC team lead, the early-career founder - there’s very little in between YouTube and Harvard.
That’s why we created the Leadership Intensives — to offer practical, high-quality leadership training for people who don’t usually get it.
Along the way, we’ve discovered three unexpected truths that are changing everything about how we think about these programs:
1/ Strangers make the best sounding boards..
Seems counter-intuitive, and to be honest, it’s not quite that simple; people aren’t going to share their deepest, darkest secrets with strangers. However, it’s hard to be honest about your challenges communicating with your team when the person you’re trying to get on board for a project is sitting next to you, and it’s near impossible to open up about managing up when your boss is in the room. In small, mixed groups of strangers, you can build the trust to share your challenges and get support.
Why does this matter? If you’re going to a manager or leadership training just to sit and listen, there are some amazing articles and videos you can watch for free! The power in attending a training is in taking the ideas, thinking about what they mean for you and the challenges you face, and practicing how you might act differently in the future.
Inspired by KONU, we call this the value of confidants as compared to allies:
Confidants are people who care about you - not the work you’re doing, but your personal success
Allies care about you, AND they care about the work you’re doing together. They have a personal interest and perspective in the work.
Allies are critical for building alliances to lead, particularly when tackling an adaptive challenge or in times of change. But in a learning environment, the value of confidants is the ability to embrace vulnerability - without worrying about the impact it will have on the day-to-day work.
2/ Leaders can access the training they need, at the level they need it, when they need it.
Too often, management and leadership training is delivered for everyone all at once. Beyond the allies vs confidants challenge, this also means that people aren’t able to access the right level of content when they need it. One-size-fits-all is too often one-size-fits-none. As a result, you end up with:
A new manager who doesn’t have the training in time and struggles to delegate and give effective feedback
An experienced leader in a classroom being taught information they already know
The junior staffer who is being taught skills they don’t have any use for
At scale, an open cohort model - like what we’re trying to build at Elevate Labs - provides the right course when you need it, rather than just what’s available. And the peers in the class are in the same boat, facing the same challenges, and coming up with new solutions.
3/ We’re more alike than we think, even across major lines of difference.
As we’ve been building these courses, we’ve talked to people at tech companies, law firms, nonprofits, HVAC repair companies, the federal government, and Fortune 500 warehouses. The contexts - and individuals - are wildly different, and yet they face so many of the same challenges:
How do I build a team that leads the work without constant oversight?
How do I manage conflict on my team?
How do I reduce call-outs / improve retention?
How do I manage disruption and support the resilience of my team?
Much has been written about how fragmented, segregated, and divided (paywall) American society - and the world - is right now. But so much of what I see is our inability to speak to and understand people who are different from us. There are so few opportunities anymore for people to actually sit down and talk about something meaningful with someone from a different background, educational experience, socioeconomic group, geography; as a good friend put it recently, “How many people do you actually know who work with their hands for a living?” (Answer: 2, and they’re both doctors.)
In my work with CISV, I’ve seen the amazing results that come when children from different countries play together and struggle with the challenges of being in community. The experience of sitting with someone with completely different beliefs and stories about the world and finding common ground is what can truly set our world and our country on the path to peace and growth. If we truly want to change someone’s mind, if we want to truly advocate for change, it requires deeply understanding the world from their eyes (this podcast with Adam Grant and Tara Westover about changing people’s beliefs is really profound).
I truly believe that Elevate Labs’s open courses can be an opportunity for people from these wildly different backgrounds to sit together and struggle through the messiness of leading teams, while learning about each other and building relationships that can transcend this space.
Idealistic? Absolutely. But I believe that leadership is learned in community. And if we can bring together people who’d never otherwise meet and help them lead with awareness, alliance, and action, I really think we can change the world.
If you know someone who might benefit, or want to check it out yourself, learn more here: the Team Effectiveness Intensive, coming to you in July!