Finding the right answers for your organization

Engaging with ECHO

We meet you where you are

Team ECHO embraces Patrick Lencioni’s philosophy of Naked Consulting and so we, “always consult instead of sell.”

In practice, this means we don’t come in with any pre-baked solutions and try to fit our square pegs into your round holes.

We bring our expertise, our library of content with a successful track record, and our belief that it only takes the right conditions for leadership to flourish at all levels of any organization. You bring your deep knowledge of your business, your understanding of your people, and your willingness to collaborate and innovate. Our first task is to facilitate a conversation where we come to a shared understanding of your needs and opportunities, and then to co-create a plan for bringing all of those building blocks together into the best solutions.

Custom Answers to Your Most Pressing Needs

Services we Offer

Leadership Development

Everyone is a leader. When you de-couple leadership and rank or authority, you free people up to lean into leadership behavior that gets the best out of all of those around them. By offering leadership development to all levels of an organization, you create a culture where every person, “takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes and has the courage to develop that potential.” (from Brené Brown, Dare to Lead).

High Performing Teams

The key to high-performing teams is creating an environment of psychological safety. Creating this environment requires specific skills and knowledge both within the team, and in the surrounding environment. We help teams and organizations transform their culture creating the right conditions for high-performing teams to thrive.

Leadership Teams

Often, leadership teams are just made up of a group of individuals who report to the same high-level executive. But the power of a connected and collaborative leadership team is exponential. We help leadership teams come together as a constellation of leadership - independent, powerful actors who come together for a united purpose. (from Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power)

Connecting with Us

Ways to Engage

Whether you’re looking for a single workshop, a series of classes, or an extended engagement targeted at creating your next generation of leaders, Team ECHO can engage at the right level to help you get what you need to grow the workforce of the future.

Much of our learning library can stand alone, whether you’re interested in covering a specific topic, addressing a single, specific issue, or going after a short-term opportunity. But we can also engage at a deeper level, helping you develop a particular team or set of teams, or even helping you build your own, sustainable leadership development program.

Our resources are adaptable and together we can design exactly the right solution for your needs.

Past Success

Case Study: From Soft Skills to Leadership

The Applied Leadership Program (ALP) was developed to address one particular issue. Across our organization we had managers with excellent technical, a.k.a. "hard," skills, who couldn't seem to lead their teams to success. How could we enable them to capitalize on their own knowledge, experience, and past history of success and turn that into leadership of highly performing teams?

Our hypothesis, which we proved out through ALP, was that the way to create these high-performing teams was to turn managers of work into leaders of people. At the time, most of corporate America devalued leadership, a.k.a. "soft," skills, believing them to be "touchy-feely," or, "just holding hands and singing kumbayah." Unfortunately, no matter how good you are at delivering work, no matter how many deadlines you've met (or beaten) or how much high quality work you deliver, those skills do NOT enable you to lead a team. Leading people is an entirely different skill set. And there's nothing soft about it.

ALP played out over 4, three-day, in-person sessions spaced out over six months. Each session focused on a different set of leadership skills that each individual could personalize with their own strengths and experience, which would in turn support and enhance the technical and management skills they already had. The first session focused on emotional intelligence and professionalism (leading within), the second on facilitation and creating psychological safety (leading teams), the third on coaching and mentoring (leading others), and the last on bringing all of the skills together into your own brand of agile leadership (leading organizations).

In the classroom, content was delivered in a variety of ways designed to be accessible to many different learning styles. Whether sitting at tables and talking in small groups, recording what you learned in your class workbook, adding ideas to sticky notes and sticking those to one of the many colorful posters in the room, or coming together in a circle of chairs to role play or do other "on-your-feet" activities, these 3-day sessions were busy, colorful, fun, and often, revelatory. But as great as those classroom experiences were, we didn't depend on those moments alone to enable learning.

Between classes, participants had "immersive learning" projects designed to bring what they learned in the classroom to life in their day to day jobs (experiential learning). They also were expected to share their learning with their direct leader, and get feedback on their progress. Throughout the entire process, they were able to connect with others in the cohort through small learning groups called "pods" which provided support and collaboration through the immersive learning work (social learning).

"ALP changed my career and has allowed me to do more than I could have ever imagined. I have been able to grow the people on my team to be better leaders as well - not by telling - but through my actions and the environment I create for them."

In December, 2021...

...we decided to send out a survey to ALP graduates. The program had been suspended beginning in March, 2023 due to the pandemic. So, at that point in time, it had been 2-3 years since any of those surveyed had graduated from the program.

How many times in the past 2 weeks have you used tools / ideas / models you learned in ALP?

Even 2 - 3 years after graduating from the program, 91% of respondents were still using concepts they learned in ALP, some of them on an almost daily basis.

Past Success

Case Study: Growing Leaders for the Future

A large company in the healthcare space was facing a very particular challenge - how could they become a consumer-centric organization when so many leaders across the org had no direct contact with their consumers, or even deep knowledge of who those consumers are and the challenges they face? The Consumer-Centric Leadership Experience (CCLE) was developed to enable passionate and high-performing talent from the front line to acquire both the leadership and technical skill sets they would need to bring their understanding of and compassion for their consumers deeper into the organization.

CCLE is a full-time program in which participants are put onto small, agile consulting teams who take on experience-improvement work sourced from across the organization. Participants have access to an ongoing learning curriculum that includes leadership skills, technical skills, career-building, and business acumen. As they learn, their project work becomes the ultimate laboratory to put their learning into practice, with the ongoing support and coaching of the team running the program. Each quarter, team s re-form, enabling participants to practice the skills needed to stand up a new team and build positive working relationships with team members who have a diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, personalities, and opinions. Projects are also selected on a quarterly basis, exposing participants not just to different types of project work, but also to the different parts of the organization that work supports.

Participants in CCLE enter the program through non-traditional recruiting sources. Early cohorts have come from consumer facing roles across the organization and from early career internships programs.

Responses from business partners who sponsored improvement projects during Q2, 2023

91%

Would partner with CCLE again

Business Impact Rating

8

out of

10

How would you rate the impact of your partnership with a CCLE team on your business area overall?

Project Impact Rating

9

out of

10

How would you rate the impact of your partnership with a CCLE team on your specific experience improvement work?

Growth Impact Rating

7

out of

10

How much are you and your team learning through your partnership with a CCLE team?