Leadership Programs and Workshops

Multi-month cohort programs and high-intensity workshops, built around your leaders' real situations.

Transformative Leadership Programs

Multi-month cohort journeys.

We make leadership learnable, breaking down complex capabilities into specific practices leaders can observe, rehearse, and refine under real pressure.

Multi-month cohort journeys for senior and high-potential leaders, designed around your real strategic and cultural challenges.

These programs are designed to:

Shift how leaders think, act, and collaborate under pressure.
Build the judgment needed to lead in high-uncertainty environments.
Strengthen leadership culture across teams, units, and functions.

One of our multi-year cohort programs for senior scientist leaders is now in its seventh year, with dramatic impact on collaboration and alignment.

The Adaptive Leadership Cohort

A year-long program in four modules, each an in-person session of two to three days, with small-group case consultations and one-to-one coaching between them.

1
Diagnosis
Reading the system before acting on it.
2
Action
Intervening in the system, and learning from what moves.
3
Authority
Exercising formal and informal authority deliberately.
4
Inside Out
The leader's own patterns under pressure, made visible.

Alumni continue in AL Leaders Connect, a community of practice that keeps the shared language and the peer consultation going after the cohort ends.

Executive programs

Strategic Leadership and High-Stakes Leadership.

Strategic Leadership

The challenge is creating meaningful organizational change.

Running an organization effectively and changing an organization are not the same thing. Many of the most important leadership challenges involve helping an organization adapt, evolve, innovate, grow, or respond to changing circumstances. Leaders must understand not only strategy, but also the organizational dynamics that shape what is possible. Culture, incentives, history, informal networks, competing interests, and resistance to change all influence whether progress occurs.

Strategic leaders learn to diagnose the forces shaping an organization, identify opportunities for movement, build coalitions, create alignment, and mobilize people around a shared direction. The focus shifts from managing performance to shaping the future.

High-Stakes Leadership

The challenge is remaining effective when leadership is tested at its limits.

Some leadership situations place extraordinary demands on the person in the role. The stakes are high. Visibility is high. Expectations are high. Decisions carry significant consequences. The pace is relentless. Competing interests collide. Pressure comes from multiple directions at once.

In these moments, technical expertise and good intentions are rarely enough. Leaders must be able to diagnose what is happening while events continue to unfold. They must manage themselves under pressure, exercise authority deliberately, maintain judgment when emotions run high, and remain effective when the system pushes back.

High-Stakes Leadership is the most advanced program in our portfolio because it focuses on the capabilities leaders rely on when leadership matters most: judgment, steadiness, adaptability, presence, and the ability to act effectively under pressure.

Both sit at the top of our Leadership Development Pathway, above Manager to Leader Foundations and Advanced.

Immersive Workshops

High intensity, one capability at a time.

High-intensity workshops focused on specific capabilities, from leading in the Fog Zone to running high-stakes meetings and consultations.

Sessions are hands-on, case-based, and built around your leaders' real situations, so practice transfers immediately back to the work. Run as a single day, a series, or a Leadership Dialogue: a four-day intervention for a senior team, closing on what the team will continue, stop and start.

Workshop series can focus on

Adaptive leadership and leading through uncertainty.
Cross-functional collaboration and influence without authority.
Decision-making under pressure and systems thinking in practice.
Leading in the Fog Zone.
Running high-stakes meetings and consultations.

Workshops draw on the Leadership Flight Simulator and the Nextland multi-stakeholder simulation where a scenario serves the capability better than a case.

How we work

Learning that stays connected to the work.

We design lab-like environments where leaders slow the action, experiment with new moves, and translate insight into embodied habits. We connect growth to concrete work: live cases, strategic initiatives, culture shifts, so learning is never abstract or detached from outcomes. And we build internal capacity: frameworks, shared language, and peer development that continues long after a single program ends.

Every program opens and closes with an assessment, so the growth is visible. Leaders who need focused work on one capability between or after a program can hold Leadership Intensives.

Start with a conversation.

Fifteen minutes with a member of the faculty, at no cost. Tell us what your leaders are facing, and we will tell you which program or workshop fits.

Start a conversation