Dean Hallett, President This quote precisely defines what it takes to achieve and sustain high-performance leadership – Awareness and Authenticity. While those in executive positions often intellectually understand what it takes to be a leader and chase organizational goals, they may be unable to identify and tap into the best of their inherent attributes. Most spend time demanding perfection and pretending to know all the answers. Such behaviors are driven by our experiences in life, where we form fixed beliefs and fixed behaviors that tend to obscure who we really are. This is what compelled Dean Hallett to explore the idea of broadening out executive leadership coaching programs and establish his company, Hallett Leadership.
Hallett believes that leadership is more than just operating in a templatized manner; doing things that leaders are supposed to do. High-performing leaders – who create organizational cultures where teams can thrive - often need a boost. Hallett Leadership discovers potential and provides the education to help individuals transform into truly effective leaders.
The company also fosters collaboration and teamwork through its programs to help businesses create better work environments for their employees. The focus here is that we are better together than we are alone. It is important to note that some of the best ideas for your company sit in the hearts and minds of your people. When we create a safe place to exchange and build on those ideas, creativity and innovation go through the roof. Hallett, the company’s president, elaborates on his approach to delivering leadership and coaching programs through his interaction with Manage HR.
What are some of the executive programs offered by Hallett Leadership and the methodologies used to deliver them?
Hallett Leadership extends three leadership development tracks; executive coaching, accelerated leadership programs, and multi-day workshops. Our executive coaching program focuses on developing the individual from the inside out using the BE – DO – HAVE model, tapping into the leader’s true self and drawing out the key leadership attributes the individual already possesses. We are all unique, and it is that uniqueness that makes us special – therefore, each leader is also special and unique. The accelerated leadership program is a nine-month-long program that brings together a group of executives within the organization to collaborate more effectively, inspire their team, and become accountable and responsible for pushing each other to be their best. The company benefits from the bond forged by the participants, as well as from the fresh perspective the team provides on challenges and opportunities facing the company and industry. The third track is a multi-day workshop, which works well for businesses that intend to align the rest of the teams in their organization. Each program allows companies to utilize the discovery model, which entails interactive exercises that allow the participants to truly experience their leadership in action. It is like riding a bike – I can tell you for hours how to do it, but until you get on the bike you will not truly experience how it feels.
Could you help us understand Hallett Leadership’s methodology to onboard its customers?
When we partner with clients, we invest quite a bit of time in establishing the building blocks to high-performance leadership. In each association, we help our clients understand their challenges to ensure we coach them effectively in building their leadership foundation. We educate the clients about the significance of collaboration and alignment – again, we are better together. We help them focus on various foundational pieces, such as how to build the best teams and how to give and receive feedback.
For all our clients, we carry out behavioral assessments for benchmarking. Through DiSC behavior assessments, we help people understand their behavioral styles and how to best work with other behavior styles around them. Our team also performs a 360-degree assessment where the leaders anonymously obtain feedback from managers and co-workers on how frequently they demonstrate specific leadership behaviors. Based on that feedback, we help individuals identify how they are perceived. We set goals for them and work on personal affirmations that become tools for people to demonstrate their best leadership attributes, which refers to them presenting the best versions of themselves for the company and the people they work with.
Tell us a client success story highlighting the challenges an organization faced and the offered solutions.
One of our clients in the entertainment industry wanted to move to a digital distribution platform. However, each individual division wanted to create their own digital supply chain, which would have been incredibly inefficient. So, we spent a significant amount of time working with individuals involved in the process to create alignment around the idea that it’s better to create just one digital supply chain. By doing that, they would be able to realize incredible efficiencies and opportunities. However, to make that possible, we had to offer significant coaching and align many people around the idea. There was a lot of history and territorialism to overcome, as these divisions had managed and controlled their own individual processes for decades.
We educate the clients about the significance of collaboration and alignment
We helped the client generate ongoing alignment around the guiding principles of the initiative, which proved to be essential in achieving the necessary levels of trust and respect. Once that supply chain was complete, it created incredible opportunities to move products efficiently and accelerate deadlines for getting every division’s product into the market.
What makes Hallett Leadership stand apart from other coaching businesses
Our biggest differentiators are the discovery model transformational process and the fact that we have experience in the trenches. Consequently, when clients come to us, we don’t give theoretical answers but instead draw out true leadership behaviors and refer back to instances where we approached actual problems that had to be resolved. More importantly, we don’t have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. We can customize our solution for our clients’ needs.
The missing piece in most companies is leadership development at all levels of the organization. Without it, the organization my not have a proper foundation, and may come crumbling down. People are the foundation. If an organization can get them right, it can get everything right.
