Partner to Thrive
Meet anywhere. All services are currently provided "virtually."
Stacks Image 39463
There's a bridge from where you are now to where you're going. Have it be something better.

Better for you.
Better for your team or organization.
Better for the difference you choose to make.

Thrive: Empower Your Leadership
Wherever you lead, you are surely already oriented for high performance and excellence in your field of expertise. That keeps you at your creative, leading edge as an expert. Competence as a subject-matter expert and leadership mastery are not the same thing. Imagine what might be possible if you more consistently embodied both. Empowered leadership focuses on what I call CompetencePLUS. The Competence qualifies you at a level of expertise and in a position for leading. The PLUS evolves your leadership knowledge, trust, presence, and power for navigating the unknown in powerful times.

A great capacity for change lives in each of us. All change results from a change in meaning. People change when they decide that change is meaningful to who they are. Empowering your leadership starts there.

At its core, leading change is about making and acting on new choices. Ideally, you make those choices more consciously, more skillfully, and in a coordinated and purposeful way that builds trust while creating new possibilities or outcomes. In your quest to empower your leadership, your relationship with power matters. As your consciousness about and interaction with power evolves, so will your capacity to lead meaningfully.

In a world obsessed with “effective” action, more is required of us all. The power to be “effective” can be used for good or ill. “Effective” simply means something was successful in producing the desired or intended result. That result could be enliveningly generative or appallingly degenerate. Our bigger challenge – especially in these powerful times – is to call forth other qualities in leadership to reach beyond “effective.” Work improves in every way when it has meaning. Powerful times call for more empowered leadership that creates meaningful outcomes. Outcomes to live for.

Imagine what “thriving” could look and feel like to you.
  • What do you need now to grow as a more vibrant, empowered leader?
  • What will be different when you are that leader?
Reach for more of what you really want ...and start having it more consistently.
  • Cultivate greater excellence in the human element of your work
  • Expand your range and agility working with conflict and complexity, overcoming obstacles to growth and change
  • Redirect patterns of mindset, conversation, and interaction to increase resilience and engagement
  • Bring out the best in yourself and others for adaptive, creative approaches to create what matters.

Thrive: Transform & Grow
Reach to transform and grow for
  • Healthier, more adaptive, innovative, and trust-centered leadership
  • Wiser, more collaborative and presence-centered ways to co-create
  • Braver, more empowering expression of personal mastery.
Transformation isn't just a big word for change. It's more than that.

An essential way to understand “transformation” is that you become a new normal. More than acquiring new knowledge or skill, transformation means that the way you know, understand, and move in the world changes. You respond more consistently and skillfully from conscious choice. You be / do / say from your “best” self, not just reflexively based on prior conditioning. Embodying a new normal, you are effective in new ways under pressure. The under pressure bit is key; you've practiced the new way into your tissue and bones. It's more than a mindset. You're evolving your whole and integrated Self.

When your individual leaders and leadership culture transform, new things become possible, raising your floor and lifting your ceiling.
Stacks Image 39525
Grow with intention and direction.

There's a truism that says we're always either growing or dying. Another truism is there's no comfort in the growth zone and there's no growth in the comfort zone. True.

In leadership, growth is an orientation towards continual learning and fulfillment. Fulfillment of aspirations, commitments, and potential. You can define success by how you grow and what you create along the way.
What about sustainable or regenerative growth?

Thriving is both an experience and an expression of who you are. As you (re)define success, you may be rethinking "sustainable" leadership, collaboration, and business practices as well as what "regenerative" could mean for you.

Leaders and organizations that integrate socially responsible and environmentally sound policies and practices as core elements in their growth strategy very often create sustainable economic values. Sustainable business practices are generally those that are economically viable as well as socially and environmentally responsible. It's the triple bottom line of People, Profit, and Planet. Sustainable leadership practices take care of effectiveness, as well as fulfillment, growth, and wellbeing. Sustainability is about energy and the capacity to create what matters both in the short term and the longer term. We might think about "sustainable" being about profit and “stuff,” but it's as much or even more about people and how we interact with all of life.

What becomes possible - personally and organizationally - when "sustainable" becomes your floor (not your ceiling)?

Regeneration is a paradigm for understanding life and living systems. Regenerative business practices focus on "aliveness" and relationships of people with structures, systems, and processes within the whole. Development is an essential principle of regeneration; participants in the system - your business, for example - seek to grow and develop each person's ability to evolve and their potential to be viable and vital.

How might "regenerative" call you forward toward greater fulfillment?

Thrive: Innovate & Evolve in Complexity
Innovation isn't just another word for clever ideas or inventive change. It's more than that.

As with transformation, “innovation” introduces a new normal. Contrary to popular belief, the "best" ideas don't always take hold as innovation. What happens when you understand innovation as adoption of new practice? An inventor creates something new. But we know innovation has happened when a group or community has adopted a new practice.

Leaders everywhere are being asked to innovate and create environments that promote innovation. What are the interaction patterns that produce innovation, for real and for the good? While retooling on the run, what personal and collaborative practices make you better at innovating? Let's find out.
Complexity has changed the leadership game. More and more, the leadership game is about responding appropriately to what is predictable and to what is unpredictable. Things continue to change faster than ever, but now different kinds of things are changing as well. VUCA - volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity - is the reality in most, if not all, leadership contexts anymore. Never before has a "status quo" approach to leadership and collaboration been so dangerous. How do you deal with this, staying sane, resourceful, and choosing to thrive?

Complexity means that multiple interrelated, interdependent variables interact in unpredictable ways. Volatility is a kind of ongoing, rapid, exponential change with ever new variables at play in a dynamic and evolving context. Does this sound familiar? Maybe exciting, daunting, or overwhelming? Lack of clarity about information, variables, outcomes, and meaning are a recipe for the stress that arises with uncertainty and ambiguity.

What's daunting about the complex space? You can observe, look for patterns, and intervene with an emergent experimental approach, but you cannot control or predict what will happen. Because the rules and practices for complexity are counterintuitive, leaders may well need support to get their heads, hearts, and guts around them. Who do you know deals with complexity? Marketplaces are complex adaptive systems. Business models and business strategy are complex. Unprecedented events or circumstances - e.g. global pandemic, climate change, etc. - precipitate complexity. Just about everything having to do with people and change - e.g. culture change, employee engagement, innovation - is complex.

Most leaders learn to lead in a complicated world. What happens when you realize that applying approaches and processes to complex problems that arose and are appropriate for complicated problems can actually make a bigger mess of things? Leading well and with wellbeing in complexity requires different mindsets, emotional resonance and resilience, and embodied capabilities.

The call of complexity is to approach the world in more open and curious ways, becoming more agile at bridging between the complex (unpredictable) and complicated (predictable) realms. Discovering and evolving ways to navigate complexity m/.core confidently and skillfully is core to evolving your leadership. You engage intentionally with what is diverse, novel, and adverse.

This is within reach for you. Along the way, you become more able to engage the best parts of your humanity. The compassionate, connected, and committed learner who chooses be the change you wish to see and dance with in your world.
Stacks Image 39530
Leadership development and organizational culture work are where the "rubber" of complexity meets the road. Leaders who shape and evolve culture to deliver on their strategy accomplish radically better results. Leadership and/or culture development ignored puts results in peril.

A leadership culture orientation develops essential leadership competencies, life stance, and behaviors throughout your organization (independent of role or title).

Executive and senior leaders, business owners, and knowledge professionals partner with me for Growth by Design™. They achieve healthier leadership, more sustainable and collaborative growth, personal mastery, and intentional transformation. They effectively shape, leverage and scale their leadership culture. Engagement, innovation, performance, resilience and wellbeing improve. It's how you thrive.

Really, what needs your attention now?

Thrive: Take the Next Step
Stacks Image 2650
What is next for you as you lead?

Bridging Lives clients tend to be independent thinkers and creative mavericks. They challenge the “norm” and consciously seek out life-affirming challenges. They strive to create understanding and connection across boundaries. As scientists, technologists, and creative knowledge professionals they are passionate about making a meaningful difference. It matters that they extend their reach and impact.

Bridging Lives clients invest in their growth, from the inside out.

Is something unique emerging for you now?
  • You’re redefining your current identity and personal power
  • You chose an unconventional professional path or broke barriers to advancement by force of talent and determination and now get to create more on your terms
  • You find yourself now in unfamiliar territory, having advanced to a new position or domain in which to innovate and evolve
  • You’re grappling with the challenges of fast organizational growth and how best to guide deliberate culture change for coherence and aliveness.

Stacks Image 39458
We all need allies - true partners - for our inner game of leadership.

When you’re at the leading edge of personal and cultural transformation, who is your ally?
  • Override self-limiting patterns - like self doubt or self sabotage - and empower new choices
  • Experiment and take risks with greater ease, wisdom and grace
  • Cultivate your presence and practices to generate greater trust and excellence
  • Navigate dynamics of conflict and change for positive, collaborative outcomes
  • Step forward confidently with greater awareness and skill
  • Thrive, calling forth the best from yourself and with others.

Who needs you to succeed and thrive at the same time? You do. They do. We do.
Take the next step. Let’s find out what’s possible for you when we Partner to Thrive.

Stacks Image 21
To get to the next level of greatness depends on the quality of the culture, which depends on the quality of relationships, which depends on the quality of conversations.
Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results, by Judith Glaser
In movement from Patriarchy to Partnership everyone is required to upgrade their operating system. That is the Development Agenda. If it does not happen, we all collude in going back to normal.
Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results, by Bob Anderson & Bill Adams
In the complex domain (sometimes called a complex adaptive system), there are too many moving parts - too many people with opinions and abilities of their own or too many contextual forces that interact to create new patterns. Here, because you cannot know something will turn out until afterwards, it's vital to pay attention to the patterns rather than attempt to predict the future. It's especially risky to make a big bet; smaller, safe-to-fail experiments are a much better approach at first, as you get a sense of how the system operates. In the complex domain, learning from the system as it changes is the best way to move in a desirable direction.
Jennifer Garvey Berger, author of "Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps"
Personal mastery of any discipline or art appeals to those who desire to move beyond mere competence to a position of power, freedom, peace of mind, and full self-expression.
The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life, by Steve Zaffron & Dave Logan
Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. ... When change works, it tends to follow a pattern. The people who change have clear direction, ample motivation, and a supportive environment.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Beyond the issue of finding intimacy and meaning in our lives, I believe learning to communicate non-defensively is our next evolutionary step, an essential key to our survival.
Taking the War Out of Our Words: The Art of Powerful Non-Defensive Communication, by Sharon Ellison
Lead. Collaborate. Grow. ... to Thrive!
Stacks Image 39547
Stacks Image 39544
Stacks Image 39541