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New managers need more than a generic leadership course.

They need help with the decisions, people, and pressures of their own roles. Our cohort-based program combines instruction, practice, and coaching to help managers build sound judgment, delegate well, and lead their teams with confidence.

Book a callSee how it works

Thirty minutes on Zoom. Which managers, where they are starting, and what has to be different.

Veteran-owned

Kansas City

Founder-led development

Accelerate the leader development curve.

Your new leaders are hungry. They want to learn how to inspire a team, and they want to build something that works.

They also stand closest to your line workers and your customers. What a new leader does each day is what those people experience of your business. That makes them critical to how it performs.

You decide how quickly they get good at the job. We teach them how.

A new manager learns the job one way or another. Without a deliberate start they learn by trial and error, and the team lives through each error with them.

We start them on the everyday habits: setting expectations, delegating, giving feedback, and holding the conversations that are easy to postpone. They practice on the team they lead right now, so the work counts twice.

Explore new-leader development

Classes, practice and coaching work on one development plan.

Learning only matters when it changes what happens at work. We connect the lesson, the next action, and the review so leaders can practice with purpose, and so the people accountable for them can see it happening.

  1. Damon Wells teaching at a whiteboard to a small group of managers.
    Learn Practice the skill in a class, on the situations the role actually brings.
  2. Three managers talking as they walk through an office.
    Apply Use it in the leader’s current work, with the next action always clear.
  3. Two people in a one-to-one conversation in an office seating area.
    Review Use coaching and agreed progress reviews to examine what happened and what to change.
See the engagement
The team view, headed Who is where. Seven leaders listed by their initials, each row giving how loaded they are, the conditions that would likely suit them best, what to discuss about the fit, days in role, days since their last one-to-one, open items, and their function, tenure and number of reports. A line at the foot reads that the page shows no personality scores, no age and no sex, and never will.
The team view. How loaded each leader is, where a leader and their conditions do not match, and who has not had a one-to-one. It shows no personality score, no age and no sex, and it says so on the page.

No two roles ask the same thing of a leader.

We develop your leaders for the specific environment, not a generic template. Your business has its own requirements, so we adapt the development program to maximize your leaders’ potential.

Marked up for one leader Shelly, a nurse manager. Illustrative.

Athlete

How this leader tends to operate.

Shelly was a staff nurse for eight years and was promoted for reliability. When a task is late, she completes it herself.

Arena

What the role demands, and the conditions around it.

O*NET rates Dependability 98 for this role, its highest rating. Leadership Orientation is 91.

Alignment

Where those two help each other, and where they pull apart.

Her strongest trait is the role’s highest demand. The role also needs the work done through other people. She does it herself.

Adaptation

One practical change, tried in the work and reviewed against what happened.

Each Monday she assigns one task she would normally do herself, with a due time. On Friday she records what happened.

Her staff does not learn the task, and the work stays with her.

What the review shows feeds the next adaptation.

Ratings from O*NET 11-9111.00, which lists Nurse Manager among its job titles: Dependability 98, Leadership Orientation 91, Attention to Detail 87. Shelly is illustrative. She is not a client. The ratings describe the occupation, not any individual in it.

This approach supports reflection and development. It is not a validated hiring, promotion, or performance-prediction tool.

Explore our approach

What an engagement includes

  • An assessment result headed Your five traits. Five cards ring a petal chart: Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness, each with a percentile, a high, low or average reading, and a sentence on what it means in plain words. A line at the top reads that the number is how many of 100 adults of your age and sex score lower than you, and that higher is not better.The assessment
  • The app a leader uses, open on a 90-day plan. A named goal, a count of actions done, and a first stage of three dated items to check off.The leader’s app
  • Damon Wells standing at the front of a room, speaking to about twenty people seated at tables with notebooks and laptops. A screen behind him shows a diagram of linked circles.A group class
  • Damon Wells sitting in a low chair facing one other person, both mid-conversation. A low table between them holds an open notebook, a pen and a coffee cup. A window fills the wall behind.A one-to-one
The screens are from the apps. The photographs are illustrations.
  • The P×E assessment. A leader-by-environment survey that names each leader’s tendencies, their strengths, and the development path that follows from both.
  • The leader’s app for the full 90 days. Their priorities, the demands of their role and their next action, in one place between sessions.
  • A team view for the supervisor. The manager accountable for the group watches progress across all of them.
  • Eight group classes, 90 minutes, one a week. Leadership fundamentals, styles and behaviors, worked against your own company’s values.
  • Four individual coaching and assessment sessions, to gauge where each leader has actually moved.
  • Three supervisor one-to-ones inside the 90 days.
  • 90 days, or up to 180 for the intensive.
See the engagement
Damon Wells speaking with a small group of managers.

Built from 31 years of military leadership and 10 years of research. Applied to your organization.

Summary Leadership is led by G. Damon Wells, who commanded at every level from battery to brigade and taught at West Point. His approach focuses on developing critical leadership skills during the most impactful phase of a leader’s career, but he adds role and environmental requirements. These requirements are half of the leadership alignment equation, and are often overlooked by traditional leader development programs.

Classes and coaching bring those requirements into the decisions, conversations, and responsibilities your leaders face at work.

Meet Damon

Run your new and developing leaders as a cohort.

A cohort runs for 90 or 180 days, depending on what fits your team. Throughout the program, your managers learn together, practice together, and review the real work they are doing right now. They build a common approach to solving problems, making decisions, and leading people. The result is more than better individual managers. It is a management team that works from the same playbook and holds the same standard.

Tell us how many leaders you have and where they are starting. We will work out the length and the start on the call.

Book a call

Thirty minutes on Zoom. Which managers, where they are starting, and what has to be different.