Get Strategic Foundations
A 12-week program that teaches a group of your leaders how to be strategic and gives them one quarter to practice it together. It runs on the same method I use one on one with my Get Strategic 30 clients.
Is this right for your leaders?
Foundations fits a specific moment.
You have a group of leaders worth investing in, and you want their growth to happen with intention rather than waiting on time and experience to do the work.
It's the right program if:
- They're still executing at the level that earned them the role, and the role requires something different
- They already think strategically, but they struggle to protect the strategic, high-impact work from the day-to-day demands
- You have four to six of them, and you'd rather they learn it together than one at a time
- You want their development to be deliberate, with visible progress along the way
It's probably not the best fit if:
- You're looking for a course, a workshop, or a certificate program
- You want one leader developed deeply over months rather than a group brought along together, which is what Get Strategic 30 is for
- You want generic leadership training rather than a program built around your business and your strategy
No one teaches a mid-level leader how to be strategic.
Branch managers, functional heads, and mid-level managers get promoted for solving problems fast. So they keep solving them, often the same ones reactively, rather than solving them upstream where they are created. Each week fills up with whatever comes at them first, and the strategic work gets pushed to the next week and the next week. They keep playing the hero, because being the hero is what got them the job. Two forces keep it that way.
The Operational Pull
Even leaders who understand what strategic work looks like find the operational demands of the role competing with it every week. Without a system that protects strategic thinking, it becomes the thing that always waits until next week.
The Identity Shift
The skills that earned the promotion, being the expert and the fixer, are the ones holding them back in a bigger role. The job now is to build systems, develop people, and get results through others. Almost no one is taught how to make that turn.
Being strategic is a discipline, and it can be taught:
- Go upstream to the root cause instead of fixing the same symptom again.
- Spend the week on the high-impact work.
- Take priorities from the company's strategy and carry them down to the week in front of you.
- Reflect back every week and learn from what actually moved and what didn't.
- Build the people around you into the ones who solve it next time.
Be the playmaker, not the star player.
Foundations teaches that discipline and gives each leader twelve weeks to practice.
Each leader builds their own strategic plan and works it every week, with coaching from me.
What Each Leader Gets
- A Big 5 personality profile with a 1:1 debrief from the creator of the instrument. Before we build anything, each leader learns how they're actually wired: how they take in information, decide, and handle pressure. The program gets tuned to that wiring, and that fit is why it resonates with each individual leader.
- A personal GPS: their North Star for the next 12 months and beyond, Strategic Pillars and Initiatives, and one Strategic Habit, held in their own dashboard. The Pillars and Initiatives tie directly to your company's strategic plan, so their growth pushes your priorities forward.
- A planning waterfall: quarterly, monthly, and weekly plans that flow down from their Strategic Initiatives, so the week in front of them always ties back to your strategy. Every Friday they submit a reflection on the week and their plan for the week ahead, and each one gets a coaching response.
- 10 weekly lessons from me: one leadership principle each week, taught in a short video with a one-pager and the tool that puts it into practice, delivered on each leader's dashboard. Principle deep dives are taught live in the group sessions.
- Monthly and quarterly synthesis. I personally read every leader's weekly reflection, and each month I pull the four weeks together into one read: did the work that matters most actually move, what keeps getting crowded out, and what needs to change. That is also where I track each leader's identity shift and provide feedback and support, always through the lens of their Big 5 personality traits.
The Live Coaching
- An opening 1:1 with me for every leader: we customize the GPS to their role, their team, and their year, so the program is specific to them from day one.
- A group launch session where the cohort builds their GPS live. Everyone leaves with a working plan already in motion.
- Two group working sessions during the quarter: one on focus, one on leading through others, both sessions applied to the leaders' actual work.
- Open office hours every other week. Anyone can drop in with a live challenge and get unstuck that week.
- A closing session where each leader presents their quarter and their next-quarter plan to the cohort. Presenting the plan to peers makes the commitment real.
- A shared cohort board where the group posts questions, comments, and wins between sessions, so the conversation keeps going all quarter.
Three arcs, one quarter.
Ten principles, one per week for ten weeks, with the last two weeks devoted to making the changes stick.
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Build the GPS
Week 1 From executor to enabler. Group launch: the job now is deciding what matters, not fixing everything yourself.
Week 2 Know how you're wired. Big 5 debrief with the instrument's creator, then an opening 1:1 with me.
Week 3 Carry only the week. The GPS goes live: year to quarter to month to this week.
Week 4 Reflection turns experience into wisdom. First monthly synthesis.
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Protect the strategic work
Week 5 The Focus 5 and the One Thing. Group session: three to five priorities a week, one non-negotiable.
Week 6 Structure creates freedom. A Strategic Habit with a day and a time attached.
Week 7 Time is also energy. The ideal week, prime thinking time, and 30-minute sprints.
Week 8 Clarity beats certainty. Manufacturing clarity fast, starting ugly, and a two-question check for the decisions that matter.
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Multiply through others
Week 9 Who, not how. Group session: who can help, who can guide me. Then how to delegate, not dump.
Week 10 Lead up and out. Managing up as a discipline, and leading with the so-what.
Weeks 11–12 Make it permanent. Quarterly synthesis and cohort close. Each leader writes their next-quarter plan and checks it for blind spots before committing.
The after picture, week 12.
Twelve weeks is enough for real change to show. I want to be precise about that promise. The deeper identity work continues past the quarter, but the change should already be observable from where you sit:
- The strategic initiatives they own actually move. The operational demands keep coming all quarter, and each leader plans the big work into the week anyway. At the close they can show you what moved and what didn't.
- Leaders who come to you with a so-what and a recommendation, having already thought through the tradeoffs.
- Bigger decisions come with the blind-spot check already done. Before they commit, they've asked what they might be missing and which assumption breaks the plan if it's wrong, so you aren't the one catching it later.
- A short progress note to their manager every Friday, a few bullets on what moved that week and the one thing they're committing to next week. You always know the progress, where their focus is, and where you're needed.
- They hand real work to their team and set them up for success. Each leader asks who before how, hands the work off with the expectations in writing, and follows up on a rhythm the two of them agreed on.
- A next-quarter plan each leader built themselves and presents at the close, tied to your company's priorities.
Along the way I track a few simple signals: progress on each Strategic Initiative, weekly plans completed, the Strategic Habit held or missed, work moved from doing to delegating. I read those every month, and you see the full arc at the close.
You see the progress. The coaching stays confidential.
Before the program starts, you and I sit down once with your strategic plan and what it means for the leaders in the cohort. That shapes every leader's Pillars.
Then each leader has their own conversation with their manager, before week 1. They take three questions:
- Which part of our strategy is mine to push forward this year?
- What do you want me doing differently by the end of the quarter?
- Who on my team do you want to see taking on more this year?
They repeat the conversation in week 12, and most keep it as a standing 90-day rhythm.
I talk with each manager briefly myself: where they see this leader today, and what they'd need to see change by the quarter's end. That shapes how I coach, and it stays out of anything the leader reads. That conversation and the Big 5 assessment are both due before the first group session.
At the close I sit down with each manager again, after their leader has walked them through the quarter: what changed in how they plan and prioritize, and what makes sense next, whether that's running the GPS on their own, a cohort check-in, or deeper 1:1 work.
The pilot cohort
Foundations is new, and this cohort is the first. You get founding pricing and more of my attention than any cohort after this one will get. I get a working partner willing to tell me what lands and what needs to change.
Length
12 weeksone full quarter
Cohort
4 to 6 leadersfrom your company
Investment
$3,500per leader, pilot pricing; standard pricing is $5,000
Includes the personality assessment and creator debrief for every leader, all live sessions, and the full planning and reflection system through the 12 weeks. Each leader leaves with their GPS, a quarter of their own plans and reflections, and the method to keep planning this way on their own.
The next step is a 30-minute conversation about the leaders you have in mind and how the program might be a fit for them.
Work well,