Start where the evidence is strongest. The Extraordinary Leader™ pairs a globally validated 360 assessment with flexible delivery, then keeps the development going with programs that deepen it and simplify it across the organization.
Leaders receive anonymous, multi-rater feedback benchmarked against the 75th and 90th percentile of global leaders — then build a plan around three to five signature strengths instead of chasing every gap. Available as a one-day in-person experience, two 3-hour live online sessions, or two 90-minute one-on-one coaching sessions.
For leaders who have completed the flagship experience and want the next level of depth: re-measurement, a sharper strength target, and a plan that survives a promotion.
For alumni cohorts and high-potentials moving up a level.
Trust is the leading indicator of leadership effectiveness. This assessment and session measure a leader on all three elements — positive relationships, judgment and expertise, consistency — and turn the result into an action plan.
For leaders whose bottleneck is credibility, not competence.
Six capabilities that make the biggest measurable difference, expressed in one shared language from frontline supervisor to executive — the simplest way to align development across a whole organization.
For enterprise-wide programs that need one framework.
Start where the evidence is strongest. The Extraordinary Leader™ pairs a globally validated 360 assessment with flexible delivery, then keeps the development going with programs that deepen it and simplify it across the organization.
Participants identify their coaching preferences across three leadership-style spectrums, learn the FUEL conversation framework, then practice it on their own real scenarios with feedback from learning partners. Delivered as two 3.5-hour live online sessions or a one-day in-person workshop, with an email sustainment program and optional FUEL Igniters modules.
Most feedback fails on delivery, not intent. Leaders learn how to give feedback people can act on — and, just as importantly, how to ask for it in a way that gets an honest answer.
For cultures where feedback is rare, vague, or annual.
A coaching culture needs coachable people. This experience measures and builds the receiving side — the willingness to seek, accept and act on input — for leaders and individual contributors alike.
For organizations rolling out coaching at scale.
Senior leaders face problems that don’t fit a workshop — a culture shift, a new mandate, a derailing habit. Our coaches bring senior-level experience and a proven process rather than generic advice.
For executives and high-visibility transitions.
Zenger Folkman provides microlearning experiences to allow organizations and their leaders to develop key behaviors demonstrated by highly effective leaders. The experiences offered by Zenger Folkman leverage the same research, leadership framework, and strengths-based development methodology as The Extraordinary Leader development experience.
They focus on leadership capabilities that are critical—as the way we work is constantly being redefined. Experiences include a self-assessment, feedback report, and development guide. They may be customized to the audience and include a planning conversation with the facilitator.
In times of uncertainty, trust in leadership matters more than ever. Zenger Folkman’s research identifies three key behaviors that build trust and helps leaders create a practical plan to strengthen trust with their teams.
Today’s fast-changing environment requires leaders to move quickly while making sound decisions. Leaders learn key behaviors for greater agility, innovation, and pace, along with tools to identify and strengthen their leadership speed.
In a complex environment, leaders must challenge the status quo, push boundaries, and boldly pursue new goals. Leaders learn practical behaviors and tools to strengthen their influence and lead boldly through uncertainty.
Effective leadership during change and challenge requires more than simply keeping people informed—it requires powerful communication. Leaders learn five key behaviors that strengthen communication impact and use a self-assessment to create a practical action plan.
Resilient leaders don’t just survive change and challenge—they thrive through it. Participants gain personal insights and data-supported strategies to strengthen their leadership resilience and create an individualized development plan.
Zenger Folkman’s research shows that 25% of leaders are unaware of their own blind spots. Participants learn five critical skills for valuing diversity and genuinely including others, along with insights to create a development plan.
Strategic thinking is essential to effective leadership and critical for long-term career advancement. Participants gain personal insights and data-supported strategies to strengthen this skill and create an individualized development plan.
Organizations often seek greater collaboration, yet ineffective meetings, events, and communication can create dysfunction instead of synergy. Participants assess their collaborative tendencies, learn four behaviors that enable stronger collaboration, and create a personal development plan.
Challenging assignments can increase employee engagement and satisfaction, but setting effective stretch goals can be difficult. Participants learn four research-based skills for establishing meaningful stretch goals, overcoming common barriers, and creating a focused development plan.
Leaders need the skills to help employees reach their full potential and support growth early in their careers. Participants learn five key behaviors for developing others, explore three data-driven approaches, and create an action plan for improvement.
Leaders shape workplace ethics through integrity, honesty, and leading by example. Participants learn research-based behaviors that strengthen integrity and create a development plan for growth.
Organizations need leaders who can take calculated risks while managing potential failure. Participants assess their risk-taking approach, learn behaviors that strengthen confident decision-making, and create a development plan for growth.
Leaders must be prepared to navigate significant organizational change, yet many lack the skills to lead it effectively. Participants learn behaviors that help overcome inertia, champion change, and create a focused development plan.
Decisive leadership is strongly connected to overall leadership effectiveness, yet difficult decisions are often avoided. Participants assess their decision-making approach, learn research-based behaviors, and create an action plan to make more effective decisions.
| If your situation is… | Start with | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Leaders are capable and ready to build on their strengths and increase their impact | The Extraordinary Leader™ | 360 assessment + 1 day, live online, or 1:1 coaching |
| Managers avoid the conversations that matter | The Extraordinary Coach™ + Elevating Feedback™ | Two 3.5-hour live online sessions, or 1-day workshop |
| You need one leadership language across every level | Leadership Levers™ | Enterprise framework + assessment |
| Engagement is dropping and you suspect credibility | Leadership Trust™ | Assessment + development session |
| A senior leader needs individual support, fast | Executive Coaching | 1:1 engagement |
| A program ended and the behavior is fading | Leadership Microlearning Sessions | 24 short sessions, live online or in person |
▸Definition
Leadership development programs combine assessment, skill-building, coaching, and reinforcement to create measurable changes in how leaders behave at work. The most effective programs use multi-rater data to target a few key strengths and reinforce new behaviors long after the workshop ends.
Most leadership training fails for a boring reason: it treats development as an event. A leader attends a day, leaves motivated, and returns to a job that rewards the behavior they already had. Nothing measurable changes.
Our solutions are designed around the opposite assumption. Development begins with data a leader can’t argue with, targets the small number of strengths that actually differentiate, and continues in short doses over months. Choose one of the three paths below — or combine them, which is what most organizations end up doing.
Strengths-based 360 development for leaders at every level, plus the six capabilities that predict business results.
Turn managers into coaches, make feedback land, and give senior leaders one-on-one support.
A plan requiring additional time gets dropped in the first busy quarter. Survival is a design problem, not discipline.
Increase in employee engagement
Less
Turnover
Increase in customer satisfaction
Increase in profitability
More discretionary effort
The research behind every solution on this page comes from the same place: a database of more than 1.6 million 360-degree assessments, built over four decades. It’s what tells us that extraordinary leaders are defined by a handful of profound strengths, not the absence of weakness — and that the fastest way to elevate a strength is to develop the companion behaviors around it.
We map your competency language onto our research framework so development targets the behaviors that predict your business outcomes — not a generic list.
A validated 360 gives each leader anonymous multi-rater data benchmarked to global percentiles.
Each leader picks a small number of strengths and the companion behaviors that elevate them, in a plan they wrote themselves.
In person, live online, or one-on-one, plus facilitator certification when you want to run it in-house.
Short sessions and sustainment tools keep the plan alive through the months where most programs quietly die.
Repeat the assessment to show movement, the only honest proof that a leadership development solution worked.
At minimum, three things: a validated assessment that shows where a leader actually stands, a development experience that turns those results into a written plan, and sustainment that keeps the behavior going after the session ends. Ours add two more — flexible delivery formats (in person, live online, or one-on-one) and optional facilitator certification, so your own team can run the program internally once it’s proven. A solution missing the assessment is training; a solution missing the sustainment is an event.
The core experience takes one to two days; meaningful behavior change takes six to twelve months. The Extraordinary Leader™ is delivered as a one-day in-person experience, two 3-hour live online sessions, or two 90-minute one-on-one coaching sessions — but the assessment happens before it and the development plan runs long after. That gap is where most programs fail, which is why the 24 microlearning sessions exist: short, repeated reinforcement across the months when a plan would otherwise quietly die.
Training transfers knowledge; development changes behavior. A training event can be excellent and still leave a leader’s 360 scores exactly where they were, because knowing what good leadership looks like is not the constraint — most leaders already know. Development starts from multi-rater data about how this specific leader is experienced by the people around them, targets a small number of strengths, and measures again later to prove something moved. If nothing was measured before or after, it was training.
Re-measure the same validated 360 assessment after six to twelve months and compare percentile movement against the global benchmark. That’s the only honest proof, and it’s the step most programs skip. We also recommend tracking the organizational outcomes leadership effectiveness predicts — employee engagement, discretionary effort, and voluntary turnover on the affected teams. Clients using our programs have reported up to a 70% increase in employee engagement and 50% less turnover.
Yes. Every flagship program offers facilitator certification, and our 360 assessment has a separate certification for coaches who want to debrief results with the people they coach. Certification is an intensive process — live online or in person — that gives skilled internal facilitators the framework, tools and materials to deliver standard or customized versions of the workshop inside your organization. Most large clients start with our facilitators and shift to their own once the program is established.
Yes — each of the 24 sessions is self-contained, with its own self-assessment, feedback report and development guide, so a team can take a single session on one capability and leave with a usable plan. They’re most effective in two situations: targeting one specific gap a team needs closed now, and sustaining a flagship program after the main experience ends. They draw on the same research and leadership framework as The Extraordinary Leader, which is why the two fit together without repeating each other.
Tell us where leadership is costing you — engagement, execution, turnover, bench strength — and we’ll point you at the program that addresses it. Or tell you honestly if we’re not the fit.
