2012 Year of Deepening

2012 was a year of deepening the foundations and structures of the school and of building on what we have learned. While it is tempting to quickly expand on our successes, we recognize that long-term sustainability requires that we capitalize on what we have created and ensure that it is broad enough and strong enough to support the future growth of the School.

Below are some of our major accomplishments in 2012:

• Held the first Three-Day Leadership Clinics for the participants in the second cohort. These clinics, held at a residential facility in the local regions, are designed to reinforce the learnings of the Five-Day Fundamentals in Transformational Leadership and address how to deal with breakdowns in the field.


• Held the second five-day residential program for the second cohort, Fundamentals of Transformational Leadership, with an emphasis on enrolling others and then empowering them in their own leadership.


• Produced two, three-hour Leadership Dialogues for the participants, one on the created future and one on integrity. These international conference calls are part of the curriculum of the school and are held during those quarters of the academic year when there is no residential offering.


• Professionally recorded two distinctions as audio offerings of the School – Access to Power and Transformational Leadership. These audio offerings are part of the library of more than 50 distinctions being developed by the faculty.


• Held two School Builder meetings – one on January and one in July – to do the reporting and planning necessary to keep the School moving forward.


• Continued to build the Apprentice Leader Program, which includes 12 of the original 18 participants in the first cohort of the School. During 2012 each of them had at least one major opportunity to advance their program leadership. This is a significant level of commitment from an all-volunteer group.


• Began an Apprentice Coaching program with 12 participants (nine of them from the first cohort). These apprentices learn the basics of coaching participants in the School by coaching each other and are mentored by a senior coach.


• Began the groundwork for pre-enrollment into the third cohort, which will begin in the second quarter of 2015. This includes structuring the enrollment process, considering the rate of scaling for the size of the school, the criteria for participation, and ways we might identify, qualify, and mentor candidates.


• Worked out how to schedule subsequent cohorts so there is a less hectic and smoother transition from one to the next. We also began to look for those programs we can schedule farther in advance so everyone has more notice. Created the calendar for each year of the third cohort, from 2015 through 2018.


• Continued to revise the presentation of the residential programs for the second cohort based on what we learned in delivering the same basic distinctions to the first cohort. As a result, we observed that the participants in the second cohort are moving through the phases of developing their own leadership more quickly, with less resistance to dealing with the challenges, and with fewer perceived impediments.


• Began to cross-train volunteers and School Builders in different roles and jobs, particularly around program production. This makes more experience and skill available to the School and is also enlivening and enrolling to those learning new jobs and accountabilities.


• Continued to build, maintain, and improve the structures – such as checklists, calendars, manuals, and other records – that are part of the foundation of the School. This work is critical to creating sustainability as well as to giving us a firm foundation on which we can then expand without any loss of quality.


• Launched a new community element, the Tech Finders Element, to support us in finding, testing, and implementing the most appropriate and effective technologies for all levels of the School.