Leadership Grows in Many Different Ways.
Every leader's journey is unique. The right next step looks different for everyone. Serving Leader Center offers a variety of ways to invest in leadership — each designed to help leaders bring out the best in themselves and the people they serve.
Leadership development isn't about collecting more information.
It’s about becoming the kind of leader others want to follow. That kind of growth happens over time—through reflection, practice, conversation, encouragement, and opportunities to see familiar challenges from a different perspective.
Four Ways to Invest in Leadership
Thought Partnership
Dedicated one-to-one space to think out loud, explore possibilities, test your thinking, and give what matters the attention it deserves.
Facilitated Leadership Conversations
An intentional conversation for a small team around something that matters, whether you're navigating a challenge, exploring a possibility, or paying attention to something that's already working well.
Serving Leader Cohorts
Leadership development that unfolds over time, in a learning community where leaders reflect on their own practice, learn from one another, and bring new thinking into their everyday work.
On-Demand Courses
A flexible way to invest in your leadership, with focused courses you can explore on your own schedule, reflect on, and connect to the leadership moments you encounter every day.
Professional development for association and nonprofit professionals — on your own schedule.
Through SLC's partnership with World Serving Leaders, you can access professionally developed on-demand courses grounded in the Serving Leader Model® and Five Actions of Serving Leadership™.
Each course provides 8 professional development hours and focuses on a particular aspect of serving leadership, with case studies, reflection, practical application tools, quizzes, and a Certificate of Completion.
Designed for association and nonprofit professionals who want to strengthen how they contribute, work with others, and advance their organization's purpose.
Chart Your Leadership Journey
Explore your values, purpose, vision, and sphere of influence, and consider how the Five Actions of Serving Leadership™ can shape the way you lead.
Run to Great Purpose™
Explore the role of Great Purpose in leadership: clarifying where you're headed, raising the vision, and helping purpose become something people understand and experience in the work.
Raise the Bar™
Explore how values become everyday behaviors, and how expectations, coaching, and accountability can help people do their best work.
Blaze the Trail™
Consider what creates value for the people you serve, what may be getting in the way, and how leaders can help remove obstacles so people and organizations can move toward their mission.
Build on Strength™
Explore strengths and motivations, how they connect to meaningful work, and what becomes possible when people are able to contribute their strengths as part of a team.
Upend the Pyramid™
Explore delegation as more than handing off tasks: developing people, sharing meaningful responsibility, and building leadership capacity throughout an organization.
Note: SLC partner-specific purchase links are pending from World Serving Leaders and will be added before launch. Course buttons will be active once links are received.
You probably don't need more advice.
You may need more room to think.
Leaders know what deserves attention; they just rarely get protected space to give it that attention.
Dedicated one-to-one space to think out loud, explore possibilities, test your thinking, and give what matters the attention it deserves.
You bring what's on your mind. We stay with it long enough to look at it in different ways, test assumptions, notice patterns, and explore possibilities. When another perspective, a useful resource, or a little research would help, we can bring that in too.
You remain the expert on your own leadership, organization, and decisions.
Thought Partnership might be useful when you're:
Start with one session. Continue when it's useful.
For in-person sessions requiring significant travel, we'll talk about travel arrangements before scheduling.
Leadership development that unfolds over time.
A Serving Leader Cohort is a learning community where leaders explore the Serving Leader Model® and Five Actions of Serving Leadership™, reflect on their own practice, and consider what these principles look like in the leadership moments they encounter every day.
The framework provides the foundation. The conversations bring it into real life.
Why a Cohort?
Good ideas matter. What happens when they meet real life matters too. A cohort gives you time to consider what you're learning in the context of your own work, try ideas in real leadership moments, and come back together to reflect on what you're noticing.
The learning doesn't stay in the cohort. It travels with you into the leadership moments that happen every day.
Invest in Your Team's Leadership
Serving Leader Cohorts can be offered by organizations investing in their own teams or by associations creating a leadership opportunity for their members.
Leadership shows up with or without a title.
A cohort can include emerging leaders, experienced leaders, people with formal leadership responsibilities, and people whose leadership shows up in the influence they have every day.
The investment reaches beyond the individual. Participants strengthen their own leadership while the organization benefits from a shared leadership framework, new thinking brought back into everyday work, and relationships that support continued learning beyond the cohort.
Cohorts can be offered for your own team or as a leadership opportunity for members, including as professional development, a member benefit, or part of a grant-funded or sponsored initiative.
What to Expect
Eight live, facilitated virtual sessions
Cohorts are scheduled over time to support reflection and application between sessions. Meetings may be weekly, every other week, monthly, or scheduled in another way that works well for the organization and participants.
OA or CAE professional-development credit may be available when applicable.
Cohorts can be structured in different ways depending on who's participating and how the experience is being offered.
You don't have to wait until something is wrong to invest in your people.
Sometimes the most important leadership conversations don't begin with a problem.
Something may be working especially well. Your team may have found its rhythm. A new practice may be making a difference. You may simply want to understand what's good here so you can strengthen and protect it.
And sometimes, yes, there's a challenge, change, or difficult question that deserves thoughtful attention.
Both are something that matters.
Facilitated Leadership Conversations create intentional space for people to think together about something that matters, with a thoughtful outside facilitator helping them listen, notice, explore, and move toward greater clarity.
A conversation around something that matters. Facilitated Leadership Conversations create intentional space for a small group to think together about a question, possibility, practice, or challenge that matters to them. This isn't meeting facilitation. The conversation itself is the work.
What might be worth a conversation?
Notice What's Working
And Give Thoughtful Attention to Something That Matters
Longer or customized conversations can be discussed when useful.
Family engagement doesn't always have to mean planning another event or bringing in another speaker.
What if, instead of asking families to attend something you've planned for them, you invited them into a conversation where their experience is actually needed?
A facilitated conversation creates space for families and educators to think together about something that matters to their program.
What is something important enough that parents' experiences and perspectives actually belong in the conversation? Maybe it's what your philosophy looks like in real life for children, educators, and families. What families hope you never lose. Or what everyone can learn from an ordinary experience like children coming home muddy after a wonderful day of outdoor play.
Engagement isn't inviting families into your answer. It's inviting them into the thinking.