The Developmental Edge

Executive Coaching can yield fantastic results: renewed vigor, greater clarity of purpose, and, most importantly, a meaningful shift in mindset and behavior.

With organizations facing ever-increasing change and disruption, executive coaching has become a default solution for many organizations to shift the thinking and behavior of senior leaders and a limited number of “high potentials.” Some companies now access executive-coaching services via digital platforms that take the existing one-on-one coaching model and make it a little easier to deploy and a little faster and cheaper to deliver.

While a step in the right direction, these services still deliver fundamentally the same product to roughly the same target audience with the same general limitations in expense, scalability, and the pace of change. Is this good enough for organizations today?

The answer from The Developmental Edge (TDE) is a definitive “No.” And it offers a radically disruptive alternative by providing the essential elements of executive coaching—insight, guidance, and accountability—in a far more scalable delivery system that’s accessible for everyone and faster, more impactful, and more affordable for organizations.

“The trend we see in most organizations today of pushing decision-making and accountability further down the employee chain makes it important for much larger groups of employees to shift their mindsets and behavior. So, the challenge is to deliver the transformational benefits of executive coaching to more people at once, at a fraction of the cost and a much faster pace,” says Andy Fleming, CEO of The Developmental Edge. “This is exactly why we created the Developmental Sprint®.”

TDE’s Developmental Sprint® is a guided four-week, technology-enabled program that integrates agile principles with the science of human development. It is rooted in the ground-breaking research of Dr. Robert Kegan and Dr. Lisa Lahey, noted Harvard faculty and TDE’s chief knowledge officers and co-founders, along with Fleming and Claire Lee.

Through an integrated series of virtual workshops and peer coaching meetings spread over 4 weeks (requiring only 8.5 total hours of “seat time”) participants in cohorts of up to 250 people gain insight into their self-limiting mindsets and traction on self-chosen improvement goals aligned with the needs of the organization.

The entire experience is scaffolded with the Developmental Sprint® Digital Tool that enables participants to more easily gain and retain breakthroughs in their thinking and behavior. These breakthroughs serve their organization through more capable, connected, and productive employees. Employees gain personal satisfaction from overcoming previous limitations, discovering new capabilities, and helping others to grow, too.

The digital tool also makes it possible for TDE to provide organizations with previously unavailable data (anonymized and aggregated) that sheds light on the barriers facing their people in achieving improvement goals and business objectives.

By making individual development a “team sport” inside the organization rather than a private activity with an outside executive coach, the Developmental Sprint® is a game-changer for organizations that need to rapidly develop their talent at all levels and to achieve large-scale transformations across teams, business units, or the entire organization. There is nothing else like it on the market for shifting mindsets rapidly, at scale.

The Developmental Sprint® and the accompanying digital tool are available in 11 languages. According to Chief Business Officer Claire Lee, “One of our new clients, a large healthcare organization located in the UAE, asked for the Developmental Sprint® to be delivered in Arabic. Because of our experience in meeting the demand of global clients with employees in over 75 countries, we were able to accommodate the request quickly.”

In total, TDE’s Developmental Sprint® and other related offerings represent a new “transformation technology” for organizations of any size and scope all over the world.