A SHARED MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR GROWING COMPANIES
The Collaborative Leadership System
Help capable managers solve the right problems—together.
The Collaborative Leadership System gives your management team shared ways to establish priorities, solve problems, make decisions, navigate difficult conversations, and follow through.
Managers learn to carry more of the company’s weight—skillfully, collaboratively, and without everything rolling uphill to senior leaders.
Your managers already know how to solve problems
Every manager brings ways of working shaped by previous experience—often by what worked at their last company. Those approaches may work well individually and still differ considerably across the team.
The differences become visible where responsibilities intersect: managers make different assumptions about decisions, ownership, communication, and what constitutes a clear agreement.
The CLS gives them shared frameworks, language, and practices for solving consequential problems together.
What the management team does differently
As these shared practices take hold, you begin to see changes in the company’s day-to-day work:
Problems are investigated before solutions are proposed
Managers look beyond symptoms, consider the larger system, and clarify what a successful outcome requires.
Decisions have clear ownership
The right people provide input, responsibility is clear, and decisions do not repeatedly return to senior leaders.
Priorities become clear agreements
People know who will do what, by when—and follow up when circumstances change.
Difficult conversations happen sooner and more skillfully
Managers address concerns directly, listen carefully, and work through disagreement without avoiding tension or damaging relationships.
Delegation includes useful guidance and support
Managers delegate more effectively, adjusting their guidance and support to the person and situation.
Follow-through becomes more reliable
Agreements hold, problems require fewer iterations, and senior leaders no longer need to remain involved to ensure progress.
What the Collaborative Leadership System provides
The CLS develops the mindsets and disciplines managers bring to their own work, then extends them to how they lead individuals and teams.
Building a strong leadership foundation
Managers learn to recognize unproductive mindsets, think systemically, solve problems with greater discipline, and communicate productively.
Leading individuals
Managers strengthen their ability to delegate, give feedback, coach, and help others solve problems collaboratively.
Leading teams
Managers learn to align teams around a shared mission, establish useful working agreements, diagnose performance problems, and guide collaborative decisions.
How learning becomes reliable behavior
A workshop can create insight and shared understanding. But insight does not automatically become reliable behavior on the job. That is why the CLS combines learning with application, practice, and reinforcement:
1. Align
Russ works with senior leaders to understand the company’s goals, management challenges, and the situations in which change matters most.
2. Learn
The management team develops shared frameworks and skills through highly participatory workshops built around realistic and current challenges.
3. Apply
Between sessions, managers apply what they are learning to consequential problems, decisions, conversations, and working relationships.
4. Deepen
In three-person mastery sessions, every manager receives focused attention, repeated practice, and feedback while working through live situations from their jobs.
“I can now much more readily zoom out from the weeds of an issue and engage in systems-level thinking about potential solutions. This has already begun to improve the quality of our team’s output—my team is clearer on our objectives, and we’re more likely to identify non-obvious root causes of problems.”
–Marie-Claire Conlin
Research Program Manager
Saint Michael’s Hospital
Built on proven work
At the heart of the CLS is the Middle Path curriculum, designed by Chris Holmberg (of Middle Path Consulting) and used with managers at more than 160 organizations, including technical startups and Fortune 100 companies.
Russ brings more than three decades of experience designing and facilitating training and performance-improvement programs for organizations including Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle), Roche/Genentech, SAP, Medtronic, the U.S. Coast Guard, and Hilton Worldwide.
Is the Collaborative Leadership System right for your company?
The CLS is designed for growing companies whose managers are capable and committed—but whose ways of working have not kept pace with the company’s growth.
It may be a strong fit if:
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Too many decisions and difficult problems still roll uphill to senior leaders.
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Managers perform well individually but struggle where their responsibilities intersect.
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Problems are revisited, decisions are reopened, or agreements do not consistently hold.
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Managers need greater skill in delegation, feedback, coaching, or difficult conversations.
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The company is growing faster than the management team’s shared practices.
The CLS is not remedial training for a few struggling managers. It helps the management team develop more consistent and reliable ways of solving problems, leading people, and working together.
The CLS Make-It-Right Commitment
I stand behind this work
The CLS asks for a meaningful investment of time, attention, and money. In return, I commit to bringing the preparation, rigor, and attention required to help your management team think, communicate, and solve problems better together.
If your organization meets the participation commitments below and you do not feel the CLS has delivered meaningful value, contact me within 60 days of completing the engagement. I’ll give you two options:
Make it right. I’ll design and deliver targeted follow-on work—such as additional mastery sessions, a focused workshop module, or structured coaching—at no additional charge, aimed specifically at the gap you’ve identified.
Apply a credit. I’ll apply a credit equal to 20% of your CLS program investment, excluding pass-through expenses, toward another RPC engagement within the following 18 months.
What the commitment asks of your organization
For the Make-It-Right Commitment to apply, your organization agrees to the following: (1) Participants complete the required pre-work before each workshop. (2) Participants attend each workshop in full, within the attendance limits established for the program. (3) Participants engage actively in workshop exercises, discussions, and activities. (4) Managers and executive sponsors have the pre-workshop conversations with their direct reports that I prompt. (5) The executive team visibly supports the program and the behavior changes it asks of participants.
These are the conditions under which I have seen the CLS produce its strongest results.
Build the management team your company now needs
If you are wondering whether the Collaborative Leadership System fits your company’s needs, Russ will help you examine what is happening, what may be creating it, and whether the CLS is the right response.
Not ready for a conversation?
The Management System Diagnostic can help you identify where friction is consuming senior-leader time—and what deserves attention first.