The Leaderful Institute is a collaborative venture of The Boston Consortium for Higher Education (TBC) in conjunction with Dr. Joe Raelin, author of Creating Leaderful Organizations, and a number of other highly talented associates of TBC. Having provided members of the Consortium with successful interventions that can transform their very ways of operating toward more collaborative behavior, we endeavor to bring our knowledge and practice of leaderful development to a wider community.

In particular, we offer four distinctive competencies within the world of leaderful development consultation across two client systems:

First, we work with key change agents within organizations, especially managers and others who are primed to effect positive, democratic, and humanistic change within themselves, their units, and the organization as a whole. Secondly, we work with key change agents who are committed to positive, democratic, and humanistic change within the social networks to which their own organizations are affiliated.

Working with these two clients systems, we present a leaderful approach to development and change relying on four critical distinctive competencies:

1. We espouse and practice a unique method called “developmental action learning,” which takes participants through three stages of practice designed to reduce the level of personal and professional risk as they become increasingly comfortable sharing their leadership change experiments with one another and with their own member organizations. The developmental stages are: discussion group, learning team, and project.
2. We practice what we preach. Thus, we do not direct the adoption of leaderful practice nor expect other officials to oblige participation. Anyone who participates does so on his/her own free will and, furthermore, does so because of a commitment to learn organically within the very process of working on critical problems in their own workplace.
3. We are committed to not just practice, but learning from that practice. As a result, we make room for the contribution of theory and ideas to improve the effectiveness of our actions. The key tool that we use to convert theory into practice and practice into theory is the tool of dialogue or reflective practice.
4. We are not an agent that makes recommendations and leaves the scene afterwards. We commission others to work with us in the development of their own leaderful practice and look forward to the day when that practice is adopted and disseminated throughout the organization and network naturally so that our involvement is no longer needed.