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OUR RESEARCH-BASED APPROACH

The Referent Group’s leader development experience has been crafted, refined and perfected over the course of two decades. It masterfully blends cross-cultural qualitative and quantitative peer-reviewed research from leading authorities in the organizational behavior and psychology domains. We have synthesized principles and methods from the leader development system at West Point, the authentic leadership course at Harvard Business School, and the research and thinking of Warren Bennis, Boas Shamir and Galit Eilam, and Bruce Avolio to establish the foundation of our teaching. The results — demonstrated everywhere from the world’s largest company to some of the leading healthcare organizations in our country — have consistently proven authentic, personal, meaningful, and transformative.

Leadership development efforts typically follow one of two conventions. The first method identifies and labels knowledge, skills, or abilities requisite for organizational leaders and then delivers targeted training to enhance competencies. The second identifies the qualities, methods, or behaviors of good leadership — according to  “expert” or proprietary ideology — and equips people with these ideas and tools. Both conventions typically promise specific outcomes: leaders will emerge from a program able to do this or do that.

At The Referent Group, we follow neither of these paths. We make no promises, and we claim no proprietary insights. We’ve learned over time the promise of specific outcomes doesn’t serve authentic growth. At the same time, any reasonable promises we might communicate would underestimate the impact of the experiences we provide. Our participants have spoken about changed lives, transformed thinking, increased self-awareness, and refreshed motivation to lead. Every single participant who completes one of our programs comes away with something different. We offer up an experience — a journey if you will — and then we equip leaders to make their own meaning. What we do can’t be copied and it can’t be repeated. Every single experience is different. The participants drive much of the learning. The leader development happens through reflection, discussions, exercises, and coaching sessions. It’s a product of what we call the “Leader Growth Engine.”

With each new session, we simply fuel the Leader Growth Engine. We have developed lessons from original academic research on topics such as Power and Influence, Transformational Leadership, Trust, Motivation, Culture, and more. As much as we love these lessons, and teach each with passion, the content is not what’s most important. The shared experience reigns. We made it our mission long ago to understand the depths and nuances of research such as Boas Shamir and Galit Eilam’s: A Life-Stories Approach to Authentic Leadership Development. We then translated the academic into the practical. In doing so, we’ve crafted the most original, genuine, and personalized leadership development process on the planet. It’s grounded in the best research available yet brought to your leaders in the most humble, personal, and committed way possible.

We are leaders ourselves. We don’t want anyone telling us exactly how to to do it. We are introverts, extroverts, visionaries, doers, men, women, thinkers, feelers, rationals, and intuitives. Our leadership proceeds from who we are. As such, there can be no leadership experts. We are only experts on our own leadership.

There are, however, leadership development experts. And that’s who we are at The Referent Group.

The Referent Group’s Underpinning Readings and Research

Avolio, B. J., & Hannah, S. T. (2008). Developmental readiness: Accelerating leader

development. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 60(4), 331–347.

Bennis, Warren G. (1989). On Becoming a Leader. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley

Pub. Co.

Chan, K-Y, & Drasgow, F. (2001). Toward a Theory of Individual Differences and

Leadership: Understanding the Motivation to Lead. Journal of Applied Psychology,  86(3), 481-498.

McCormick, M. (2001). Self-Efficacy and Leadership Effectiveness: Applying Social

Cognitive Theory to Leadership. The Journal of Leadership Studies, 8(1), 22-33.

Shamir, B., & Eilam, G. (2005). "What's your story?" A life-stories approach to authentic

leadership development. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 395–417.

Walumbwa, F., Avolio, B.J., Gardner, W., Wernsing, T. & Peterson, S. (2008). Authentic

Leadership: Development and Validation of a Theory-Based Measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89-126.