"I was amazed at the progress our team made after working with Erik for a year. Our work together was transformative. Erik’s incisive questions drove me to restructure our senior group in a way that made the remaining group much more effective. A year later, the ROI is clear to me. There were many important business outcomes for Killington.
Our leadership team trusts each other more. The discussions were much more honest than I expected from a leadership course. Erik helped us define and execute challenging leadership experiments, and the reports we shared together inspired actual tears and displayed courage. The focus was on our critical relationships with each other and our teams. The course helped us break down barriers to communicating honestly.
When considering making this investment, many on our team were reluctant to spend time in a leadership training course, thinking they're probably already good leaders because they're on the Killington team. But every single member of my team found a lot of value. The depth of impact was surprising. Erik challenged us to become better leaders in our family relationships as well. This was inspiring to us all.
The course is well titled: Leading by Managing Self. It offers a laser focus on how you can improve yourself as a leader, as opposed to preoccupation with changing others. Together we learned through direct experience that this expands one’s influence.
Leadership courses I've done before have the same goals, but the knowledge tends to stay in the binder. Erik’s work delivers. He forced us to do the work- together. He is a good listener, and he doesn't fill the meetings with long lectures. He conducts improvisational meetings that get right to the heart of our key leadership challenges. He issued very specific challenges and required us to experiment. He challenged us to not hold back. In the past we often avoided being direct, fearing it would weaken partnerships. But together we learned that the opposite is true- we were weakened by our lack of courage. Now, if a leader is thinking something challenging, they say it.
What makes Erik different? His course was not a cookie cutter like many others. It just felt so much more personal and real. That's the key. In every meeting, from day one, we dealt with real, practical business issues together in a whole new way, and it made us better.
Erik’s work is unique. It’s almost like you must go through it to realize what I am saying. Even the people on my team that were the most skeptical, worried this was “another training”, were really surprised at how much better they became. We plan to use Erik for the next level of the leadership team at Killington because we had such a positive experience in the first round."
