Women's Leadership Community

Ris Higgins of Leadership Outfitters is offering an innovative and provocative leadership development program just for women--the Women's Leadership Community.  Please consider joining us in being part of this small and intimate group of leaders dedicated to improving their own effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. That’s what happens in group coaching, and it goes far beyond a traditional training program. The process is designed to help you develop and enhance your leadership, your coaching competence, and your team skills.

The Women’s Leadership Community is a nine-month development process that provides leaders with key leadership distinctions, tools, practices, skills, and ongoing learning among peers. This is a transformational process that has the power to ignite you and your personal effectiveness as a leader. It is application focused and customized to your needs. 

The Women's Leadership Community embraces this belief:  learning takes place from each participant's contribution, not just from the Program Coach.  It's in group coaching that you will foster a unique developmental connection to receive insights and to contribute to each other's greater leadership mastery.  It is intended to be a community in the best sense of the word.

Program Components

• Because accountability is a key aspect of our program, we ask you to complete a Leadership Assessment before and after attending the community.  This involves you and five of your colleagues in completing an assessment about you, giving you a baseline to use in measuring your progress and growth at the end of the nine months. 
• Month one features one full day for Community Development and Authentic Leadership Practices.
• Each of the following eight months features one four-hour session from 8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
• During months 2, 4, 6, and 8, we learn leadership distinctions, tools, practices, and skills.
• During months 3, 5, 7, and 9, we discuss applications of the learning in group coaching.
• Throughout the nine months, you will have the opportunity to schedule three Individual Coaching Sessions with Ris.  This enables you to get customized, just-in-time, one-on-one support for situations that need further exploration as you apply them at work.
• We feature rotating Triad Meetings, you and two other women, between each monthly session.  These 90-minute meetings enable you to continue your dialogue on leadership, discussing the impact of how you have incorporated and applied what you are learning back at work. 

Lasting Results 

We feature a Lasting Results meeting at the completion of the nine months.  This is an individual two-hour meeting with Ris to chart a future plan for yourself, using all the skills, practices and tools you have learned.  This goal setting and action planning coaching session insures your continued development, mapping out how you can sustain successful behavioral changes and insights.

Outcomes

Through the Women’s Leadership Community you’ll learn new distinctions about how to lead, with both individuals and teams. This includes developing a deep sense of self-awareness and self-management that will help you:

• Bring balance to your life
• Move through communication breakdowns quickly and powerfully
• Build and maintain more productive relationships
• Lead change in your organization
• Motivate and inspire
• Set clear, achievable goals for yourself and others that get results

You'll share insights.  You'll share experiences.  You'll conduct live problem solving and develop long-lasting relationships built on mutual respect. 

As Daniel Goleman says in his book, Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, "The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both. Leaders can be made more effective, if they are offered the right tools for learning. Such deep learning, however, goes beyond using the right tools. It is a process that isn't necessarily linear and smooth; rather, it is a journey full of surprises and moments of epiphany."

During the nine months of the Women’s Leadership Community, the monthly curriculum centers on five powerful distinctions of leadership—authenticity, accountability, the language of leadership, courageous action, and emotional intelligence - and their applications.  You will receive over 56 hours of learning, growing, and developing through this unique, peer-to-peer group coaching experience! 

Ideal participants for the WLC would be women who: 

1. Want to learn how to hold people accountable and stay connected to them at the same time.
2. Enjoy learning with a small group of fellow leaders to form a sense of community.
3. Realize they contribute to the breakdowns and miscommunication that occur at work and are willing to look at themselves and how that happens.
4. Want to reach a new level of leadership effectiveness and influence by enhancing their emotional intelligence.
5. Want to create balance by transforming both their personal and business lives. 

Program Coach

Ris Higgins 

Ris Higgins is a leadership development coach to senior executives and their teams, an author, and Vice-President of Leadership Outfitters, a Bozeman, Montana based leadership development company that has offered coaching and consulting for the last 19 years. Ris offers insights and real life applications, not just theory, from more than 38 years of experience as a corporate leader, government manager, author, entrepreneurial consultant, business owner, and leadership coach. She uses her comprehensive communication skills to ask transforming questions and capture insights that achieve breakthroughs, add value, get results, and move things ahead. Bottom line—her personal mission is to make a difference. And she does.

Ris writes a monthly newspaper business column, has co-hosted a monthly radio show on leadership, and produced a documentary on equine-assisted leadership. As a student of business leadership and development, Ris is continually investing in her own development. She holds a B.S. from Iowa State (1973), is a graduate of the three-year Organizational Development Internship with National Training Labs (NTL), is a graduate of the three-year program on Coaching and Leadership offered by the Center for Authentic Leadership, completed the Newfield Network five-month Ontological Learning Course for experienced coaches, is a member of the International Coach Federation and is finalizing her Master Coach credentialing. She is a former board chair of the Prospera Business Development Corporation and currently serves on the Women’s Advisory Board for the SBA Women’s Business Center in Bozeman, MT. 

Since co-founding her company, Ris has had the pleasure of working with clients such as MillerCoors Brewing Company U.S.A. and Mexico, Kraft Foods USA and Canada, Capital One, Albertsons, FINRA, Heineken USA and the Caribbean, Houston Rockets, and Chevron-Texaco.