tl;dr: Address the disease, not the symptom

Leadership Coaching is the farthest “upstream” area I’ve found. It helps get rid of so much “downstream” work. Employees often spend time dealing with downstream effects created by a leader’s defensiveness, uncertainty, set of beliefs, or by things like organizational politics. If an organization lacks trust in leadership, leans too far in one direction when it comes to things like initiative vs. diplomacy, or if employees get caught up in miscommunication and incorrect assumptions, downstream tasks will abound. The more time employees spend on downstream tasks, the less time they spend finding fulfillment and adding value to their organization. The Main and Supplemental Workshops offered by Life Notes, LLC address some of the most common upstream issues. When these issues are addressed, people spend less time on downstream work and more time making transformative impact.

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tl;dr: Make it safe to be an agent of change

All the way from Socrates to Martin Luther King, Jr., I’d like to think that if the leaders, organizations, and cultures that rebuffed those men were more receptive to and felt less threatened by change, we’d have many more examples of people like them throughout history. How can we create organizations, cultures, and leaders that celebrate, embrace, and elevate change agents? In Patrick Lencioni’s ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ the top dysfunction is Absence of Trust, and the second is Fear of Conflict. I’ve personally felt how disruptive those two forces can be, but conversely when they’re addressed well, I’ve felt how they can cause companies to flourish. My main value proposition is to help new ideas break through, help old ideas get heard, and to help leaders, organizations, cultures, and people reach their ultimate potential.

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tl;dr: Spend time solving problems, not managing status/appearances

There's a story Daniel Coyle tells in the beginning of 'The Culture Code' where he talks about kindergarteners competing against MBA students. Each group has under 20min to build the tallest structure they can that supports a single marshmallow on top, and they can only use limited amounts of spaghetti, string, and tape. Most of the time, the kindergarteners win. Why? They don't spend time negotiating roles, asserting dominance, managing status/image, or trying to look smart. There's natural collaboration without ego. They rapidly prototype and get quick feedback, instead of making elaborate plans. They're also more comfortable with iteration - they aren't afraid to fail. A lot of the slides in my workshops don't look that sophisticated (they might even seem a little juvenile) and this website isn't that fancy either, but that's not what I'm going for. The slides don't set a super-professional tone of status/image/ego management, so you also don't have to concentrate on those things. My slides aren't perfect, so your questions during a workshop don't have to be either. I believe that's more conducive to learning. In between a caterpillar and a butterfly there's an unorganized sloppy part where all the growth and transformation happens - that's what I'm going for here. It's deliberate juvenile minimalism. I'm hoping that if I stick to that approach, I can help my clients finally beat those kindergarteners.

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tl;dr: Get your ego out of the way so you can be more effective

Lastly, there was an Adam Grant study years ago that involved entrepreneurs in Italy. The entrepreneurs were separated into two groups, one control group who were told nothing, and another group who were told to think like scientists instead of business owners. "Thinking like a scientist" means that your business ideas are hypotheses, not truths, so you're less attached to them and are more open to experimentation. If you're less emotionally attached to your ideas, you're also less biased/defensive when they're challenged, and you might even, as a scientist, purposefully seek disconfirming evidence. As a scientist, you're not really afraid to fail either - there's no failure really in science, only running experiments and iterating based off results, so you'll naturally experiment more. You can guess which of the two groups made more money at the end of the study. I'm here to help you think like a scientist.