The Leader Listening Tour

We want to hear from you!

When organizations grow past around 50 people, leadership and management challenges get bigger and more complex. Brilliant individual contributors struggle to grow into confident, effective managers. Leaders feel caught between an ambitious strategy and their overwhelmed teams. And HR is overstretched hiring new staff, managing benefits, dealing with employee relations issues... you could get ahead if you could just get a break from the constant firefighting.

If this sounds familiar, we'd love to hear your story.

Ready to participate?

Share your leadership experience in a 30-minute conversation.

What This Is

We're conducting a listening tour with leaders at mid-sized organizations (50-300 people) to create a comprehensive resource on the challenges of building skilled, confident, and aligned managers, leaders, and teams.

The resource will be part "story bank," so leaders can hear from peers experiencing similar challenges, and part "resource lab" with tools and frameworks you can use right away.

What We're Asking

A 30-minute recorded interview where we ask you about:

How your organization has grown and evolved in your time there
The specific leadership and management challenges and opportunities you're seeing
What you've tried, what's worked, what hasn't
What you would do to support leaders, managers, and teams if you had the time

You decide if your story appears with your name or anonymously. It will be summarized, with quotes, and presented alongside other leaders like you (some named, some not).

View the Interview Questions

Note: Given your specific organization's size, rate of growth, or your tenure, not all questions might fully apply to your case. We'll tailor the questions accordingly as we get into the conversation, while sticking to their spirit.

Tell me about how your organization grew into a mid-sized organization, or past around 50 people. Was it gradual, or was there one big contract or grant or circumstance that contributed to rapid growth?
What do you feel your organization gained as it grew? What felt good about becoming a larger, more mature organization? What did it lose? What aspect of the early days did you find yourself missing?
What was an experience in your organization (or a previous one) that caused you to grow and/or mature as a leader?
What have you tried to support or develop your managers and leaders? What worked, and what didn't land the way you hoped?
What do you think are the biggest challenges faced by managers and leaders in your organization? Are the challenges the same across different layers of leadership (executive, director, manager) or different?
What sort of support do you wish you could give managers or leaders in your organization? How could you see that support impacting them or the organization?
What advice would you give to a leader at a smaller organization that's crossing into becoming a mid-sized organization? What do you wish someone had told you?

What You Get

During our conversation:

Immediate perspective on your challenge from patterns we're seeing across similar organizations
Validation that you're not alone, and help naming what you're dealing with

After the tour:

Early access to the complete resource before it's publicly available
Credit as a contributor (if you want it) to a resource your peers will use
The satisfaction of helping other leaders navigate what you're navigating right now

Practical Matters

Time

30 Minutes

Format

Video call on Zoom, recorded and transcribed for accuracy

Privacy

You choose whether your name/image is used, or your story is shared anonymously. Story and quotes will be shared in advance for your review and approval.

See What Others Have Shared

Read stories from leaders who have already contributed their experiences.

Read Stories