Leadership Development and Coaching
Most engagements with Leadership Dialogues begin with assessment — understanding how someone thinks, what motivates them, and whether that aligns with what a role actually demands.
Over time, those relationships often expand. A team challenge surfaces. A leader needs development work that goes deeper than role fit. A group needs a structured process to solve a problem they’ve been circling for months without resolution.
The capabilities below are not a menu of separate services. They are tools that become relevant at different moments in an ongoing relationship — each one grounded in the same underlying question that drives everything else here:
Does how this person or team thinks align with what the situation demands?
Basadur Applied Innovation
When team friction is the presenting problem
Leaders often bring team challenges framed as communication failures or personality conflicts. Frequently the real issue is something more specific and more solvable: people who are genuinely wired to engage with problems at different stages of the problem-solving process, talking past each other without knowing why.
The Basadur Innovation Profile — which takes less than ten minutes to complete — identifies each person’s preferred thinking style across four stages: generating new possibilities, conceptualizing and connecting ideas, optimizing toward practical solutions, and implementing in the real world. When a team skews heavily toward one or two of these styles, it creates predictable tensions.
The optimizer who wants criteria before anyone brainstorms. The generator who keeps opening new problems before the first one is solved. The implementer who is ready to move while the conceptualizer is still building understanding.
These aren’t personality flaws. They’re cognitive style differences — and once they’re named, teams can work with them rather than against each other.
For teams facing more complex organizational challenges, the full Basadur Simplexity process provides a structured eight-step facilitation pathway from problem definition through implementation. For engagements of that scope, Ellen works in conjunction with the Basadur organization.
The connection to Selection Architecture: Just as that work examines whether an individual’s thinking style fits a role, Basadur examines whether a team’s collective thinking styles fit the problem they’re trying to solve together. Cognitive fit — at two different levels of analysis.
LEGO® Serious Play®
When the loudest voices are the only ones being heard
In most meetings and planning sessions, a small number of voices dominate. Introverts contribute less than they know. People defer to hierarchy rather than insight. The result is that organizations make decisions based on a fraction of the thinking available to them.
LEGO® Serious Play® is a facilitated method that changes that dynamic. Participants build physical models in response to structured questions — about strategy, values, challenges, possibilities — and then explain what they’ve built. The model is the medium, but the explanation is where the insight lives. People say things through a physical object that they wouldn’t say in a conventional conversation.
The method works particularly well in technical organizations, where many of the most capable thinkers are not the most vocal ones. At Primera Engineers, a firm of nearly 200 engineers and technical professionals, the LEGO Serious Play process gave every employee an equal voice in the firm’s strategic planning — across departments, disciplines, offices, and seniority levels. The ideas generated were directly incorporated into the firm’s strategic planning process.
Ellen has facilitated LEGO Serious Play sessions for strategic planning, values alignment, team connection, and complex organizational problem-solving. Sessions are designed and facilitated to match the specific question the organization is trying to answer.
Valuegenic Self-Leadership and Executive Coaching
When the thinking patterns that got someone here are limiting what comes next
Selection Architecture identifies whether someone’s cognitive and motivational profile fits a role. What it can’t fully predict is what happens when that person encounters sustained pressure — a demanding client, an ambiguous situation, a high-stakes decision with incomplete information.
Under pressure, thinking narrows. Leaders default to their most automatic patterns — reactive rather than deliberate, driven by stress rather than judgment. The gap between how someone performs at their best and how they perform under pressure is often the single biggest factor in whether they reach their potential in a senior role.
Valuegenic Self-Leadership coaching addresses that gap directly. Using the VQ Profile — which identifies both thinking strengths and risky cognitive habits — leaders develop awareness of when their thinking is working for them and when it isn’t. The coaching builds the habit of deliberate choice: pausing, recognizing the pattern, and shifting to clearer thinking before a reaction becomes a consequence.
At the executive level, this work focuses on judgment under pressure — how leaders maintain clarity about what creates the greatest value for all stakeholders when expectations are unclear, priorities conflict, or the situation demands more than technical competence alone.
The Clark Construction Group applied this framework across their leadership team. Turnover dropped from 24% to 4%. Engagement reached 99%. Revenue doubled. These are the results of people making better decisions under pressure, consistently over time.
This work is delivered as individual coaching, team development, or as part of a broader leadership program. It integrates naturally with assessment-based coaching that begins with the Selection Architecture process — using the same framework from hire through development.
The connection to Selection Architecture: Selection Architecture identifies who will succeed in a role. Valuegenic coaching develops how they think once they’re in it. The two together create a coherent pathway from hire to high performance.