FACE’s C-Suite aspirants are promising, upwardly mobile middle managers who are committed to developing their own personal leadership style. You may be seeking personal growth, and you may also be looking for greater responsibility in your career. Our hope is that you will find both.

Your training and specialty really don’t matter. There is no set of attributes that is a pre-requisite to leading, or that even signals an aptitude for leadership excellence. You can be shy or outgoing, imaginative or a crank-turner… it doesn’t matter. 

What does matter is that you have the strong desire to become a compassionate and effective leader and co-worker. 

Expectations

In our group environment, it is important that you be open, honest and compassionate about your strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of others. We are going to be diving into our own frailties, and we will be sharing challenging situations that are active in our workplaces, so we have to establish and maintain trust through deep honesty and willingness to share. Your FACE forum partners are likely to become lifelong co-mentors and friends.

FACE recognizes that leadership is the intelligent and compassionate application of influence for the benefit of yourself, your company, employees, investors and customers, as well as our natural environment and global economy. Effective leadership comes from establishing a bank account of trust that you can spend to positively influence and benefit people. It arises from establishing a compelling presence based on hard work, experience, compassion and perseverance. 

FACE works by bringing you together with other aspiring C-Suite executives and experienced leaders and facilitators who bring a bag of tricks and tools to nurture your development as a leader. Participants freely share their challenges with their peers, who relate their experiences in similar situations. Ideas for solutions will flow from your combined experiences and the tools that are provided by your facilitators. 

The Forum for Aspiring C-Suite Executives is an experience that’s both transactional and transformative. Transactional because you will learn a variety of management and leadership skills and be given tools that you can utilize in your daily work. More importantly, FACE is transformative. You will learn to operate on a plane that’s deeper than skill mastery, to meld genuine insight with a more mature and inclusive value structure, and to acknowledge with humility the role that luck has played in your success.

• Excellence. You will be encouraged to continually pursue excellence and to inspire the same in your reports. Ideally excellence becomes second nature.
• Values. You will cultivate the value of team success over purely egotistical gratification. There is an inner joy and satisfaction with team success.
• Drive. You will develop a sense of purpose, a North Star that guides and informs your daily decisions, and energizes and sustains you when life’s storms reach your shores.
• Patience. Balancing drive with the recognition that things take time, that people are human, and that most things don’t happen overnight. Some projects take years. A real leader is capable of the long view.
• Extroversion. Leaders need to look outward, to notice what other people are doing and what motivates them. You will learn to cultivate the positive aspects of your personality like active listening and compassion, while simultaneously learning to throttle back damaging aspects of our human nature, like narcissism and self-reference, that drag you down.
• Introversion. In addition, you will turn the spotlight inward, understand your own interior motivations, look at your own reactivity, and observe how it might compromise your overall effectiveness and satisfaction with life. This kind of healthy introspection is the root of understanding other people and a key foundation of leadership.
• Failure. Ideally you will learn to understand the role of failure in your career and life; that successful people experience failures early and often. They bounce back with resilience. They learn and persevere onward.
• Empathy. You will learn to feel another’s pain, to reach out to people who are suffering, and render the help that comes from meeting that other person as an equal. That’s where empathetic communication begins, the kind of communication that’s fundamental to genuine leadership.
• Integrity. The idea of integrity is often given lip service. In FACE you will be challenged to maintain a high level of integrity and held accountable by your peers and your facilitators.

Your FACE facilitators are senior consultants with decades of hands-on experience.

For over 30 years, Steve Rice has advised owners, CEOs, and CMOs on making and implementing wise marketing and technology decisions around people, systems and processes that result in sustained growth and profitability. His ability to absorb information about brands, strategies, technologies and results, then impart their context and opportunities in simple language has proved invaluable to executives. His consulting specialties include leadership development and decision-making, paid marketing architectures and strategies, and acting as a personal & confidential advisor.

John Lamy was a Silicon Valley manager for 25+ years, and has been a consultant for 15+ years. His consulting specialties include R&D, strategy, and getting results. Both Steve and John have developed trusted advisor relationships with their CEO and C-Suite clients. Here are bios for Steve and John.