Want to get ahead in your career?

Twelve Skills gives you the roadmap to become a stronger leader and accelerate your career.

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Praise for Twelve Skills

“The greatest value in this book lies in the insights of how to become an effective leader. Barrows and Downing share skill-building techniques that ensure success throughout your career.”

— Ted Fleming, former Head of Talent Development, CVS Health, and author of Develop

Become the leader you want to be

Accelerate your career by acquiring the twelve key skills successful leaders have mastered. Clearly structured, evidence-based, and packed with self-assessment tools and proven techniques, this book is the definitive guide to understanding and developing the fundamentals that enable you to stand out and move up. Read this book to:

Discover the twelve core skills high-potential leaders use every day
Pinpoint your own leadership strengths and development areas
Master proven leadership principles taught at the world’s most renowned institutions
Join a community of peers dedicated to sharing best practices and supporting each on their path to career success

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The Twelve Skills framework (click to enlarge)

Twelve Skills

A new way to chart your leadership journey

The Twelve Skills framework is designed to help you assess where you stand regarding the qualities of high-performing leadership, and plan your journey to being a more empowered leader.

When your Twelve Skills are balanced, your “dartboard” moves you forward in your ability to lead and have a greater impact in the world.

Resources you need to lead

With Twelve Skills, you’ll have access to a growing set of resources to help you balance and master your Twelve Skills including:

Self-Assessment: Find out what your current skill level is for each of the Twelve Skills with our free self-assessment
Blog: Explore the latest thoughts and ideas about how to boost your leadership capabilities with articles and ideas from our Blog
Linked In Group: Share your knowledge, experiences, and insights with like minded colleagues by joining our Linked In group

Discover what the skills can do for you

Want to learn more about each of the skills? Click the links below.

Mastering Strategic Thinking

Unlocking Problem Solving

Developing Clear Messaging

Enhancing Executive Presence

Expanding Relationship Building

Strengthening Talent Development

Invigorating Team Building

Improving Group Collaboration

Revamping Change Leadership

Increasing Persuasion and Influence

Driving Focused Execution

Achieving Top-Tier Performance

What are your skill strengths?

Teams? Talent? Communication?

What are your skill growth areas?

Strategy? Results? Change?

Target the areas of the “dartboard” that contains the skills to move you forward faster.

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Organizational Journeys

Companies compete on the skills of their workforce which are evolving almost daily. Workforce skills are also challenged when marketplace changes impact the organization’s ability to remain relevant and compete.

There remains a basic foundational set of elements a workforce needs: primarily a streamlined, proven way to upskill large groups of people. Twelve Skills for organizations is a way to address groups of leaders, teams or entire workforces in an effort to measure and embed these skills.

We believe that the right training/coaching combination over time is the best way to improve skills and embed behavioral change among workforces.

Training using the Twelve Skills framework plus integrated coaching customized to your organization’s culture and workforce provides ample opportunity for improvement through a cohort style of learning, practice and review for feedback.

Let’s have a conversation about how we can design a Twelve Skills organizational journey to create a skilled workforce ready to lead.

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Origins of Twelve Skills

Executive coaches and consultants Laura Downing and Ed Barrows have a deep passion for strategy. For years they’ve helped scores of organizations—large and small, public and private—create and execute more effective business strategies. Over their twenty plus years of advising, what they found time and again was one consistent theme: more than anything else, what hampered managers’ ability to execute effectively wasn’t a poor strategy, but rather a lack of the right skills necessary to successfully execute strategy.

Ed Barrows, Professor, Brown University

In 2019 Laura and Ed began exploring what published research, best-in-class leadership development firms and their own client experiences indicated were the critical capabilities required to be an effective, strategic leader. Across the many sources they studied, what they found was a distinct set of key skills that they distilled and organized into what is now the Twelve Skills of Strategic Leaders.

Organized into six general areas, each of the individual Twelve Skills works in harmony with the other. These key skills come along with a measurable and manageable set of tools to help people become highly effective, and more importantly, highly strategic leaders. Each skill is backed by proven methods that can be learned regardless of current abilities or experience. Twelve Skills is designed to help each person—no matter what role or capacity—become a more balanced, strategic leader.