Meet the DaVinci Leadership Team
The founders and Principal Partners of DaVinci Leadership LLC are John Bonosoro, Craig Robinson, and Todd Nielsen. Their combined leadership and leadership development experience exceeds a century, and their mission is to apply their experience, education, and passion to the task of creating more and better leaders that consistently drive behavioral change that produces measurable positive results.
Why?
Before starting the company, the founders faced the question of “Why yet another leadership development company?” head-on. The challenge of answering that was a multi-step process that can be distilled down to two conflicting points.
Most of the approximately $60 billion a year spent on training pays for useful and actionable content that is pretty well delivered.
The overall quantity and quality of organizational leaders has been steadily falling. This is supported by numerous studies and by most practitioners in the leadership development business. This includes both the vendors who supply it and the organizational leaders that demand it.
These two points are in obvious conflict, so how can the trend be stopped and reversed? Based on the principle that the same input will produce the same outcome the obvious answer is something new, and that is what DVL was formed to provide.
The basic philosophies of DVL are easily described, but not so easily achieved. Starting with the desired outcome DVL embraces the concept that great leaders do the right things, the right way, at the right time.
In order to accomplish that lofty goal, leaders need to address four elements. Leaders must:
- Want to be a leader, or a better leader for those who are already on the journey
- Know themselves and be aware of how others see them
- Profoundly know others
- Do something positive with that knowledge. Leadership is not about what you know but about what you do.
Do
Lastly leadership effectiveness is the sum of what leaders do and how they do it. If either side of the equation is zero the outcome is zero.
Once the focus becomes behavior rather than knowledge, reasons for the decline in leadership become more clear. There has been a huge focus on what leaders know. The first response to a leadership shortfall is training of some sort. Read a book, talk to a mentor, follow a thought leader. The reality is that many leadership failures are due to a leader not acting on what they already know or poor delivery of what they do know. Existing leadership programs focus almost exclusively on the two middle elements of the success formula, knowing your self and knowing others. When was is the last time your leaders were asked if they really want to be leaders?
The vast majority of leadership programs emphasize one side of the success equation (the what and the how), and when they do address both sides it is not in an integrated fashion. Experienced (actual leaders) presenters and coaches tend to lean to the how to do it side and trained presenters tend to lean to the what to do side. Both are providing good ingredients but they are not providing the cooking instructions that would make a good leadership meal.
The DVL team addresses the need for change as follows.
1. Create a team that has a strong and balanced background with a substantial quantity of actual leadership experience as well as significant formal training.
2. Embrace the latest technology (see our Curated Intelligence tab) to provide best in class "What to Do" science of leadership in real time 24/7.