Executive Training Wheels helps organizations set appropriate and ambitious goals, identify and select from multiple strategies, and commit to specific tactics.
For audiences ranging from intimate groups to 1,000+. Past topics include industry-specific insight, data-driven transformations, and developing high-performing teams.
Who can Benefit from Executive Training Wheels
Anyone exercising or affected by high-level leadership
Current Executives
Executives who want to build and maintain high-performing teams, and who want to add greater value through leadership.
Aspiring Executives
Those at any level who want to climb the corporate ladder by adding value.
Evaluators
Board members, business partners, and anyone hiring for executive roles. This also applies to candidates evaluating potential peers or supervisors.
Behind the Name
There are no "training wheels" at executive levels
Failure is an excellent teacher- when we listen to it. It takes years of successes and failures to get to executive levels, and the learnings don’t stop there. Instead, the falls get more costly, and the pain spreads to others. We must learn from our mistakes as efficiently as possible.
Many organizations have “training wheels” to get people to higher levels, but then they have to come off to go faster and be more nimble. At executive levels there is little tolerance for failure, and support mechanisms previously available may disappear entirely.
However, it is possible to construct our own invisible set of “training wheels” to help us learn from mistakes while avoiding costly falls. This guidance comes from our peers, our network, our introspection, and even our own employees when we invest our efforts properly.
There’s no good way to lead others without taking on additional risk; leadership requires courage. Executive Training Wheels exists for those who understand and rise to that challenge. If you share the humility or humor to don some virtual “training wheels” in your quest for executive effectiveness, we can help each other make the business world a better and more productive place.
Welcome, I'm Doug Bennett.
My background is common. Growing up middle class in a small town in the rust belt, I had to wait for mom’s next paycheck to get a graphing calculator for math class. There was limited business experience in my family, and I was a first-generation college student. My wife and I lived check to check off her $12/hr job through graduate school.
Over the next 10 years of my career, I was astonished by the stark lack of business and career coaching for anyone not already steeped in it by family tradition. When I first got into business and finance, I had almost no professional network. Now that I’ve worked my way from the ground up to hold multiple VP positions at a multi-billion dollar global company, I want to help others climb those steps.
Though my background is common, it’s relatively rare among executives. I founded Executive Training Wheels to close that gap and to improve the overall level of leadership in the business world.
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