The DESIGN Approach is a comprehensive 12-month executive leadership development program that integrates three frameworks most coaches treat separately: Emotional Intelligence, Red Team Thinking, and CliftonStrengths.
Each framework addresses what the others miss. Emotional intelligence without strategic rigor leaves you reactive. Strategic thinking without emotional awareness misses the human dynamics driving every decision. Strengths without critical self-examination become autopilot.
DESIGN integrates all three from day one.
Through six principles, you develop the self-awareness to understand your patterns, the emotional intelligence to navigate complex dynamics, the strategic rigor to stress-test your own thinking, and the ability to leverage your natural strengths intentionally rather than by default.
Six Principles:
● D - Disrupt Assumptions
● E - Expand What's Possible
● S - Stress-Test Strategy
● I - Implement with Intentionality
● G - Generate Psychological Safety
● N - Navigate Influence
The ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions and to recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others.
It's a different way of being smart. Not your IQ, but how you manage yourself and your relationships.
12 competencies across four domains:
● Self-awareness (Emotional Self-awareness)
● Self-management (Emotional Self-control, Adaptability, Achievement Orientation, and Positive Outlook)
● Social Awareness (Empathy and Organizational Awareness)
● Relationship Management (Influence, Coach and Mentor, Conflict Management, Teamwork, and Inspirational Leadership)
An approach originally developed by military and intelligence agencies to help individuals and organizations make better, faster decisions in complex environments. It builds critical thinking, challenges assumptions, identifies blind spots, and develops resilient alternatives before circumstances force your hand.
Develops three capabilities:
● Clarity—gaining an unbiased view of your situation and identifying hidden risks and missed opportunities
● Capability—building practical skills so you can think independently and decide under pressure
● Culture—creating environments where diverse perspectives are welcomed and assumptions are constantly challenged
Your complete talent profile. It identifies your greatest strengths, reveals your default patterns, and shows what makes you uniquely effective. When you lead from your strengths intentionally, you're more engaged, more effective, and more sustainable.
Results map across four domains:
● Executing—making things happen
● Influencing—taking charge and being heard
● Relationship building—creating cohesion and belonging
● Strategic thinking—processing complexity and planning ahead
Action: Intentionally break automatic patterns rather than continuing to lead without examining assumptions, playing it safe, or leading everyone based on your own preferences for being led.
Outcome: You disrupt what you do automatically and begin leading consciously with comprehensive awareness of your patterns.
Action: Break free from limiting beliefs about what's possible for you and your organization to move from surviving to thriving.
Outcome: You have a clear vision that breaks free from limiting assumptions. What may have seemed impossible now feels achievable.
Action: Create rigorous, resilient strategies that account for complexity, challenge assumptions, and prepare you for multiple scenarios instead of comfortable plans that fall apart under pressure.
Outcome: You have robust strategies that are resilient to disruption and uniquely suited to your talents. When conditions shift, your plans adapt.
Action: Execute deliberately by breaking old patterns and embedding new ones through sustained, purposeful practice—not just good intentions, but acting with discipline.
Outcome: New patterns become automatic. You lead adaptively across situations and execute with your unique strengths—even under pressure.
Action: Create environments where people feel safe to challenge assumptions, bring diverse perspectives, and address systemic barriers—combining kindness with high expectations to create conditions where everyone can excel without conforming to outdated norms or lowering standards.
Outcome: You create cultures where people feel safe to challenge assumptions, address subtle acts of exclusion, and grow—leading to innovation and high performance through genuine inclusion.
Action: Build strategic coalitions and drive transformation that continues beyond individual leaders by creating sustainable change through developing others.
Outcome: You build deep relationships that amplify your impact. You create sustainable transformation and establish a legacy that continues through the people and culture you've nurtured.
This is transilience. Not just recovering from adversity but positively transforming through it.
Do more than just survive. Let yourself thrive. Surviving is a reactive way of being whereas thriving is proactive. Resilience is primarily about survival. Transilience takes you further—beyond resilience.
Increase your capacity to embrace change in the forms of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and hyperconnectivity (VUCAH). How might a serendipity mindset help you see opportunity in the unexpected or bisociative thinking help you connect seemingly unrelated facts or events? For you and your organization, consider how you might challenge assumptions, stress-test ideas, and strategize to discover feasible alternatives to be ready for whatever the future could hold.
Develop your ability to be antifragile—when exposure to chaos and uncertainty, stressors, or risk results in making something better and stronger than before. How might embracing discomfort help you develop your antifragility?
Hustle culture and 996 aren't ambition, but exploitation dressed up as virtue. High work demands, inadequate resources, and unrealistic expectations don't just create long hours, but a grinding spiral from overwork into burnout. When unhealthy workplaces reward people for overworking, that implies they treat people as resources to be consumed rather than humans to be developed. Burnout isn't a personal failing. Instead, it's an organizational design flaw. The best workplaces prove this daily: high standards, real accountability, and genuine compassion aren't competing values, but rather the foundation of cultures where both people and performance thrive.
Sustainable excellence beats burnout brilliance. As a leader, how can you work effectively, protect your personal life, and cultivate well-being in ways that enhance both your performance and your team's approach to work?
Maximize utility to prevent burnout. Work should nurture the other parts of your life, not diminish them. What matters to you beyond work? What good is an "A" at work if you get an "F" in life?
You can "have it all" over the course of a lifetime, but it's unrealistic to have it all at once and be able to keep it up. Recognize the seasons of your life and what matters most to you for each point in time.
Imposter syndrome is a systemic scam that exacerbates normal feelings of self-doubt and fails to recognize the impact of systemic bias and exclusion on women in workplaces. It's more pronounced for marginalized identities—the more intersectional, the more compounded the marginalization will be. If you're working for an organization that hasn't yet addressed imposter syndrome, you can still improve your ability to navigate it at work.
Recognize that you don't need to be fixed because there's nothing wrong with you. Question the role of workplace culture in imposter syndrome and challenge the assumption that it's an individual problem (because it's not). Your level of confidence and outcomes aren't commensurate with your competence as a professional. You may not believe it yet, but you are more than good enough.
Develop genuine confidence for your own well-being and avoid fake confidence and overconfidence. "Fake it 'til you make it" is bad advice. Instead, face it 'til you ace it. Self-confidence results from not betraying yourself, consistently honoring your own needs, and keeping commitments to yourself.
Be willing to take calculated risks and practice self-compassion to support yourself whether you succeed, fail, or something in between. Help others in your organization by validating their experiences, reinforcing their capabilities, and helping them to adjust inaccuracies in how they see themselves.
Effective leadership requires innovative thinking and doing. Most of us tend to default to one or more of the following:
1) An ingrained way of doing things (like being on autopilot),
2) A tendency to stick to what's comfortable and familiar (like playing it safe), or
3) Leading everyone based on our own preferences for being led (as if everyone were like us).
To challenge ourselves to level up our leadership, we can choose to lead by design by adapting different styles of leading to best suit the situation and stakeholders involved.
Find new or unusual ways to leverage your strengths effectively. You can't get the most out of your strengths and reach your potential if you just stick to using them the way you always have.
Discover your typical leadership patterns first. Then challenge yourself to move out of your comfort zone to choose different combinations of leadership approaches for certain situations that allow for genuine self-expression, adaptability, and help strengthen how you want to be perceived.
Strategically analyze your stakeholder network to engineer how you can build your influence by considering stakeholders' levels of influence and where they fall on the spectrum between support and opposition relative to you.
"I used to avoid difficult conversations at all costs. When I couldn't, I'd spend days anxious beforehand, get flustered in the moment, then replay every word afterward convinced I'd failed. Now I can walk into conflict with confidence. I learned to manage my own emotional reactions first, which gave me the capacity to genuinely hear what others were experiencing. Difficult conversations are still hard, but I no longer dread them or doubt my ability to navigate them well."
—A.B., New York, NY
—Dr. Jacqueline Ashley