
WE ACCELERATE
REAL-WORLD
LEADERSHIP THROUGH
FULLY CUSTOMIZED,
END-TO-END,
BLENDED SOLUTIONS,
SO YOU CAN DO
BIG WORK. 
Let’s face it, what you usually get from traditional educational institutions and consultants is a catalog of courses, like an a la carte menu of random, one-size-fits-all options to choose from. It’s clear that these people are trained by rote memorization and flip charts to help you find something they already offer. They also assume you know what your needs are, where your blind spots are, and what questions to ask.
What if you know you need a solution, but you need guidance to understand how to solve it? When was the last time a catalog helped you make important, strategic decisions anyway?
You need someone with real leadership experience to help you first understand the problem and then lead you to a solution.
You deserve real-world leadership development. We are not professors that study leadership. We are successful leaders that have been through the rigors and challenges of business. You can ask us, “What did you do?” rather than, “What did they do?”. We act as mentors using our own experiences to help our participants and business partners achieve their goals and aspirations.
Our goal is to allow all organizations and all business units to have their own expertly crafted, real-world leadership development solution. The option to have a customized solution may have once seemed out of reach: too expensive, cumbersome to develop and risky to deliver well. Through a collaboration led by the LF Center for Leadership, an experience is created in which both program sponsors and participants say, "This program means more because it looks and sounds like who we are.”
Read our Open Letter to the business world to learn more about who we are and how we think.
In 2018, we delivered leadership development to:
Clients
Programs
Participants
At the Lake Forest Center for Leadership we partner with organizations to develop and deliver real-world customized learning solutions to advance your talent that is deeply connected to your business goals.

Fully Customized
Whether you need a catalog of proven programs or a fully customized program, we're ready to give you real-world leadership development.
Define
We take the time to assess your business needs, objectives, and what really matters to your organization. We then evaluate these objectives at every stage.
Develop
Our team becomes an extension of your team to design impactful solutions that meet your business objectives.
Deliver
We create trusting learning environments that engage participants in real-world, practical concepts based on our own business experiences.
Click here to learn more about how we create a fully customized program.
End-to-End
We create end-to-end development programs for the full life cycle of leadership — from new leaders to experts and executives — across the entire organization.
Emerging Leaders
We help individuals early in their career who need a deeper understanding of the essentials for great leadership now and in the future.
Mid-Career Managers
Our programs build on communication and leadership skills vital to managerial success to better position them to make a positive impact.
High-Potential Executives
We focus on ways to fast-track high achievers to master management and develop a strategic perspective, vision casting, and alignment.
Blended Solutions
We create a blended solution that reaches your leaders worldwide through face-to-face sessions or innovative technology - or both.
In-Person
Our Business Leader FacultyTM leads workshops and conference center events for your team to get in-person, relational support on their leadership journey.
Digital
We develop digital, asynchronous learning environments for individual work with a cohort as well as team-based solutions facilitated by our faculty.
Live-Virtual
We use state-of-the-art technology to broadcast live classes anywhere in the world, bringing in-person relationships to the online platform.

Get the outside perspective from the inside.
Broad Thinkers. Strong Leaders.
Without the focus, skills, and knowledge to lead, you quickly become obsolete. Your organization needs a real-world approach that creates leaders who can manage everyday operations and drive a long-term vision.
Business Leader Faculty™
We’re not academics and consultants. We’re a community of successful business leaders applying real-world leadership from our own businesses since 1946.
Leadership Community
Your leaders get a student and alumni network of nearly 10,000 business leaders to guide and support their journey. You can provide a growing network that compounds the value of their education.
Our Mission
We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and have a mission to develop our next generation of leaders because we believe great leaders change lives. Leadership impact does not just touch teams and organizations, it changes families and communities for the better. A leader doesn’t stop being a leader when they leave their work for the day. It touches every part of their life. Our learning experiences explore how to be agile, innovative, strategic, and inspirational. This kind of education is not only found on a syllabus; it is absorbed and cultivated in our unique environment.
You deserve real-world leadership development.
Let's Talk
Let’s talk about how the Center for Leadership can help you advance your business goals and talent strategies.