New Cohort Preparatory Material
We are excited to begin this Rooted Leadership journey with you! Below is a curated list of materials that will help you continue to grow, beyond the retreat. Please respect the proprietary nature of these materials and do not alter or share outside of the Groundwork network.
If you have any difficulty accessing or viewing the materials below, please contact Kenzie.
Retreat Materials
Digital copies of your retreat materials.
2023 Cohort Bios
2023 Cohort Contact Information
Mentor Bios
Retreat Itinerary
Information for Plus-Ones
Map of Salishan
A copy of the slideshow and fillable, digital copy of the workbook will be available as soon as the retreat concludes.
Articles
Please take a moment to read and reflect on the listed articles before attending our January retreat.
Books
Although these books are not mandatory for the Rooted Leadership curriculum, we highly recommend them to our participants. The Groundwork leadership team handpicked these works for their relevancy to our framework and powerful delivery.
If you are interested in borrowing a copy, let us know!
The Outward Mindset
Without even being aware of it, many of us operate from an inward mindset, a single-minded focus on our own goals and objectives. This book points out the many ways, some quite subtle and deceptive, that this mindset invites tension and conflict. But incredible things happen when people switch to an outward mindset. They intuitively understand what coworkers, colleagues, family, and friends need to be successful and happy. Their organizations thrive, and astonishingly, by focusing on others they become happier and more successful themselves This new mindset brings about deep and far-reaching changes.
Anatomy of Peace
What if conflicts at home, conflicts at work, and conflicts in the world stem from the same root cause? What if we systematically misunderstand that cause? And what if, as a result, we systematically perpetuate the very problems we think we are trying to solve? Every day.
From the authors of Leadership and Self-Deception comes an international bestseller that instills hope and inspires reconciliation. Through a moving story of parents who are struggling with their own children and with problems that have come to consume their lives, we learn from once-bitter enemies the way to transform personal, professional, and global conflicts, even when war is upon us.
Good to Great
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.
Extreme Ownership
Sent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin's SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed "all but lost." In gripping firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories in SEAL Team Three's Task Unit Bruiser, they learned that leadership--at every level--is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails. Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training that helped forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After departing the SEAL Teams, they launched Echelon Front, a company that teaches these same leadership principles to businesses and organizations. From promising startups to Fortune 500 companies, Babin and Willink have helped scores of clients across a broad range of industries build their own high-performance teams and dominate their battlefields.
Start with Why
Why are some people and organisations more inventive, pioneering and successful than others? And why are they able to repeat their success again and again? In business, it doesn't matter what you do, it matters WHY you do it. Simon Sinek explains the framework needed for businesses to move past knowing what they do to how they do it, and then to ask the more important question—WHY?
Dare to Lead
Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential.
When we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don’t see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don’t avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work. But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we’re choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we’re scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can’t do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start.
Quirky
What really distinguishes the people who literally change the world--those creative geniuses who give us one breakthrough after another? What differentiates Marie Curie or Elon Musk from the merely creative, the many one-hit wonders among us?
Melissa Schilling, one of the world's leading experts on innovation, invites us into the lives of eight people--Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs--to identify the traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, over and over again. While all innovators possess incredible intellect, intellect alone, she shows, does not create a breakthrough innovator. It was their personal, social, and emotional quirkiness that enabled true genius to break through--not just once but again and again.
Dangerous Love
Knowing how to transform conflict is critical in both our personal and professional life. But generally, we are terrible at it. Chad Ford believes that we are missing a critical word in our discussions about conflict resolution: love. What if we could learn how to love the people we are in conflict with through the conflict? It's a dangerous move: we have to confront our fears and stereotypes and shed our protective presuppositions. But when that sort of love takes hold, we no longer see enemies--we see us. This book is about everything Ford has learned in the last fifteen years working as a conflict mediator, professor, and researcher. It shows how we disconnect from people at the very time we need to be most connected to them, which leads to the predictable patterns of justification and conflict escalation that ensue. It also shows how to break the cycle. Whether you are struggling with a difficult family member, a lack of unity in your work team, or problems in troubled communities, Ford offers a new way of thinking and dealing with deep-rooted conflict.