Leadership Development That Meets You Where You Are

Introducing 3Rivers Leadership Institute

(This blog will take approximately 8 minutes to read.)

There's a moment in almost every session I facilitate where I can feel the room shift. It's not when I deliver a well-researched model or a polished slide — it's when a leader looks up and says, "That's exactly what's happening on my team right now." Often, that moment comes right after I've asked a question and simply waited. That moment is the whole point of my work, and it's the standard every 3Rivers Leadership Institute engagement is built around.

I'm Dr. Jim Dittmar, founder, President, and CEO of 3Rivers Leadership Institute. I've spent over four decades in the field of leadership practice and development — as a teacher and school principal, as founding director of Geneva College's groundbreaking M.S. in Organizational Leadership Program, as a professor and department chair for twenty years, and now as a leadership trainer, consultant, and executive coach working directly with organizations across the region. I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, and I've written or contributed to several books on leadership, including The LEADERS Model and The Leadership Carol, along with a chapter in Ken Blanchard's Servant Leadership in Action.

My Philosophy: Your Needs Drive the Design

Here's something I want to be direct about: this work isn't about what I want to teach. It's about what your organization actually needs to solve.

Too many training programs are built around a facilitator's favorite content — a framework they love, a case study they've used for years, a format that's comfortable for them rather than useful for the room. I take the opposite approach. Every program I offer is a starting point, not a finished product. Before I design a single session, I want to understand your real pain points — where communication is breaking down, where decisions are stalling, where culture is quietly working against you. Then we build the training around those answers together.

That's why my process always starts with a conversation, not a proposal:

1.      Contact Me — a quick conversation to learn about your situation.

2.      Consultation Call — we talk through your specific pain points and goals.

3.      Create an Action Plan — together, we build a customized timeline and training design.

4.      On-Site Training — we deliver sessions built specifically for your team.

Ask. Listen. Then Respond.

If there's one habit that defines how I work — in a training room or in a one-on-one coaching session — it's this: I ask before I tell.

My natural instinct isn't to open with an answer. It's to ask a good question, listen carefully to what's underneath the response, and only then respond — often with another question. This isn't a technique I perform; it's a discipline I practice because it works. When I hand someone an answer, they can nod along and forget it by the following week. When someone works their way to their own answer — through a question that made them think differently about their situation — that insight belongs to them. It sticks. It changes behavior.

This is what separates a facilitative style from a lecture-based one. In a training room, it looks like posing a challenge to the group and letting the conversation do the teaching. In a coaching relationship, it looks like resisting the urge to solve a client's problem for them, and instead asking the question that helps them see the problem — and their own capability — more clearly. My role isn't to be the smartest person in the room. It's to help the people in the room become smarter about their own situation than I could ever be on their behalf.

Vertical Development, Not Just Horizontal

Most leadership training focuses on what I'd call horizontal development — adding new skills, new tools, new knowledge to a leader's existing toolbox. That kind of development matters, and it's part of what I offer. But it isn't the deepest kind of change, and it isn't where I put my primary emphasis.

My real focus is on vertical development — helping leaders change how they make sense of their world, not just what they know how to do. Horizontal development gives someone a better hammer. Vertical development changes how they see the whole situation they're standing in — their assumptions, their blind spots, the mental models running quietly underneath their decisions. It's slower, harder, and far more transformational. It's also where lasting leadership change actually happens.

My Model: The Transformational Learning Process

To guide this kind of deep change, I use a model I call the Transformational Learning Process — a continuous cycle, not a one-time event, that shows how genuine transformation actually unfolds over time. The process begins when someone realizes the need to change their behaviors. It requires them to deeply reflect on what is happening at each stage of the cycle. Only through openness to change and reflection can this happen.

1.      Identify Current Assumptions and Behaviors — naming what's really driving current actions and decisions. This is where the cycle always begins.

2.      Identify Desired Behaviors — getting clear on what the leader actually wants to be doing differently.

3.      Identify New Assumptions Associated with New Behaviors — recognizing, up front, the shift in underlying beliefs that the desired new behaviors will require.

4.      Reflect on the Cognitive Dissonance Created by New Assumptions and Behaviors — sitting with the discomfort that real change always produces, rather than retreating from it.

5.      Identify and Begin Practicing a Few New Behaviors — starting small, with a handful of concrete, practicable changes.

6.      Seek Feedback on New Behaviors — inviting outside perspective rather than relying on self-assessment alone.

7.      Reflect on New Behavior Experiences and Feedback — processing what the feedback and experience actually reveal.

8.      Practice New Behaviors and Establish New Performance Outcomes — deepening repetition until the new behaviors produce real, sustained results.

9.      Create a Feedback Huddle or Seek a Feedback Coach and Meet Regularly — building an ongoing structure of accountability so the growth continues.

10.   Assess and Reflect on New Behaviors and New Outcomes Achieved — evaluating what's genuinely different now, before the cycle returns to the top to identify the next set of current assumptions and behaviors.

The entire cycle happens within the context of the leader's real organization and relationships — it isn't an abstract exercise, and it doesn't end. Leaders who commit to it don't just add a new skill; they develop a genuinely different — and more capable — way of seeing themselves and their leadership.

A Facilitative, Applied Style

I don't lecture. I facilitate.

My approach is collaborative and interactive, built around real workplace examples that connect directly to your organization's actual business needs — not abstract theory. Sessions are designed to be engaging and hands-on, giving participants real opportunities to apply new skills rather than just absorb information. If a concept or framework can't survive contact with your team's real situations, it isn't worth teaching. So we test it against your reality, in the room, together — through questions, not lectures.

Trainings I Offer

Below is a sample of the training curriculum that I have developed. Every one of the programs below is customizable — in length, depth, and emphasis — to fit the needs of your organization. Several can also be delivered as focused, stand-alone sessions.

The LEADERS Development Model

A comprehensive framework exploring seven dimensions of leadership: Leadership, Ethics, Alignment, Decision-Making, Engagement, Resilience, and Stewardship. Each dimension can be explored in depth as its own session or woven into a broader leadership development series.

Followership: The Often Forgotten Part of Organizational Development

Explores how a more complete understanding of followership — and how leaders view the people who follow them — can boost creativity, sharpen decision-making, and strengthen relationships across an organization.

How (Un)Ethical Are You?

Using a “3 P's” approach — Process, Perspective, and Person — participants examine their own ethical standards and decision-making patterns through knowledge, introspection, and applied practice.

Decision-Making: It's More Than You Think It Is

Focuses on improving the quality of complex, high-stakes decisions — including the factors that derail good decision-making and, just as important, the follow-through needed to implement decisions well.

Emotional Intelligence: What It Is, How to Develop It, and Ways to Apply It

Introduces the core components of emotional intelligence, gives participants concrete ways to build this competency, and applies it directly to challenges in their own workplace.

Servant Leadership: Why It's Necessary, Not “Soft,” and Often Absent

Explores the perspective, attitudes, and behaviors of servant leaders and their measurable impact on organizational performance — along with the common misconceptions that lead many leaders to reject the approach.

Why Good People Do Bad Things

Examines how well-intentioned leaders can find themselves trapped in cycles of unethical behavior without ever meaning to — and introduces a practical model for avoiding those traps.

Changing the Mindset: Challenging Assumptions to Become a Better Leader

Challenges participants to examine their own assumptions about what leadership means, then introduces a relational model of leadership influence, with tools to begin implementing it in their own organizational context.

Additional Sessions

Include Just Try and Motivate Me (intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation) and It Can Help or Hurt You: Creating and Sustaining an Amazing Culture (a practical model for building organizational culture that drives performance).

Coaching: The One-on-One Extension of This Work

Training moves a room. Coaching moves an individual.

My coaching clients are people who want more than incremental improvement — they want to change, to become genuinely more successful in what they do, and to grow as people in the process. That third piece matters as much as the first two. I'm not just interested in helping someone perform better at work; I'm interested in helping them become someone better.

Coaching sessions typically run one to three hours, and engagements usually unfold over several months, meeting weekly or bi-weekly depending on the client's goals and pace. That rhythm matters — real, vertical change doesn't happen in a single conversation. It happens through the same cycle of practice, feedback, and reflection described in the Transformational Learning Process above, sustained over time with someone in their corner asking the right questions along the way.

Let's Talk About What You Need

If you're weighing whether a training, a coaching engagement, or some combination of both is right for your team, that conversation is the actual starting point — not a sales pitch, just an honest look at where you are and where you want to go. That's how every 3Rivers Leadership Institute engagement begins, and it's how I make sure what I deliver is what you actually need.

3Rivers Leadership Institute — leadership development built around your reality, not mine.

Dr. Jim Dittmar

Founder, President & CEO, 3Rivers Leadership Institute

724-462-9962 | jimdittmar.com