Leadership and Learning: Personal Change in a Professional Setting

As a company, Leadership and Learning Inc. (L&L), Barry and Joan are unique in the range and depth of their combined seventy-five years of consulting work in the public and private sectors on personal, interpersonal, and organizational change.

They began their careers as high school English teachers and started alternative high school programs before the concept of “alternative” (or “charter” or “magnet”) existed: Joan at Cardozo, in Washington D.C. and Barry at Murray Road, in Newton, MA:

From the mid-70s, when they started L&L, until the early-80s, Barry and Joan worked primarily with school principals and superintendents, teachers, and school boards in contexts defined by team building, planned change, leadership training, supervision and evaluation, executive coaching, superintendent searches, and entry into new jobs. They wrote two books together about their work, originally published by McGraw Hill: Leadership and Learning: Personal Change in a Professional Setting and Entry: the Hiring, Start Up, and Supervision of Administrators.Both books are currently in their second edition.

During the 80s, their work expanded to include hospitals, government and social service agencies, day care facilities, and higher education, as well as businesses as diverse as newspaper publishing, finance, nuclear power, architectural design and construction, real estate development, international management consulting, engineering, consumer products, .com start ups, software development, and magazine publishing, along with doctors and lawyers.

They have each combined in-the-field consulting, seminars, and running “offsite conferences” with classroom teaching in academic settings, Barry at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since 1977 and Joan at Lesley College, Wheelock College, Northeastern University, and in Boston University’s Program in Professional Development since 1981.

Their approach to personal, interpersonal, and organizational change has been tested and successfully implemented in their twenty-five year relationship as educators, friends, and business partners.

Since 1975, Barry Jentz and Joan Wofford have been Partners and Principals in Leadership and Learning Inc., an organizational development and consulting firm specializing in leadership development and organizational change. Between us, we have over seventy years of experience, working extensively in both the public and private sectors with administrators, managers, and executives in hospitals, government and social service agencies, day care facilities, and higher education, as well as in businesses as diverse as newspaper publishing, finance, nuclear power, architectural design and construction, real estate development, international management consulting, engineering, consumer products, .com start ups, software development, and magazine publishing, along with doctors and lawyers.

Our business is making learning an integral part of leadership: We believe that leaders must be capable of learning about and modifying their own practice by examining the underlying patterns of thought that give rise to that practice, as well as generate this same capability in those who work for them. Our methodologies engage leaders in examining and changing their own behavior and underlying mental constructions by:

Creating new personal and interpersonal knowledge through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Helping individual leaders make new sense of their experience and increase their vocabulary of leadership behavior through Executive Coaching

Construing the start of a new job as an opportunity for organizational learning by using an Entry Plan Approach

Producing change in individual and teamwork performance through a progression of Group Teamwork Performance Feedback Activities

Expanding interpersonal skills through Video Taping and Analysis of a Progression of Difficult, Managerial Interactions

Enhancing the performance of large teams through an Offsite All-On-The-Same-Page Activity and other designs to help groups identify, examine, change, and improve their own work structures and processes