By: Malana VanTyler

Klemmer and Associates equips individuals and organizations with the tools to lead consciously, ethically, and with impact. Specializing in experiential leadership training, the company has spent more than 30 years helping participants dismantle limiting subconscious beliefs that hold them back from success. Since 1995, tens of thousands of individuals from over a dozen countries, along with teams from major corporations such as Hewlett-Packard, Christie Clinic, and Specialty Laboratories, have completed Klemmer’s immersive programs with measurable gains in confidence, collaboration, and productivity. The company’s founder, Brian Klemmer, built the curriculum on the idea that lasting growth requires more than inspiration or strategy. His teachings emphasize the importance of inner alignment, recognizing how unconscious perceptions influence decisions, relationships, and results. At the core of Klemmer’s offerings is the concept of the Compassionate Samurai:, Advanced Leadership, Heart of the Samurai, and Samurai Camp. These courses guide participants through a developmental journey that sparks meaningful transformation from the inside out.

Every organization finds itself confronted with the need to adapt to changing environments. To stay competitive, every organization needs leaders who understand both how to confront change and how to seize the best opportunities that come along with it. Yet a 2023 survey by the recruitment company Zippia found that only around 5% of companies choose to invest in leadership training at every level of their organization. That’s a massive amount of opportunity lost.

Leadership training not only needs to reach beyond the C-Suite. It also needs to reach multiple dimensions of who we are as human beings. High-quality leadership training is transformative, breaking through worn-out patterns of thinking and behavior. It challenges participants to confront their own personal roadblocks and limiting beliefs, with the ultimate goal of building character and achieving personal mastery.

This is the type of leadership training offered through Klemmer, a company that has provided workshops to numerous major corporations, including Hewlett-Packard and ITT Corporation. It is the type of training that develops well-rounded leaders capable of responding from a core belief system centered on the ability to get things done on time and with excellence, within a compassionate ethical structure.

With a confident, highly competent leader at the helm, an organization is better able to resolve internal and external conflicts, gain resiliency, boost productivity, and create breakthrough innovations. On an individual level, people who complete leadership training often go on to earn more, gain influence within and outside their organizations, and become more promotable.

Core Skills Anchored in Core Values

There are a number of essential qualities an organization should expect of its leaders. Among the most important are strategy and decision-making ability, communication skills, and a talent for engaging and inspiring the rank-and-file employees who make the business run.

Ask people about the managers and executives they know, and you might see two general types of leaders emerge. The first group consists of those whose strengths lie in empathy and communication, but who are less skilled at decision-making and executing a plan. The other group consists of those capable of acting decisively and getting projects done, but who often rush ahead without thought for any human toll they leave behind them. To achieve lasting positive change for an organization, leaders need to balance both these strengths.

This is why the most effective leadership trainings work from the inside out. They emphasize development of character over instruction in how to respond to every single possible situation. They teach participants how to reach members of their teams where they are, building on their strengths to create a whole that is far more effective than an assemblage of its parts.

Successful leadership trainings center active listening, a skill based in openness to engaging with other people, not just talking at them. Good leadership trainings also help participants develop greater emotional intelligence. Emotionally intelligent leaders understand the power of empathy to communicate across real or perceived differences. These are the leaders most capable of inspiring commitment and passion for a job well done.

Leaders also need to be able to make good decisions for their organizations. The best trainings for strategy-building and decision-making focus on learning to find and deploy accurate information and foster constructive debate. They teach participants to stay on task while being open to alternative views that can produce a better outcome. But they also teach leaders to own the decisions they make, and how to learn from both good and bad decisions.

It may sound counterintuitive, but training people to be good decision-makers ultimately involves helping them reduce reliance on their own egos. The ability to bring together all useful sources of stakeholder input, and to foster the genuine involvement of their teams to get to consensus, is a standout characteristic of the most decisive, successful leaders.

The Power of Experience, the Responsibility of Influence

An additional major component of leadership involves influence. The best leadership training programs enable participants to understand how to use their own power, confidence, and influence in service to an outcome that transcends themselves. A strong leader looks to the future, hiring, developing, and empowering successive waves of new team members who will continue to build their organization’s success. In doing so, a leader also ensures their own legacy.

The late Brian Klemmer was such a leader. From his founding of the company in 1995, Klemmer has continued in his tradition of creating what he called Compassionate Samurai, leaders who can act with strength and empathy in their professional and personal lives. Brian Klemmer’s book The Compassionate Samurai serves as one of the cornerstones of Klemmer’s workshops, which have reached tens of thousands of people around the world.

What Klemmer aims to do is not “motivational” training per se. That provides a temporary rush of positive feelings, but seldom inspires lasting change. Klemmer’s experiential trainings reach deeper, asking participants to engage critically with their own preconceived ideas about themselves and the world. Often, these ideas do not align with reality and can prevent people from becoming the committed, responsive, and decisive leaders they want to be.

For this reason, Klemmer’s workshops are truly experiential and capable of producing more sustainable positive changes. Brian Klemmer believed that when people learn to see things differently, their beliefs and behavior begin to align with that fresh perspective. That internal change helps individual lives and entire organizations become better able to thrive.