We help your leadership team excel by reducing friction and increasing partnership.

About Leadership Archetypes ®

The archetypes describe behaviors and patterns of how leaders get work done, what drives them, how they add value and how they work with others. Rather than edicts, the archetypes are broad patterns aimed at helping leaders understand their own leadership style and that of others to ease organizational friction.

The Leadership Archetypes ® framework was researched with leaders at companies like Alloy, Circle CI, Elastic, Equinix, Gitlab, Griffin, Hashi Corp, SendGrid, StackHawk and Stripe among many others.

The Leadership Archetypes ® framework:

  • Fosters self awareness

  • Establishes a common language

  • Helps leaders find the best expression of themselves

  • Creates more positive work environments

  • Reduces friction and increases partnership

A part of the Constellary leadership framework

Guiding Principles

There are many ways to lead

We believe in nuance, knowing there isn’t one right way to be a potent leader. We don’t believe in pattern matching or mono cultures. We know that every style brings value.

It’s about the conversation

We know that being real and talking about the hard stuff builds relationships. Conversation brings understanding and eases friction, allowing us to find solutions and avoid intractable conflict.

We’re better together

We see ourselves as one team. We eschew us vs. them thinking. We seek to bring out the best in everyone. We know that combining our strengths makes everyone better and we achieve more.

Facilitated Conversations for Teams

A different kind of conversation

This isn’t your normal workshop — it’s an experience designed to strengthen your team. It’s about the a-ha moments that lead to insights on how we can work more effectively. This facilitated conversation provides grease to the system, so teams can have the important and sometimes difficult conversations they need to have to be more productive.

The conversation centers on three areas:

  • Understanding my style

  • Working with others

  • Team dynamics

Leaders leave with a better understanding of their work style and the team better understand how to effectively partner with their peers and navigate friction.

Duration: The in-person event is either half-day or a full day. The facilitated conversation is perfect for an off-site or when a new team is forming. To get the most out of the experience, teams can add an additional introductory session or follow up session.

Learn more about how Leadership Archetypes ® can support your team.

Meet the Creator

The creator of Leadership Archetypes ® is Suzan Bond , the former COO of Travis CI. She’s a leadership consultant, trained facilitator and executive coach. She’s spent more than 15 years in technology. She has an educational background in psychology, sociology, community organizing, and organizational development. She’s been an executive coach for over a decade.

Suzan completed her coach training and certification at the Co-Active Training Institute , one of the most rigorous programs in the industry. She received training in leadership and facilitation from the Co-Active Leadership program and in organization & relationship systems coaching from CRR Global .

Suzan hosts LeadDev Bookmarked , a monthly book club for engineering leaders. She’s a regular contributor to Fast Company where she writes for the Work Life section.

Follow her on Twitter or read her substack Suzan’s Fieldnotes .

What People Are Saying

I adore Leadership Archetypes® - they provide an intuitive, positive shared language for talking about how we work as a leadership team. I’ve worked with other leadership type mappings before, and found that they’re either too complex to be easily memorable and useable, or they box us in to who we are rather than how we tend to operate, which doesn’t reflect the fluidity of how humans behave.

Understanding Leadership Archetypes® has given me clarity on how my weaknesses show up, and early warning signs to identify when I’m getting out of balance. I’ve deliberately built closer relationships with complementary archetypes within my executive team so that I can lean on others’ strengths.

—Maria Campbell, COO, Griffin