Extraordinary leadership is built in ordinary moments.
What if the moments we overlook are the ones that matter most?
OLEL helps leaders and organizations build the capacity to take on the challenges that matter, bring out the best in others, and thrive in the lives that they are building along the way.
Something has shifted in what leadership requires.
Most leaders feel it before they can name it.
The decisions that land on a senior leader's desk today are different from the ones their predecessors managed. They move faster. They affect more people. They carry consequences that travel well beyond the walls of the organization — into communities, industries, ecosystems, and the lives of people who will never sit in that room.
Organizations are spending $100 billion annually on leadership development.
Engagement keeps falling.
The tools most organizations use to develop leaders were built for a world that rewarded individual expertise, linear thinking, and contained problems. That world is passing. Most development sends people back into the same conditions that shaped the patterns they came to change.
The culture stays.
The dynamics stay.
The gap between the leader someone wants to be and the leader they find themselves being under pressure stays.
In talent that leaves. In decisions made from too narrow a view of what is at stake. In leaders who are accomplished by every external measure and privately running on empty.
Not closing that gap has a cost too.
OLEL was built for what leadership requires now.
Ways to Work with OLEL
For Leaders
Executive Coaching & Advisory
Individualized coaching and advisory for leaders navigating greater responsibility, complexity, transition, and change.
Leadership Intensive · Executive Coaching · Executive Advisory
For Organizations
Organizational Partnerships
Bespoke engagements to strengthen leadership, teams, and the organizational conditions that shape how people work.
Speaking · Workshops · Leadership Development · Team Coaching · Offsites & Retreats · Organizational Advisory
Leadership is something we practice.
Most accomplished leaders have spent years developing expertise in their field. Far fewer have had the same opportunity to deliberately develop how they lead when the stakes are high and there is no obvious answer.
Yet these are precisely the moments that reveal our leadership.
What happens when someone challenges an idea we care deeply about?
What do we do when the pressure to deliver conflicts with what we believe is right?
Can we recognize when fear, ambition or certainty is narrowing our judgment?
Can we listen closely enough to discover that our understanding of a situation is incomplete?
What happens when we know something needs to change, but changing it will cost us?
These questions are not answered once. We encounter them again and again in the ordinary circumstances of our lives: in meetings and difficult conversations, in decisions about people and resources, in the way we respond to a mistake, and sometimes in the few seconds between feeling an impulse and choosing what to do next.
Over time, those moments become the way we lead — and the cultures we create.
Every moment is practice.
The OLEL Method
Care. Wisdom. Courage.
The OLEL Method is grounded in contemplative science, contemporary research, and decades of applied leadership practice.
Care
The capacity to pay attention.
We develop our ability to pay attention with care and compassion and remain in relationship with ourselves, other people and what matters, particularly when circumstances are difficult.
Practice Presence · Focus Deeply · Cultivate Energy
Wisdom
The capacity to see clearly.
Paying attention does not guarantee that we understand what we see. Wisdom asks us to examine the assumptions shaping our perspective and widen our view to include relationships, systems and consequences we might otherwise miss.
See Clearly · Choose Intentionally
Courage
The capacity to act with integrity.
Understanding something does not guarantee that we will act on it. Courage is where practice enters our behavior: how we speak, how we make difficult choices, how we use power and what we choose to create through our work.
Speak Compassionately · Act with Integrity · Create Meaningful Value
None of these capacities is enough by itself. We can become more focused on something that does not deserve our attention. We can see a problem clearly and still avoid doing anything about it. We can act decisively without understanding enough about the consequences of our actions.
The practice is learning to bring care, wisdom and courage together, especially when the situation is difficult and responding from habit is no longer working.
Meet the Founder
Leslie Hubbard
Leslie Hubbard has spent more than two decades studying a deceptively simple question: what changes when we learn to see ourselves, our leadership, and our organizations as they actually are — interdependent?
Her path began far outside the traditional institutions of leadership development. In 2004, Leslie was ordained as a Buddhist nun by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and given the name Sister True Suchness. She spent eight years living, practicing, teaching and leading within his international community — traveling globally, helping lead retreats and teaching programs for thousands of people, including Fortune 500 executives, government officials, physicians, educators and artists. She was part of the founding community of Blue Cliff Monastery in New York. Those years became an unconventional education in leadership: how communities make decisions, how human beings transform deeply conditioned patterns, and what becomes possible when leadership is understood as something that arises through conditions rather than something possessed by an individual.
When Leslie returned to secular institutions, she encountered a strikingly different operating system. Organizations spoke about collaboration while measuring individual performance. Leaders were credited with outcomes created by hundreds of people. Stress was treated as an individual resilience problem even when its causes lived within organizational conditions. The contrast raised the question that has shaped her work ever since: what would leadership look like if our organizations were built around a more accurate understanding of how human beings actually flourish?
That question took Leslie into universities, organizational leadership and business education. She holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University and an MBA in Sustainability from Bard College, and has completed advanced training in executive coaching, emotional intelligence and personality assessment. For nearly a decade at the University of Virginia, she worked at the intersection of contemplative practice, education and human development, designing and leading programs for emerging leaders. Her later work at Harvard expanded that inquiry into climate, sustainability and the systemic challenges facing institutions and society.
Over more than two decades, Leslie has worked with leaders across business, government, higher education, healthcare, climate and sustainability, film, the arts and civil society — on six continents, in more than a dozen countries, with thousands of leaders.
The work begins with
a conversation.
Tell us what you are navigating.
For Leaders
Executive Coaching & Advisory
Individualized coaching and advisory for leaders navigating greater responsibility, complexity, transition, and change.
For Organizations
Organizational Partnerships
Bespoke engagements to strengthen leadership, teams, and the organizational conditions that shape how people work.
