Why The Riker Approach Process Only Has 3 Steps
The 3 Step Riker Difference
Why my process has only 3 Steps.
Discover the ROI difference.
Assessment. Alignment. Application.
People are sometimes surprised at how simple my process is. Twenty-nine years in, working with executives who are used to thick binders and twelve-phase implementation plans, and I hand them three words: Assessment, Alignment, Application. I can see in their eyes, some part of them expects more.
I didn't start out this streamlined. Early in my career, I watched well-meaning leadership programs try to skip straight to the good part. They'd hand a team a set of behaviors to adopt, or a values poster for the break room, and wonder six months later why nothing had actually changed. The missing piece was never the content. It was the sequence. You cannot build change on a foundation nobody has agreed exists yet.
The Riker Approach comes in 3 phases.
Assessment comes first, because awareness comes first. You cannot improve what you haven't honestly looked at. This is the step where we benchmark where a leadership team and their culture actually stand today, not where they hope they stand and not where the org chart says they should stand.
Awareness is the first real move toward emotional intelligence and trust, and it's also the most skipped step in this business, because it requires leaders to sit still and look at something uncomfortable before they get to fix it. However, if you are unaware of something, then you don’t have the choice or the power to do anything about it and it just persists, draining your energy, time and capacity.
Alignment comes second, because agreement has to be built, not assumed. Once a team can see the same starting point clearly, the next job is making sure they're solving the same problem for the right reasons. Does the solution align with the values, the vision and the purpose of the organization. Is it a priority right now? I have sat in more rooms than I can count where every leader at the table believed they already agreed — until it was put in action and did not produce the desired results.
Alignment is where we build the acceptance and buy-in that lets a leadership team stop talking past each other. Without it, even the best strategy fractures the moment it meets a hallway conversation.
Application comes last, because knowledge that stays in a workshop is just a nice afternoon. This is the step people are most impatient to reach and the one that actually determines whether any of this sticks. It's not enough to know what good leadership behavior looks like. You have to practice it, in your actual daily work, until it's no longer a technique you're reaching for but simply how you lead.
Application is where the Riker Approach earns its keep — where Relationships, Inspiration, Knowledge, Empathy & Enthusiasm, and Results stop being ideas on a page and start showing up in how people actually treat each other on a Tuesday afternoon.
Three steps. Not because the work is simple — it isn't — but because I've learned that leaders don't need more steps. They need the right three, done in the right order, all the way through. Skip Assessment, and you're guessing. Skip Alignment, and you're building on sand. Skip Application, and you've just run an expensive seminar.
I built my process this short on purpose. It's the shortest path I know from where a team actually is to where they're capable of going.
Transform & Thrive with ROI
— Dana