The Four18 Intensive
Master Your Inner Game
Elevate Your Strategy Game
Something has changed.
A new seat, a bigger seat, a new board, a market that moved, a team that turned over, an organization that outgrew its plan. However it happened, the demands on you are different now, and what worked before will only take you so far.
The 4·18 Intensive brings leadership development and strategy work into the same two and a half days, using your own organization, your own challenges, and the strategy you are responsible for delivering.
November 4 - 6, 2026
Senior Leader Founding Cohort
Twenty Seats Only • $10,000 per Seat
Why The Four18?
Every leader whose scope changes is racing two clocks. Both start the moment the job gets bigger, whether or not anyone announces it.
Master Your Inner Game
The first four months is roughly what you get to establish how people experience you at this altitude: your presence in the room, the trust your team extends when it is tested, and the judgment you bring when the answer is not obvious.
Most leadership development sharpens what you already know. The 4·18 works on what you carry into the room, so the leader your team sees under pressure is the one you intend to be. You will identify what happens to your leadership when the pressure rises, and build the practices that let you lead deliberately rather than reactively.
Elevate Your Strategy Game
The full eighteen months is about how long an organization takes to decide whether a leader is delivering at the level the role requires. Strategy is where that decision gets made, because strategy is where leadership becomes visible.
Where are the money and the people going? Why are the priorities everyone agreed to not moving? Where is the organization structurally working against its own plan? Which risks are being ignored, and what needs to change now rather than in six months?
The 4·18 examines the relationship between you, the strategy you are carrying, and the organizational conditions required to execute it.
The four sits inside the eighteen.
Presence, trust and alignment come first because the strategy work that follows depends on them.
You Don't Need Another Leadership Program
You need a place to work on what's happening right now.
Is the 4·18 For You?
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Your scope has expanded, and the skills that made you successful at the last level are not quite covering this one.
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You are accountable for a strategy you did not build, with a team you are still assessing, inside an organization that is tired of change.
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You walk into important rooms projecting more certainty than you feel.
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Your team agrees with the strategy, but execution keeps stalling anyway, and nobody can tell you exactly why.
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The decisions are getting more consequential, and there are fewer places to pressure-test what you are thinking before you commit to it.
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You have done leadership development before, and you are not interested in one more model to take home and figure out alone.
No Hypotheticals. Real Problems in Real Time.
You won't spend two and a half days discussing someone else's company.
Bring the strategy that's not moving, where your team isn't aligned, and the challenges you cannot quite diagnose. Here is where you can get more comfortable with the decisions you carry alone and the scope you're still growing into.
That is what we work on.
Your pre-work gives us the starting point. The room gives you space to challenge your own assumptions alongside people who have no stake in your answer. The strategy work gives you a clearer read on what is happening inside your organization, and the leadership work shows you how you are influencing the system you are trying to change. Your QI Bridge Plan turns all of it into specific actions over the next one, four, eight and twelve months.
You don't leave the 4·18 with more to think about. You leave knowing what you are going to do.
What You Leave With
This is not a passive, check-the-box kind of workshop.
What you walk away with will change the way you think about strategy, leadership, and organizational performance. The challenges you bring are not new. What will change is the perspective you apply, and the solutions that open up from there.
A Clearer Read on Yourself
You will see where decision fatigue, trust and pressure are shaping the way you lead, and what to do about it.
Trust & Decision Inventory
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A decision-fatigue and trust audit that maps where your inner game breaks down under pressure
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A values inventory and a real-time decision filter you can use in the room, not just in reflection
Power Walk Plan
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A repeatable process for repairing trust after a hard call or a missed read
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A named gap in your executive presence and a practice to close it
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A personal leadership-identity statement that anchors every high-stakes decision
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A 30, 60 and 90-day Power Walk practice plan to embed the shift after the room ends
A Clearer Read on Your Organization
You will hold the strategy you are responsible for delivering up against what is happening inside the organization, and see where execution is breaking down and why.
Strategic Context Inventory
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A gap analysis on the structure and design of the strategy you are responsible for, and how it connects to the top level plan
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A current plan performance assessment with team alignment diagnostic
Quantum Intelligent StrategyTM
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A redesign of the strategic imperatives you own, aligned to top level strategy, closing gaps and disconnects between the two
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A defined risk appetite for your scope that flows from and with the organization's plan
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A strategic decision structure for navigating opportunity and risk within your authority, and for escalating what sits above it
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A Bridge Plan with 1, 4, 8, and 12-month performance targets and metrics that tie your piece of the strategy to the organization's vision, values and contribution
The November Intensive
November 4 - 6, 2026
Built for Senior Leaders
You may have a new title. You may have the same title with expectations that have quietly doubled. Either way, something changed.
You can see more of the organization now, and you do not control all of it. You are accountable upward and depended on downward. You are expected to translate strategy into execution while developing people, sorting competing priorities, and making decisions with incomplete information. There are not many places where you can say, out loud, here is what I am struggling with.
That is why the room matters.
Twenty senior leaders from different organizations at a similar altitude. No reporting relationships, no one you have to impress, and no one whose performance review you write. What is said in the room stays in the room.
Who Belongs in the 4·18
The 4·18 is built for experienced senior leaders carrying meaningful organizational responsibility: Directors, Senior Directors, Vice Presidents and other executives with direct responsibility for leading people and executing strategy.
That includes functional and business-unit leaders, newly promoted senior leaders, and leaders whose scope may have expanded without a change in title.
You do not need to be new to your organization or your role.
You do need to be carrying consequential leadership and strategic responsibility.
Two leaders from the same organization are welcome, provided you sit at the same level and neither of you reports to the other.
Why Now?
The most expensive leadership challenges rarely announce themselves as leadership challenges.
They show up as a strategic priority that keeps slipping, a talented team that is not moving together, decisions that take too long, turnover that does not make sense, or a leader who has become indispensable to everything. Sometimes it is nothing more specific than the persistent sense that your division should be performing better than it is.
Waiting another six months rarely makes any of that easier to address.
What would change if you entered 2027 with a clear read on the leader you need to be, the strategy you need to advance, and the actions that connect the two? That is the work.
The Investment
$10,000 per Seat · Founding Cohort Price
2½ days · 16 live development hours · 20 leaders maximum · Two senior practitioners · Two integrated methodologies · One actionable Bridge Plan
The 4·18 combines work that organizations usually buy separately, from different providers,
and at varying points in time.
Executive Leadership Development
A close look at how you lead, decide, build trust and perform under pressure, using Stephanie's Power Walk Method™.
Strategy & Organizational Performance
A structured assessment of the strategy you are responsible for carrying and the organizational conditions affecting its execution, using Erin's Quantum Intelligent Strategy™.
Applied Diagnostics
Assessment work completed before and during the Intensive, so your development starts from your own leadership and organizational context rather than a generic baseline.
Implementation
A QI Bridge Plan that translates insight into one, four, eight and twelve-month actions and performance targets.
Peer Perspective
A curated room of leaders operating at a similar altitude, outside your own organization, who are still there when the three days are over.
Why $10,000?
The useful question is not what leadership training normally costs. It is what it costs to leave the challenge you would bring to the room unresolved: one critical leader lost, one major priority delayed another quarter, six months of a team pulling in different directions, or one executive still carrying work the organization needs others to own.
The value of the 4·18 is not the two and a half days you spend in the room. It is the priority that finally moves, the team that pulls together, and the decisions you make with more confidence than you had before.
The Intensive includes sixteen live instructional hours, self-reportable to SHRM, HRCI, PMI, RIMS-CRMP, ATD and IIA at no additional fee.
If Your Organization is Funding Your Seat
The 4·18 is designed to return value to the organization, not only to the leader. Participants work on their own division's context rather than hypothetical case studies, and they return with tangible work product tied to the strategy they are responsible for executing: a gap analysis of that strategy, a plan-performance assessment, a team-alignment diagnostic, and a Bridge Plan with one, four, eight and twelve-month targets.
Your organization is investing in leadership capability, strategic decision-making, team alignment and a defined implementation roadmap, along with sixteen live professional-development hours that can be self-reported for continuing-education credit.
Organizations can pay by card or by invoice with ACH, and the seat is confirmed when payment is received. If you need to make the case internally, the Brochure & Agenda below is written for the person approving the spend.
Two Practitioners · Two Disciplines · One Room
You are not learning from people who study leadership and strategy from the outside. You are working with two practitioners who have spent more than sixty combined years inside the decisions, organizations and leadership challenges being discussed, and who each still run the practice that work came from.
Stephanie Schmid, PCC, BCC, CEC, PMP, SPHR
Executive coach and leadership expert with more than 30 years of experience, including senior leadership roles at ADP and eBay before building her own practice. Creator of the Power Walk™ Method, a research-backed approach that pairs movement with the inner work of leadership, and Step Up 120™, her program for leaders building credibility in a new role. Boardwise-certified for board-readiness work.
Erin Sedor, SMP, CEC, RIMS Fellow, CPP
Strategy, risk and resilience expert with more than 30 years of experience, from management through the C-suite and, for the past decade, her own practice, Black Fox Strategy, working with CEOs and Executive Directors on organizational health and performance. Creator of Quantum Intelligent Strategy™, an approach that goes after the assumptions a strategy is built on and rebuilds the plan around what is true now.
Why an Executive Coach + a Strategy & Risk Expert
Good strategy does not survive weak leadership, and strong leadership cannot make up for a weak strategy. A gap on either side undermines your success.
Organizations usually hire coaches to work on the individual leader, and someone else to support strategic planning and performance. The 4·18 exists because we know the power of connecting a leader's inner game with their strategy game. In the room, those two perspectives meet, and the questions change.
Stephanie works from the leader outward: how you show up, what people trust you with, and how you decide under pressure. Erin works from the strategy inward: what it is built on, whether the organization can carry it, and where your piece of it connects to the enterprise plan or pulls against it.
We run independent practices, and the 4·18 is a joint expansion of what we each do best. Staying in the work is what keeps it practical.
Results from Leaders We've Worked With
"Erin is a true asset for our team. She has a rare ability to cut through complexity, quickly getting to the core issue. She combines sharp analytical insight with a strong understanding of people and organizational dynamics. Erin's strategic risk and design work delivers measurable, positive ROI."
Judy F., CEO
You are here because you know something needs to change.
You are in the right place.
Master Your Inner Game · Elevate Your Strategy Game
Not Sure the 4·18 Is the Right Fit?
Schedule a 30-minute Fit Conversation with either Stephanie or Erin, whichever calendar works for you. We'll talk through what you're navigating in your role, what you want to strengthen or solve, and whether the 4·18 Intensive is the right place to work on it. No obligation to enroll.