Leading Purposefully · Thomas J. Norman, Ph.D.
Strategy, CliftonStrengths, and Life Design coaching for the people who have to decide on Monday.
Focus on the circle of control with your choices. Combine your strengths and your strategy using design thinking and the OKR framework popularized by Intel and Google.
Certified by Gallup and Stanford
Certified Strengths Coach. We start from what you already do well, name it precisely, and build the role around it instead of around your gaps.
Certified in the Burnett and Evans framework. Design thinking applied to a career: prototype the next move, test it cheaply, then commit.
One on one, in a weekly group, or with your intact team. The method is the same; what changes is who is in the room.
One on one
Confidential, and built around the decision actually in front of you: a first leadership role, a team that has stopped performing, a reorganization, a succession, or a career that needs a next chapter. Strategy work, strengths work, or both.
I hold no more than two individual clients at a time. When both seats are taken, the next opening goes to the next person on my waiting list.
Weekly group
A standing hour with other business leaders and owners. You get the room's combined experience, an accountability partner, and a working method: strengths plus strategy, design thinking, and OKRs. Groups stay small on purpose.
Members of the Superior AI Small Business Lab join the same Tuesday group.
Strengths and life design
For the person deciding what comes next rather than how to run what they have. CliftonStrengths to name the raw material, Designing Your Life to prototype the options, and OKRs to make the chosen one real.
For intact teams and management groups
The group program, rebuilt for a team that already works together. Same method, one organization in the room, scheduled around your team's calendar.
Best fit: a leadership team of six to twelve, a department going through change, or a group of managers who were promoted for their individual work and now have to lead.
A working session rather than a training. The team brings what is actually stuck, we run it through strengths, design thinking, and OKRs, and everyone leaves with something they own by name and by date. Over a run of weeks the team builds the habit of doing this without me.
The method, in four moves
Every program uses the same four moves, whether it is one person or a whole team.
We start by separating what you can decide from what you can only react to, and spend the hour on the first.
CliftonStrengths gives us language for what you already do well, so the plan is built on real material rather than an ideal.
Prototype the next move before betting on it. Cheap tests, honest evidence, then a decision.
The objective and the key results that would prove it, so progress is visible between sessions.
I am Thomas J. Norman, Ph.D., a tenured full professor of management at California State University, Dominguez Hills, where I teach management, human resources, compensation, and labor relations. I have served as department chair and acting associate dean, and I am the faculty founder of the university's Innovation Incubator.
I am the author of Outsourcing Human Resource Activities: Measuring the Hidden Costs and Benefits and of two 2026 textbooks, Management: Optimizing Talent for Organizational Effectiveness and Compensation: Rewarding and Retaining Talent, California Edition. Judgment Call, the first book in the More Capable series on management judgment in the AI transition, is in press.
The coaching practice grew out of the classroom. The research is the same; the room is smaller.
I also run Superior AI Consulting, which helps small businesses put AI to work.
Tell me what you are working on and which room fits: one on one at $500 per hour, the Tuesday group hour, or a working session with your team. Individual coaching is capped at two clients at a time, so ask early. If coaching is the wrong tool for what you are facing, I will say so.
Running a small business and wondering where AI fits? Start with Superior AI Consulting and its free AI Small Business Lab.