About Leading with Heart

Leading with Heart, Inc. was incorporated in Pennsylvania on February 6, 1996, under the name Interpersonal Growth Workshops, Inc. In those early years, we delivered professional growth workshops to organizations serving young people: public and private schools, mental health clinics, juvenile justice agencies, and family social services.

Client demand pulled us into new territory, first healthcare and then the financial industry, where we worked with wealth managers and firm partners. Alongside the workshops, we provided psychotherapy to children, youth, and families with a focus on behavioral concerns, and later specialized in treating adults with anxiety disorders.

In 1999, our founder trained as a professional coach, and coaching and training joined our offerings. Through our partnership with Habit Change Company, which our founder co-founded and led as Chief Operating Officer, we built and ran an ICF-accredited coach training school.

By the early 2000s, coaching and training had grown from a sideline into the majority of our work. For nearly two decades we kept the Interpersonal Growth Workshops name, and our tagline told the truer story: leading with heart.

Around 2010, the ground shifted under the leaders we served. Workplaces grew more matrixed, more diverse, and more demanding, and the pace of change outran the old playbooks. Many leaders had come up in hierarchical, command-and-control environments and found themselves unprepared to lead their companies into what came next.

Social media handed everyone a megaphone: a single employee or customer could now shape a leader's reputation, or a company's fortunes, in an afternoon. At the same time, the wider climate grew more polarized, and leaders were increasingly expected to take public positions on contested social issues. Underneath all of it we kept seeing the same gap: empathy, understanding, and humility were still being treated as soft extras at exactly the moment they had become core leadership capabilities.

We were advised not to act on that gap. On June 8, 2017, we purchased leadingwithheart.com. On September 5, 2018, we filed the DBA Leading with Heart. The counsel we received was blunt: businesses would close their doors to a firm with "heart" in its name, because heart had no place in the business world. We were willing to lose those clients, and we challenged the premise anyway.

HR leaders started reaching out to us because of the name.

Our focus sharpened around two kinds of clients: those who already understood heart-centered leadership and wanted to build it throughout their organization, and those who had let profit crowd out people, losing sight of the fact that people are a company's greatest asset.

On February 4, 2024, we released the DBA and officially changed our name from Interpersonal Growth Workshops, Inc. to Leading with Heart, Inc. More than three decades in, our products and services continue to expand, guided by a single ambition: to make heart-centered leadership the way leadership is practiced.