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Gray Mountain Group Featured in Boulder Magazine: Leadership Lessons Beyond the Boardroom
- Emily Dusel
- Mar 15
- 2 min read
Gray Mountain Group Featured in Boulder Magazine
We’re honored that Boulder Magazine recently featured the story behind Gray Mountain Group and the work we’re doing with leaders and teams. Gray Mountain Group brings together experienced executive coaches Emily Dusel, Angela Chiarenza, and Jan West to explore leadership and team dynamics through experiential learning. The article highlights an idea we’ve all seen repeatedly in our work with leaders: some of the most meaningful leadership insights happen outside traditional environments like boardrooms and conference rooms. Experiential learning allows leaders to step away from familiar roles and observe how awareness, presence, and decision-making show up in real time.
Why Experiential Leadership Development Matters
Leadership development is often taught through frameworks, presentations, and strategy sessions. While those tools are valuable, lasting leadership growth often happens through experience and reflection.
Experiential leadership work invites leaders to:
observe how they show up in unfamiliar environments
notice patterns in communication and decision-making
explore how leadership shifts within teams
One of the unique aspects of this work is partnering with horses. Horses respond to attention, alignment, and awareness in the moment. Their responses often make leadership dynamics visible in ways that are difficult to see in traditional settings.
Shared Leadership in Practice
One of the most fascinating insights from working with horses is how clearly they demonstrate shared leadership. In a herd, leadership naturally shifts depending on who senses the environment, who notices changes, and what the moment requires. For teams and organizations, this can be a powerful mirror.
Effective leadership often isn’t about a single person directing everything. It’s about awareness, communication, and the ability to respond collectively to changing conditions.
The Story Behind Gray Mountain Group
Gray Mountain Group grew out of a shared curiosity between three experienced executive coaches. Emily Dusel, Angela Chiarenza, and Jan West each independently discovered the power of experiential leadership work and began exploring how to bring their perspectives together. The collaboration eventually became Gray Mountain Group, combining executive coaching, leadership facilitation, and experiential learning to support leaders and teams.
The recent Boulder Magazine feature shares more about how this collaboration came together and the philosophy behind the work.
We’re grateful to Boulder Magazine for taking the time to tell this story.
You can read the full article here:
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