The Leadership Trust® History

The Leadership Trust® was founded by the late Dr. Jim Farr and Dr. Holly Latty-Mann, both internationally recognized experts in leadership and self-awareness development and training. Although they had co-facilitated numerous Self-Awareness Workshops during and prior to 1999, Jim Farr co-facilitated their first five-day program in year 2000 through their partnership with the Wake Forest Babcock Graduate School of Management. The week before their second five-day workshop, Dr. Farr died suddenly but peacefully in his sleep (June 13, 2000). The Babcock administrators were encouraged by all of the participants to go ahead with the program, yet in the middle of this historical 5-day program, a limo was brought in to take Dr. Latty-Mann to Fellowship Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, NC to deliver her eulogy for her co-founder and friend. Upon completion of this program and many others thereafter, The Leadership Trust® maintained a 100% rate of all participants describing this workshop as the best workshop ever experienced in their career for both professional and personal improvement. Those rates remain between 98% and 99% to this day.

In 1998 The Leadership Trust® began operating as a nonprofit membership association established to build and organize leaders and promote leadership as a profession. Through the nonprofit Leadership Trust® , leadership as a profession was to receive attention, training, support, guidance and social oversight through a professional body of leaders dedicated to the quality and ethics of leadership and its practice. Remaining strong in its dedication to the quality and ethics of leadership and its practice, The Leadership Trust® changed its status to a for-profit (January, 2003) at the encouragement of its advisory board members. Within weeks of this historical move, The Leadership Trust® also moved its headquarters from Greensboro to the Research Triangle Park.

The Leadership Trust® continues to operate as a for-profit organization established to train leaders through a highly personalized, self-awareness focus. Because of the one-on-one engagement involved, the workshops are limited to approximately ten attendees, which helps explain the unusually high ratings workshop graduates consistently give toward their leadership training experience.

Most notably the personal gains are beyond the usual scope of leadership programs in general, with participants reporting life-altering experiences such as eliminating a lifelong history of stuttering, out-of-control anger , nail-biting,  chronic back pain,  headaches, asthma attacks,  psychotropic usage (e.g., anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, etc.), and writer’s block. This underscores the trend we are currently seeing across prestigious medical centers who are espousing holistic, integrative medicine. It also embraces the latest quantum physics findings reported by the Wall Street Journal since 2004.

Dr. James Farr

James Farr, a psychologist who pioneered the thriving leadership consulting and training industry, died peacefully in his sleep at home in Greensboro, NC on June 13, 2000. In the late 1960s, Jim Farr signed on as the initial founding director of the Center for Creative Leadership. Dr. Farr left the Center in 1972 to devote himself full-time to his company, but not before helping lay the groundwork for the Center's rise in national prominence in leadership studies and training. The founder of Farr Associates, a management consulting firm, Jim Farr spent his career studying what it takes to be an effective leader and sharing his findings through books and workshops. Dr. Farr more recently was the co-founding president of The Leadership Trust® with his appointed co-founding vice-president, Dr. Holly Latty-Mann. He also served as Executive Professor of Leadership at the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University. Upon the death of Jim Farr, this title was bestowed upon his business partner, Holly Latty-Mann, in view of the quality she brought to their leadership training offered through their Institute of Executive Excellence.