The article focuses on Equity Residential's leadership development program 'LEAD-Self program.' Equity's management chose to model popular, mostly classroom based courses to develop its future leaders. The idea for LEAD came from the Center for Creative Leadership. The beauty of the initiative is that it had C-level approval from the beginning. The heart of the LEAD program is emotional intelligence and self-awareness. In addition to the assessments and evaluations, participants spend the first days of orientation working on selfawareness via coaching, role-playing, and teambuilding activities and videos. Besides an outstanding expense report, LEAD also has generated positive marks among employees.