Leadership Workshops
Workshops are engaging, interactive, targeted short courses in which participants immediately apply what they learn, and they leave with tools and techniques they can immediately use at work.
Workshops can be offered in person as half-day or full-day
classes or online in 90-minute or 2-hour segments. Workshop curricula may be designed to include multiple workshops offered consecutively for an intensive training experience or spread out periodically over weeks or months for ongoing development. We work with you to design the optimal experience for participants to learn, build a support network of peers, and enjoy the process.
Workshops
Our workshops can be divided into the following focus areas:
- Self-Development
- Leading Others
- Getting Things Done
- Targeted Training for
– Remote and Hybrid Team
– Technical Teams
– Women Leaders
– Multi-Generational Teams - Additional Training Programs
Workshops Focusing On Self
Discovering and Developing Your Leadership Strengths
Using the Gallup CliftonStrengths (a.k.a., StrengthsFinder) online assessment, this class helps participants identify their unique talents and learn how to build them into strengths to improve their leadership performance.
Participants apply their unique strengths to form their personal brand and solve workplace and leadership challenges. Over 20 million people have taken the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment and Gallup has the numbers to back up its claims that it improves workplace performance.
Building Mental Fitness to Overcome Leadership Challenges
We all have bad habits and negative voices (saboteurs) in our heads that sometimes keep us from performing at our best. Just as we can change our habits to improve our physical fitness, we can develop better habits to improve our mental fitness. Mental fitness is the best predictor of how happy we are and how well we perform relative to our potential at work, at home, and in life. It is a synthesis of recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, cognitive and positive psychology, and performance science.
In this highly interactive workshop, participants take the Positive Intelligence assessment to identify their top saboteurs and learn techniques to increase their mental fitness to weaken the internal saboteurs who generate all their “negativity” in the way they respond to challenges.
Developing Your Leadership Effectiveness from 360-Degree Feedback
It is sometimes difficult to see ourselves accurately in the mirror. By asking others to
provide feedback confidentially, leaders have an opportunity to explore how others
perceive their performance. This class guides participants through a 360-degree process in which they ask peers, supervisors, subordinates, and others for feedback on their leadership performance using an online 360-degree feedback tool.
Participants bring their 360 results to class and learn how to interpret the report to understand how others in different roles perceive them differently and have different expectations of them. They identify their strengths and development opportunities and create a development plan with specific plans to increase their skills or abilities in targeted areas.
Workshops Focusing On Others
Leading Strengths-Based Teams
Imagine your team with higher levels of energy, where people are more likely to achieve their goals, are more confident and engaged, perform better, experience less stress, and are more effective at developing themselves and growing as individuals. In this course, participants leverage their unique talents to acquire the techniques of Strengths-based leadership to bring their teams to higher levels of performance. Participants practice incorporating Strengths into development planning, managing employees, and interconnecting team member strengths to increase engagement and productivity on the team.
Managing Different Personalities Using DISC, Myers Briggs, Big Five, or Hogan
Not everybody is in it for the same reasons. Some people, for example, are motivated by rewards, others by teamwork, some have an internal drive for self-development, and so on. Learning what drives oneself and others, what makes people comfortable, and how people like to get things done can make working in a team a lot more enjoyable and efficient. Using the DISC, Meyers Briggs Type Indicator, Big Five, or Hogan Personality assessment tool (you choose!), participants in this class develop self-awareness and a method to bring back to their work teams to better understand how to engage with each
other to maximize performance. This workshop is particularly good for intact teams.
Coaching and Mentoring
To attract, retain, and develop excellent employees in today’s unpredictable workforce, managers must be good coaches and mentors. This means being able to deliver feedback and lead difficult conversations with employees, peers, and sometimes bosses, being able to identify strengths and development opportunities for team members, motivating and
empowering people to grow, and connecting people with the resources they need to move forward in their careers. In this class, participants learn how to hold reflective conversations that move people to insight and change. Participants learn specific coaching and mentoring skills, such as creating a safe space for vulnerability, crafting questions that elicit an individual’s internal resources, reducing defensiveness in conversations, and increasing accountability.
Polishing Communication and Interpersonal Skills
As a leader’s responsibilities grow, it becomes increasingly important to know how to navigate organizational politics, influence across functions, collaborate with people who have competing priorities, and motivate teams to do things they may not want to do. Using feedback from an Emotional Intelligence online assessment, participants learn nuanced communication skills to help them motivate and influence people, especially people who are different from them. They learn active listening techniques and how to recognize nonverbal cues that indicate when someone doesn’t understand or is not in agreement. They learn methods of self-management as well as how to interact with others in a respectful way in tricky situations, such as delivering uncomfortable feedback to a co-worker or bad news to a client.
Optimizing Conflict
In this experiential, interactive workshop participants explore what is possible when conflict is viewed as a potential hotbed of opportunity rather than as a zero-sum game. Productive conflict and the ability to invite and listen to the disconfirming voice is an essential component of healthy teamwork and is at the heart of effective decision making.
Participants learn to let go of assumptions, apply the art of powerful questions, and advocate constructively in order to uncover shared interests and identify creative solutions.
Leading Your Team Through Change
It is a commonly held notion that “the only constant is change.” At the same time, change is almost universally resisted by employees. In this class participants learn common causes of resistance, how to identify it, and techniques to prevent it by leading employees to embrace change and maintain a positive outlook. Participants identify their own sources of resistance and work through situations of managing organizational dynamics and growing their teams using techniques learned in this class.
Teaming for Success and a Positive Work Environment
In this hands-on, working session, team members explore the number one variable present across high performing teams—psychological safety. All teams are different yet understanding psychological safety and how to create it will generate positive energy and optimize team performance. Engaging in a bit of play and a bit of work, team members identify the shared purpose that aligns them, draft operating guidelines that will support them, and name the culture that will sustain them.
Building and Maintaining Trust in Your Organization
Trust is the basis for all business activity. Without trust, getting results and collaboration with others is nearly impossible. In today’s climate of rapid change, high employee turnover, remote and global work, trust is especially critical. This interactive and highly engaging workshop provides practical and actionable steps for the participants to readily implement when they return to work. Participants gain an understanding of what trust is and how it is broken and communication techniques to (re)build trusting relationships, and a framework for making agreements and increasing clarity around expectations.
Regardless of role, each person contributes to trust in the organization and can learn how to foster greater trust.
Workshops Focusing on Getting Things Done
Strategies for Effective Time Management
There is no “one size fits all” solution to time management; a person has to use the tools that best fit with their personality and the context in which they are working. The course focuses on the philosophy of time management more than a particular tool set.
Participants learn the PAD Time model of Priorities-Accuracy-Discipline. Using the model, they apply techniques to prioritize what is important to them and what is important to their organization, accurately assess how long tasks and projects take, account for what gets in the way, and be responsible when they fall behind, stay focused, accountable, and to say “no” to avoid taking on too much.
Performance Management and Accountability
Keeping team members accountable is partly about systems, but it is also about communication and trust. In this class, participants learn techniques to develop and measure trust to improve delegation, communication practices to set shared expectations and goals, and tools, such as S.M.A.R.T. Goals, to define and measure progress.
Participants role play delegating to each other and not following through on their
responsibilities to get feedback on where they can improve their messaging and tracking. They leave with tools and refined communication techniques to keep their teams accountable.
Facilitating Productive Meetings
Productive meetings are energizing. They increase teamwork and empower people to get things done. They leave people feeling like it was a valuable use of their time. In this highly engaging workshop, participants learn how to prepare for, facilitate, and follow-up
from productive meetings.
Participants gain tools and techniques to define the purpose and desired outcome of a meeting, anticipate barriers, inform others, and get advanced buy-in, create an effective agenda with realistic timeframes and goals, keep the meeting focused
and on time, handle derailers yet flex in the moment if new agenda items emerge, and
wrap up the meeting with trackable actions and delegated accountability. They practice the new techniques while running meetings with each other during the workshop.
Targeted Training for Specific Populations and Leadership Challenges
Managing Remote and Hybrid Teams
Leading a team that has limited face-to-face contact presents certain challenges. Trust and communication are at the core of successful teamwork, and they are harder to establish and maintain remotely. Conflict is also harder to detect and manage in dispersed teams. This class provides solutions to the unique challenges of managing remote and hybrid teams. Participants engage in highly interactive activities to learn how to establish communication and trust in virtual environments, manage conflict and deliver performance feedback in an appropriate manner, measure performance of “invisible” employees, create fair systems for hybrid teams, reduce social isolation, and build team culture.
People Strategies for Technical People
Technical leaders are increasingly being asked to have it all—technical expertise and people skills—especially if they want to lead teams. But many technical people hesitate to embrace soft skills because they feel disingenuous. This class is for scientists, engineers, and other technical leaders who want to acquire tools to develop authentic people skills that feel natural, not phony. Using feedback from an Emotional Intelligence online assessment, participants learn communication strategies to help them build trust and rapport with others, motivate and influence people, manage themselves and others during conflict, and deliver performance feedback. The concept of Emotional Intelligence is approached from a scientific and logical perspective, in a way that technical leaders can approach and appreciate.
Uniting Your Multi-Generational Teams
How much are generational conflicts costing your organization? Maybe it’s a troubled relationship between an employee and a manager, a business relationship with a client, or someone on a team that’s impeding the entire team’s success. This class is about bridging generational differences to leverage generational diversity in work teams.
Participants learn a quick way to increase understanding and empathy to connect with people from different generations in a non-judgmental, productive way. In this highly interactive class, participants practice using this method to increase the cohesiveness of teams and increase collaboration and performance.
Success Strategies for Women Leaders
Women leaders often express that it is hard to be authentic. There are contradictory expectations of women leaders, creating what is called a “double bind.” On the one hand, women leaders are expected to be strong and decisive. But when they are, people criticize them for not being feminine enough. When they act in a more feminine way, people criticize them for being too friendly and nice. In this course, women leaders learn how to transcend the double bind. It’s an interactive workshop where women share challenges, learn from others, and build a network of women leaders to call on back at work. Specific topics include how to demonstrate an exceptional level of competence without appearing arrogant, how to combine assertiveness with warmth, and how to expect and shake off criticism.
MORE WORKSHOPS
Additional Training Programs
We also offer programs on diversity and inclusion, hiring and interviewing, reinventing
yourself after 50, career management, life skills for work, and many more. Please contact us for
additional offerings that our diverse team can provide to you.
