Workshops & Facilitation

Designed for Performance Outcomes, Not Kumbayas

Maybe you've promoted many individual contributors into manager roles quickly, and they are struggling to produce results and retain their teams.
Maybe your technical team is so scientific that they struggle to communicate purposefully with other functions.
Maybe your leadership team is about to make monumental changes, and they are unprepared to prepare everyone else for what's about to turn everything upside down.

Before we agree on the need for training, I dig into the nuances of what's actually driving the gap. Those closest to a problem often have the hardest time seeing it clearly. My clients count on me to challenge their instincts about the prescription they're asking for, then (if there's really a need,) deliver highly interactive, experiential workshops that help learners discover their own need to change, learn specific skills, apply them in familiar situations, and plan to implement what they've learned.

Follow-up support for on-the-job application is essential, whether I provide it or you do. Otherwise, workshops' impact becomes, "That time we went to the Marriott, got away from email for the day, mediocre lunch, open bar..."

Workshops

Bespoke, Yet Fit for Purpose

Most of my career has been spent inside scrappy organizations that, by necessity, were resourceful about balancing the ideal solution with real constraints of its people, their time, the workload, and culture. Fit for purpose. Senior leaders building a mindset shift for a major digital transformation project in a large public company require a different development roadmap than new managers in a 125-person founder-led company learning the basics of delegation.

My workshops immediately immerse people in applying new skills to solve the specific challenges they experience on the job. In real time. No death-by-PowerPoint. No longwinded lectures. No complicated frameworks or nice-to-know theories. Just hands-on work, jumping the hurdles to delivering business results.

The following list shows a range of customizable workshops available. Customized and practical aren't a contradiction, they're a necessity for any organization without an astronomical talent development budget, and I don't bring boilerplate solutions with loose relevance to your team. Doing so wouldn't accomplish the goal that prompted our conversation in the first place.

Workshops are customized to fit the objectives and constraints of the engagement: a single session or a series, a half day or a full day, virtual or in-person. Multi-session programs can cover related skills. All should include follow-up check-ins or application sessions. What's not continually discussed and reinforced is quickly forgotten.

Knowing When to Involve HR: Employment Law Basics for Managers
Giving Feedback and Having Difficult Conversations
Influencing Without Authority
Delegating and Holding People Accountable
Coaching and Motivating for Performance
Leading Through Change
Conflict Resolution for Managers
Building Psychological Safety on Your Team
Running Effective 1:1s
Time and Priority Management
Interviewing and Selection Skills
Emotional Intelligence for Managers
Facilitating Productive Meetings
Managing Remote or Hybrid Teams
Succession Planning and Developing Talent
Leadership Basics for New Managers

Depending on the specific performance goals, some workshops are best paired with a psychometric assessment that raises individual and team awareness of opportunity areas for growth.

Facilitation

Herding Kittens Toward Consensus

Maybe you need an external party to help focus groups of employees safely explore unflattering feedback from an engagement survey.

Perhaps your leadership team needs to align on a direction, and everyone in the room has too much at stake to run that conversation themselves.

Or could you use help getting a cross-functional group to a real decision, instead of three more unproductive follow-up meetings?

Bias is inherent when someone internal drives a high-stakes conversation, whether that's a leadership team at a Fortune 500 company aligning on a five-year plan, or four co-founders arguing over the same whiteboard for the third meeting in a row. It takes real skill to resolve conflicting priorities, scope creep, louder voices, unspoken needs, passionate disagreements, and inertia, all in real time.

A facilitator's job is making sure all thinking in the room gets voiced, all voices in the room get considered, and decisions get...decided.

Stakeholder Input Sessions

A cross-functional group shaped functionality requirements for a new ERP-based applicant tracking system: HR, talent acquisition, operations, recent hires giving the applicant's perspective, the RPO vendor running the process day to day, and the consulting firm handling the system configuration. HR wanted governance. Talent acquisition wanted ease of use. Operations wanted speed. The vendors wanted what was most efficient, and likely profitable, for their own delivery. The consulting firm wanted whatever was easiest to configure and support.

The work was making every interest visible, including the vendor's and the consultant's, so the group could design a system that served the business, not just the most self-interested voice in it.

Focus Groups

A BPO client was losing new hires faster than it could replace them, and needed to know why. Multiple focus groups over a three-day period were built around two questions: what made people stay, and what made people leave. The client controlled the training curriculum, a long, laborious process that dragged on for weeks and lost people's attention well before it lost their attendance.

The insights gathered gave the BPO reliable data to bring back to that client: evidence, not opinion, for why the process itself needed to change.

A Mission & Vision Upgrade

An established non-profit with a staff of 70 had long outgrown the mission and vision crafted 15 years earlier for an organization quite different from its current structure and service offering. Leveraging the hopes and dreams of the board and reconciling those with the realities and constraints well known to the tenured, deeply vested Executive Director took patience, support, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge entrenched comfort and over-lofty ambition.

What resulted was a new identity for the organization, one that respected its history and offered a clear north star for its future.

WORKSHOPS & FACILITATION

Designed for Performance Outcomes, Not Kumbayas

Workshops

Bespoke, Yet Fit for Purpose

Facilitation

Herding Kittens Toward Consensus

CASE STUDIES

Facilitating All Voices in the Room Being Heard

Where Do We Begin?

WORKSHOPS & FACILITATION

Designed for Performance Outcomes, Not Kumbayas

Workshops

Bespoke, Yet Fit for Purpose

Facilitation

Herding Kittens Toward Consensus

CASE STUDIES

Facilitating All Voices in the Room Being Heard

Where Do We Begin?

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