Above the Line: Effective Thinking for Today's Workplace Challenges

Our thinking and our stories either spark empowered emotions, productive behaviors and desirable outcomes - or they keep us stuck. In today's uncertain, complex, and demanding workplace, mindset and skillful storytelling matter more than ever.

The audience will:
• Summarize two forms of thinking that lead to divergent sets of feelings, actions, stories and results
• Describe two simple but powerful concepts to generate effective thinking in any situation
• Assess a workplace challenge through the lens of mindset and apply effective thinking tools and the power of storytelling to create a more ideal outcome

Call to Connection: Cultivating Quality Relationships with Diverse Personalities

Our relationships with colleagues in the workplace offer some of life’s greatest opportunities – and challenges. Particularly when we are navigating a variety of personalities, it’s important to know how to work through differences and cultivate connection, which is the key to team success.

The audience will:
• Define the most significant roadblocks to cultivating productive, quality relationships
• Learn about a “cycle of collusion”, which is a common pattern of unresolved tension that often leads to unnecessary conflict and drama
• Develop inclusive leadership skills
• Identify at least three practical strategies for strengthening our professional relationships

Coaching for Leaders

Coaching is an essential tool in a leader’s toolbox and an important component of sustainable leadership. But the skillsets of coaching are not widely known or practiced. Further, many leaders have been taught to be the “expert”, a mindset which can often impede the learning and growth of their team members. To be most effective in leading people and teams, leaders must know when and how to act as coach rather than expert.

The audience will:
• Identify how the coaching mindset is different than the expert mindset
• Explore how to shift from the aim of “getting people to do things” to the aim of “creating the conditions” where growth, learning, and self-efficacy flourish
• Explore the basics of coaching as a leader: listening, asking powerful questions, eliciting best thinking and helping others reduce drama and ego
• Apply the basics of coaching for leaders to specific scenarios relevant to their workplace settings

Courageous Communication: Clear is Kind

When we are confronted with a difficult conversation, we often find ourselves avoiding, sugar-coating, clumsily landing the message, or reacting defensively. This session helps participants identify and overcome these challenges so they can become more confident and comfortable giving and receiving feedback with candor, kindness, and conviction. We'll use behavioral science to support communication tactics that increase engagement, motivation and learning.

The audience will:
• Define empathy and apply it to an actual workplace conversation
• Define radical candor and apply it to an actual conversation
• List at least three ways to reduce defensiveness during difficult conversations
• Describe what it means to listen with intention
• Practice asking powerful questions

Courageous Communication: The Inner Game

Traditional efforts to improve communication skills focus on models or strategies that, while valuable, overlook one key factor: the internal work that is often necessary to improve the way we communicate with others. Developing an impactful communication style requires that we attend to important elements of our “inner operating system” such as thoughts, feelings, values, and decision making models.

The audience will:
• Describe at least five communication traps they fall into that undermine communication
• Identify their most pressing personal challenge when it comes to communication
• Understand how their inner narrative and stories will influence communication style
• Apply two simple but powerful tools for generating the right mindset to support better communication and the power of storytelling

Creating a Culture of Accountability

Lack of accountability is one of the most frequent frustration triggers for employees and one of the biggest culprits of underperformance and friction on teams. While most people want to be a part of teams where accountability and teamwork is the norm, many oversimplify the idea or are unsure of how to enact it.

The audience will:
• Describe the accountability continuum
• Define the 4Cs of accountability
• Identify their strengths and gaps in each of the 4Cs
• Develop a plan of action

Positional and Personal Power in the Workplace

Studies have shown power can corrupt by making us more impulsive, less risk-aware, and less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view. Learn the different parameters of power and its side effects. How power can, if not managed well, create toxic cultures and corrupt. Know how to spot the warning signs of powers’ seduction and use it instead, for the greater good. In this session, you’ll learn the differences between positional power and personal power, as well as what creates bad power and how it doesn’t just affect bad people. We’ll also recognize the importance of feedback, its impact on power, and how it can greatly affect trust.

The audience will:
• Define the difference between positional power and personal power.
• Learn and list traits that add to the growth of personal power.
• Understand how power lends itself to context.
• Learn how providing feedback changes within the hierarchy.
• Learn how to balance both powers to create a more effective workplace.

Trust: The Secret Ingredient

As Steven Covey says, “Trust is the glue that holds all relationships.” Research supports the importance of trust in creating and maintaining connected, collaborative relationships and high performing teams.

The audience will:
• Learn a simple but powerful framework for understanding the elements of trust including: care, sincerity, reliability, and competence
• Identify specific examples in their own working experience of each of these elements of trust (and mistrust)
• Apply the trust framework to a working relationship to identify specific issues and develop the best approach for rebuilding trust with that person

This session is appropriate for individuals and teams who would like to build or repair trust with another person and/or with their team.

Your Emotional Impact

The importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace has become a significant topic for forward thinking organizations. If a person doesn’t have a high level of emotional intelligence, their IQ or work ethic will only take them so far.

The audience will:
• Define emotional intelligence
• Learn at least three new practices for managing their own emotional energy for the benefit of themselves and others around them
• Learn at least three new practices for better understanding the emotional states of other people
• Learn about the connection of emotional intelligence to mental health