Customizable Private Classes
Tailor-made curriculums for your unique needs.
Give your team the tools they need to motivate each other, build consensus, collaborate effectively, and get results. These private classes are fully customizable to meet your team or organization’s needs and can be presented onsite or virtually. We work with you from concept to conclusion to ensure you meet your goals and get the training you want.
Leading Meetings and Groups
Story Creating
Stories work, and are one of only three secrets that work in every group, every culture, every time. Instead of only telling stories, get your participants to create them. Learn, practice and laugh at fun, fast techniques that launch attention in any setting, enhance learning in training, and accelerate performance and consensus-building in facilitation. Participants create their story and accelerate outcomes.
The Creative Facilitator
You have solid skills as an effective facilitator or trainer, and sometimes it’s not enough. You seek a broader and more creative array of tools, techniques, along with more energy for you AND your participants’ benefit that are easy to learn, and easy to facilitate. Learn and practice secrets of renowned creativity consultants that will accelerate you, your sessions and your outcomes.
Making Sessions More Than Fun
A common request in any training, meeting, or session is to “have fun.” Why? Because fun matters! But what does integrating fun look like, and how can one do so effectively? This practical workshop will address both, in addition to covering 50+ hands-on suggestions that can be easily implemented to boost energy and fun, ultimately leading to better engagement from participants.
Masterful Presentations
This workshop examines the critical components of a presentation (design, content and delivery) to ensure all areas for potential improvement are addressed. We provide a comparative demonstration of the elements of both poorly and professionally delivered presentations, identify essential presentation skills for visual-based presentations, and assess the common pitfalls in presentations and strategies to avoid them. Participants are provided with application opportunities that include instructor and group feedback before creating action plans to advance attendees to the next level of their presentation skills.
From Conflict to Resolution
Conflict is a natural state within any team. The way in which the team views the conflict and responds to it determines whether conflict increases the team’s success or destroys the team morale. Increased personal and team awareness combined with learned strategies for managing conflict greatly improve the team’s performance and satisfaction.
Dealing with Change
This course provides employees with an understanding of the phases of change as well as strategies to work through the change process in a healthy and productive manner.
Managing Conflict Effectively
Review of the five Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes (including taking the Thomas-Kilmann Assessment) and how to effectively manage conflict on your team using the Cycles of Conflict Management.
Influential and Inspirational Communication
This course is designed for leaders to strengthen their ability to communicate effectively with a wide variety of stakeholders. Whether the leader has positional authority or must influence without authority, the skills in this course will enable them to better develop verbal and non-verbal messages that influence and inspire others. The one-day workshop uses proven frameworks and practice sessions to help leaders strengthen both the message and the delivery.
Organizational Resilience
Resilient organizations have automatic and built-in characteristics so that when life shows up, they are ready for whatever the moment brings. This brief session both introduces you to what makes an organization resilient and provides a short assessment to benchmark your current state. With this guidance, an organization or the teams within it have a clear direction for building key strengths.
7 Levels of Change Management
You want different results and realize it requires different thinking. You know change is important, daunting, inefficient, and… risky. Breaking it into 7 Levels makes it manageable. Organizational climate, group dynamics, plus the 7 Levels of Fear slows it down… whereas the 7 Levels of Thinking accelerate it. Learn the right tools for leading, managing & achieving all 7 Levels. Ideal for leaders, confident facilitators, project/team leads and executives. Done in 3 days or as a keynote or executive briefing.
Effective Change Management
In order for things to get better, they must change. In order to have change, you need to deal with human nature. There is a vast spectrum of preferences around change and how we deal with it. Learn how to successfully implement any change in your organization.
Stress Management
This workshop is designed to help participants recognize the circumstances or events that are likely to trigger stress reactions and how to deal most effectively with the challenges they present. *Requires completion of MBTI workshop.
Leadership Development
Success Matrix to Drive Results
This class teaches how to develop the right measures for your organization. Research consistently shows that by developing a balance of measures (financial, customer, operational and people) you will achieve much greater results. The right measures will drive the right behavior, leading to accountability and success.
Improving Decision Making
This workshop helps individuals explore their decision-making style and develop more effective decision-making skills through a better understanding of their Myers-Briggs preferences.
Interviewing: Hire Right the First Time
Learning interviewing techniques and best practices will greatly increase the likelihood of making a successful hire. Interviewing is a skill, and managers who develop this skill find they make better hiring decisions, ultimately saving them time, money, and stress.
Networking Your Way to Success
Participants will learn effective ways to facilitate on-line and in person with other professionals. Best practices as well as behaviors to avoid will be shared to bolster the success of the networking efforts employed. Additionally, there will be an opportunity to practice initiating conversations and begin making connections with the other participants.
Selecting a Winning Team
Adding members to a team can be a catalyst for greatness or the cause of its undoing. Where most organizations provide rich resources for teambuilding within an intact team, there is often little attention given to arming leaders with the critical skills of attracting and selecting the right additions as a team grows. In this session, we focus on recruiting, interviewing and hiring; the three main components of any solid and successful selection approach.
Is Management for Me?
Participants will go through a process of self-discovery, exploring the day-to-day life as a manager, and the skills needed to effectively manage a team. As a result, participants leave the course with a clearer understanding as to whether they want to be a manager or a “leader in place” with clearly defined, individualized next steps for their own career development path.
Distinctive Leadership: Inspiring Others to Exceptional Performance
This workshop is the next step on your leadership journey. You will learn proven techniques to guide your team through exceptional performance using Powerful communication that inspires others, a Leadership Brand that stimulates trust and executive presence that drives engagement and influence.
Executive Presentations
What separates those who drive results from those who simply present? Why do some influence and others just inform? How can you take your performance in this core competency for all leaders from good to great? Master the essentials of Executive Presentations through high-octane engagement, practical strategies and relevant application with real-world implementation.
Strategic Thinking
This course helps anyone responsible for making short-term or long-term decisions. The course is designed to:
- Offer a meaningful definition of “Strategic Thinking” that gets beyond the nebulous business speak
- Provide a “Strategic Roadmap” for guiding “Strategic Thinking”
- Introduce the core competencies and tools for leveraging the power of “Strategic Thinking” and alignment
Coaching for Performance
Leaders know their people are capable of more and want to harness that capacity for higher performance. Coaching for Performance is the solution. The coaching interaction in this workshop will help leaders bring out the best in their direct reports as they learn to think and see things in new ways, take better actions, access available resources and reach for greater challenges. Aligning the power of people with a leader’s business strategy enables them to deliver the results necessary to achieve their objectives. Assessment based. Workshop can be adjusted based on the needs of the team. It starts with a team diagnostic to know the best approach.
Focused Leadership
As businesses accelerate through advances in communication and connecting, many leaders, teams and organizations become overwhelmed by the amount of information and tasks that have to be accomplished. This course teaches leaders to distinguish between the “urgent” tasks that create short-term focus and anxiety and the “important” tasks that move the organization forward and create focus. By deploying these methods, the leader can create the balance of near-term and long-term focus to reduce anxiety while increasing results.
Managing People Through Change
To provide Management with information and strategies to effectively lead employees through changes within the organization/department, and to minimize the impact of change on production and morale.
Enhancing Emotional Intelligence
This workshop is an introduction to emotional intelligent. Participants will learn how to perceive and respond to emotions more effectively as well as understand the importance of emotional intelligence, identify its intra- and interpersonal elements, and develop strategies for enhancing their own. *Requires completion of MBTI workshop.
Training Delivery & Design
From Classroom to Virtual
The world of training is shifting. Where people gather to learn will be different but HOW humans learn is still the same. The brain still needs accessible content delivered in a safe engaging environment. This webinar highlights proven strategies for bringing the BEST of the classroom experience to the virtual environment and how to leverage the unique advantages for learners and trainers available in this advancing space.
This is not a new idea for us.
The world has been “dabbling” in the virtual space for a decade. Early attempts produced some great experiences and many more “not-so-great” ones that have given “virtual” a bad name. Now it is time to get serious, stop dabbling, and commit to mastering the tools, techniques and strategies that facilitate meaningful development and performance improvement in our modern training landscape. We can get you there.
Questions we can answer:
- How do you keep people from doing email and “stuff”?
- What if the participants need to ask questions?
- How will I know they are getting it?
- What should I look for when choosing a virtual training platform?
- Do you have to be a tech genius to “drive that thing”?
Story Creating
Stories work, and are one of only three secrets that work in every group, every culture, every time. Instead of only telling stories, get your participants to create them. Learn, practice and laugh at fun, fast techniques that launch attention in any setting, enhance learning in training, and accelerate performance and consensus-building in facilitation. Participants create their story and accelerate outcomes.
The Creative Facilitator
You have solid skills as an effective facilitator or trainer, and sometimes it’s not enough. You seek a broader and more creative array of tools, techniques, along with more energy for you AND your participants’ benefit that are easy to learn, and easy to facilitate. Learn and practice secrets of renowned creativity consultants that will accelerate you, your sessions and your outcomes.
Dynamize your Workshop
Trainers need training too. Let’s face it; we get bored doing the “same old thing” all the time, and our learners can get bored too. Cutting edge trainers thrive on fresh ideas because energized and excited learners retain more and rate our courses higher! You’ll experience 20+ adaptable techniques that drive home learning for the participant. Then, discover how each one can be adapted to your courses, cultural climate and even your own personal training style.
Consulting & Client Relationship Mgmt
Effective Listening Skills
This course provides managers and supervisors techniques to improve their ability to listen, understand and communicate with their staff, peers and leaders. Upon completing this training, participants will be able to:
- Define and demonstrate active listening
- Identify obstacles to active listening
- Develop strategies to reduce obstacles and improve communication
- Interpret body language of the sender and self to further clarify the message
- Paraphrase, reflect, probe and summarize the speaker’s message as appropriate
- Assess current listening skills and recognize areas for improvement
Project Management & Execution
Executing your strategy, or any project, takes effective planning skills. Fortunately, there are great tools out there to help you to forge ideas into realities. Project management skills will enable you to plan, track, and implement your plans.
Executive Presentations
What separates those who drive results from those who simply present? Why do some influence and others just inform? How can you take your performance in this core competency for all leaders from good to great? Master the essentials of Executive Presentations through high-octane engagement, practical strategies and relevant application with real-world implementation.
Grow Your Sales and Your Business
The #1 business challenge today is growth. The real question is, “Are you ready for growth?” Companies that want to grow should be able answer the following questions:
- Why do I want to grow?
- How much do I want to grow?
- How do I want to grow?
- When do I want to grow?
This course will help you address these questions, and ensure your company is ready to grow the right way. A growth assessment is completed as pre-work.
Managing Successful Projects
Creative Problem Solving
Creativity is the #1 leadership skill of next-generation leaders. Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This fun, high energy class is designed to help you see and believe in new possibilities. Puzzles, games and magic will be used to stretch your thinking and explore new ideas.
Project Management & Execution
Executing your strategy, or any project, takes effective planning skills. Fortunately, there are great tools out there to help you to forge ideas into realities. Project management skills will enable you to plan, track, and implement your plans.
Process Improvement for Results
This class will focus on developing effective business processes, focusing on shortening cycle time, eliminating waste, and improving quality and reducing costs, which will drive bottom line results. This class will also help companies identify and prioritize improvement opportunities. This is a team-centric, hands-on, interactive experience designed to promote creativity and collaboration. A pre-class survey is used to identify the key training needs in process improvement.
Communication & Presentation Skills
Improving Your Listening Skills: Can You Hear Me Now?
Knowing what to say or how to say it can only take you half way down the path of effective communication. If sustainable success is reserved for those who go the distance, can you afford to settle for underdeveloped listening skills? In this DiSC-based course, Improving your Listening Skills is a personalized learning experience for each participant, adapted by the facilitator to your industry and organization and supports the discovery of five different approaches to listening and their most natural listening approaches.
From Conflict to Resolution
Conflict is a natural state within any team. The way in which the team views the conflict and responds to it determines whether conflict increases the team’s success or destroys the team morale. Increased personal and team awareness combined with learned strategies for managing conflict greatly improve the team’s performance and satisfaction.
Leverage (Strength Finders)
Leverage your strengths and gain practical strategies for maximizing performance, organizational impact and individual satisfaction.
Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
This first part of this workshop will help you put words to what you need to function optimally at work and in your personal life. The more you understand yourself, by default, you increase your understanding of others. The second part will specifically target teams, identifying natural points of tension and commonality, why these extremes occur, how to avoid these struggles, and how to adjust so that teams can work efficiently, effectively, and happily. Participants will take the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) prior to the workshop.
Courageous Conversations
You know you should say something, but… you don’t. You are not suffering in silence or from a lack of conviction or even a lack of understanding of the consequences of leaving things unspoken. You are just painfully aware of the more compelling consequences of trying and failing. You simply don’t have any confidence in your ability to engage in difficult conversations and reach a positive outcome. Fear, frustration, resentment; they won’t be silenced forever. They always find ways to be heard through other forms of expression: error, apathy, division, cynicism. Consider your growing discontent and multiply that by all the people in your organization. You immediately comprehend the danger of leaving the truth unspoken.
In this dynamic module, we tackle the hard truths about speaking the truth and equip participants with the insight, tools and skills that will allow them to master Courageous Conversations.
Dealing with Change
This course provides employees with an understanding of the phases of change as well as strategies to work through the change process in a healthy and productive manner.
Managing Conflict Effectively
Review of the five Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes (including taking the Thomas-Kilmann Assessment) and how to effectively manage conflict on your team using the Cycles of Conflict Management.
Executive Presentations
What separates those who drive results from those who simply present? Why do some influence and others just inform? How can you take your performance in this core competency for all leaders from good to great? Master the essentials of Executive Presentations through high-octane engagement, practical strategies and relevant application with real-world implementation.
Story Creating
Stories work, and are one of only three secrets that work in every group, every culture, every time. Instead of only telling stories, get your participants to create them. Learn, practice and laugh at fun, fast techniques that launch attention in any setting, enhance learning in training, and accelerate performance and consensus-building in facilitation. Participants create their story and accelerate outcomes.
Compelling Conversations
Communication is essential in building and maintaining relationships. This workshop helps participants identify and understand both their own and others’ communication style based on MBTI type and practice their skills to communicate more effectively. *Requires completion of MBTI workshop.
Enhancing Emotional Intelligence
This workshop is an introduction to emotional intelligent. Participants will learn how to perceive and respond to emotions more effectively as well as understand the importance of emotional intelligence, identify its intra- and interpersonal elements, and develop strategies for enhancing their own. *Requires completion of MBTI workshop.
Stress Management
This workshop is designed to help participants recognize the circumstances or events that are likely to trigger stress reactions and how to deal most effectively with the challenges they present. *Requires completion of MBTI workshop.
Building Teams
Improving Your Listening Skills: Can You Hear Me Now?
Knowing what to say or how to say it can only take you half way down the path of effective communication. If sustainable success is reserved for those who go the distance, can you afford to settle for underdeveloped listening skills? In this DiSC-based course, Improving your Listening Skills is a personalized learning experience for each participant, adapted by the facilitator to your industry and organization and supports the discovery of five different approaches to listening and their most natural listening approaches.
From Conflict to Resolution
Conflict is a natural state within any team. The way in which the team views the conflict and responds to it determines whether conflict increases the team’s success or destroys the team morale. Increased personal and team awareness combined with learned strategies for managing conflict greatly improve the team’s performance and satisfaction.
Overcoming the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team
A high performing team is an amazing force for good, but a dysfunctional team can be an equally destructive force. Patrick Lencioni brought to light how difficult it is to get teams working well in his book, The Five Dysfunction of a Team: A Leadership Fable. From that work, this course has developed engagements and interventions to address the dysfunctions that commonly impact the performance of a team and cause ripples that impact those beyond it.
Courageous Conversations
You know you should say something, but… you don’t. You are not suffering in silence or from a lack of conviction or even a lack of understanding of the consequences of leaving things unspoken. You are just painfully aware of the more compelling consequences of trying and failing. You simply don’t have any confidence in your ability to engage in difficult conversations and reach a positive outcome. Fear, frustration, resentment; they won’t be silenced forever. They always find ways to be heard through other forms of expression: error, apathy, division, cynicism. Consider your growing discontent and multiply that by all the people in your organization. You immediately comprehend the danger of leaving the truth unspoken.
In this dynamic module, we tackle the hard truths about speaking the truth and equip participants with the insight, tools and skills that will allow them to master Courageous Conversations.
Dealing with Change
This course provides employees with an understanding of the phases of change as well as strategies to work through the change process in a healthy and productive manner.
Managing Conflict Effectively
Review of the five Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes (including taking the Thomas-Kilmann Assessment) and how to effectively manage conflict on your team using the Cycles of Conflict Management.
360 Team Assessments
This program will provide your team with anonymous information about how the team members view the team as a whole. Using information in the report, the team can begin to strategize about how to work together to create a better team. The focus areas for the team fall into 5 interdependent buckets: Leadership, Alignment, Readiness, Happiness and Trust. Understanding where the gaps are for the team and how to close the gaps help move the team forward in a positive way.
Building Better Teams
This course provides both the why and the how for Leaders to create powerful teams that make significant impact. Leaders learn how to build teams that are aligned, ready and happy.
Compelling Conversations
Communication is essential in building and maintaining relationships. This workshop helps participants identify and understand both their own and others’ communication style based on MBTI type and practice their skills to communicate more effectively. *Requires completion of MBTI workshop.
“The training was a huge success, surpassing the high expectations I already had. The topics covered laid a foundation that I can now build from.”
Jonathan C. – CEO, Adjacent Solutions
Also available for customization:
The Effective Facilitator
Our flagship course, The Effective Facilitator covers the 10 principles of facilitation, more than 100 techniques, and includes 6 exercises culminating a video-taped practice session.
Topics include how to:
- Motivate a group
- Build consensus
- Manage dysfunction
- Maintain group focus
- Generate ownership
- Inspire people to action
Following the 4-day course, select from one of our quarterly offerings of The Effective Facilitator: Virtual Link. This online, instructor-led course takes participants through each of the 10 principles covered in The Effective Facilitator with instruction on how to apply the skills virtually.
*PMI Registered Education Provider (R.E.P.) Activity: Up to 24 PDUs
The Facilitative Leader
The Facilitative Leader is for individuals who want to improve their leadership skills and move to the next level in their organization. Create an action plan that uses facilitation principles to engage and inspire others to drive results. The course can be done consecutively in 3-4 days, in ½ day modules listed below, and can even be delivered virtually in 2-hour segments over time. You can select all or just a few, depending on your needs:
- The 3 Levels of Leadership
- Facilitating Communication
- Facilitating and Coaching others
- Facilitation Success in Your Team
- Facilitating Consensus
- Strategic planning and thinking
- Leading Masterful Meetings 1
- Leading Masterful Meetings 2
The Facilitative Consultant
Are you an internal or external consultant, or do you use a consultative style in your work? The Facilitative Consultant is a dynamic, interactive course that builds critical skills by using a highly-interactive case study approach. This course outlines a comprehensive framework for all stages of the consulting process from defining client needs to running a project to reviewing results. The Facilitative Consultant focuses on relationship management, allowing you to increase your credibility and trust with clients, enhance your communication effectiveness and better manage expectations. This team-based course offers you the opportunity to solve a real-life client problem by applying your new skills.
Secrets to Facilitating Strategy
This course provides a detailed understanding of the building blocks that make up a strategic plan and framework for facilitating teams through the planning process. Begin by building a plan at your own pace through our online course, Springboard Online, designed to teach you our Drivers Model within just a few hours. Then, join the other participants for a three-day session focused on facilitation best practices and key techniques for strategic planning. Our approach provides practical step-by-step direction, including a road map for constructing a strategic plan for your organization and tips for judging the quality of each component of your plan.
The Engaging Trainer
Facilitating Impactful Learning (formerly Facilitation Skills for Trainers) is designed for trainers and instructors alike. This three-day course equips you with a full toolbox of strategies for engaging participants in dynamic and interactive training segments. Trainers and instructors will be able to design and employ an approach that engages ANY audience and makes training really stick.
Special Feature: Bring a module from your own class to get feedback and recommendations for transforming it using the techniques from The Engaging Trainer! (can be done in shorter customized versions)
Advanced Facilitation Skills*
Already taken The Effective Facilitator? Ready to move to the next level? In the Advanced Facilitation Skills course, you’ll learn new facilitation techniques, receive expert feedback, and get more practice, practice, practice! Learn the DISC model, which will show you how to read and adapt to your participants’ communication styles. Other strategies taught include advanced questioning techniques, “facilitating on the fly,” and selling facilitation services. Learn best practices from top professionals in the field.
*Prerequisite: Completion of The Effective Facilitator
Strategies for Managing Business Relationships
The skill that often separates top professionals from average ones is their ability to effectively manage client relationships. In a client-focused organization, you must be adept at probing to identify the client’s real need, setting and managing expectations, adapting to communication styles, and gaining buy-in for solutions.
Learn How to:
- Probe and ask key questions to help clients discover their real needs
- Gain your client’s confidence and develop a trusted advisor relationship
- Read you client’s communication style
- Communicate effectively with clients about status, issues, and challenges
- Set and manage expectations
- Recover effectively from errors and mistakes
Seven Separators of Facilitation Excellence
What is it that separates great facilitators from good ones? This workshop covers more than a dozen techniques that you can begin using immediately to improve your facilitation.
Topics include how to:
- Establish and maintain a high energy level
- Ask starting questions that draw a vivid image
- Have a full toolkit of follow-up question types
- Respect the “power of the pen”
- Carry the group through the process
- Prevent, detect and resolve dysfunction
- Isolate and address sponsor’s key needs
DISCourse
DISCover your one-on-one communication effectiveness with peers, subordinates, clients, and even friends and family members. Use a simple approach to define and identify the four different communication styles: Drive, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance. Determine your natural style, learn clues for reading other people’s styles, and apply methods for interacting more effectively with communication styles that aren’t the same as yours.
Virtual Meetings Series: The Basics, Group Dynamics and Advanced Skills
Virtual collaboration and meetings have taken center stage. Many organizations are operating fully remotely for the first time in history, making virtual meeting skills a critical need. In order to help as many organizations adapt as quickly as possible, we have created a new 3 course series.
Whether you take just the basics (Virtual Meetings 101), or need the full program, these three half-day modules provide you tools you can use right away for running highly effective virtual meetings.
Advanced Strategies for Virtual Engagement
While online meeting platforms include several features for engagement, such a polls, chats, whiteboards and breakout groups, few people actually use them, and even fewer know how to couple them with advanced-level engagement strategies. You’ll learn to maximize the use of these features plus you will walk away with over a dozen other techniques used by the engagement experts at Leadership Strategies.
In this course, you won’t just learn what to do, or just see how to do it, you will actually do it. You will walk out of this class confident that you can make your next virtual meeting buzz with engagement and excitement. Why? Because you will have done it in the class and experience it yourself. Our interactive approach provides participants with opportunities to experience the power of engaging sessions and to replicate it themselves.
Note: This course is taught using the Zoom platform, however we will show you how to incorporate engagement techniques using other platforms such as Microsoft Teams and WebEx.
Ready to get started?
We’ll work with you from concept to conclusion to ensure you meet your goals and get the training you want.
Become licensed & certified to teach our materials to your team.
If your organization consistently trains new professionals or has a very large team, licensing our materials is the way to go. We’ll train you how to teach your team the techniques and strategies that make up our approach. Contact us to get started!