This course is for facilitators pursuing the Certified Master Facilitator (CMF) certification through the International Institute for Facilitation. The class includes an overview of the CMF process, a review of the competencies, additional training on specific sub-competencies, and a recorded session that meets the CMF requirements for certification.

*Prerequisite: Completion of The Effective Facilitator

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Facilitated by Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator, Leah Brown

Daring leadership requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. It requires that we stay curious, lean into difficult conversations, and be vulnerable instead of armoring up. The Dare to Lead™ program dives into the future of leadership, ethical decision making and organizational success through the lens of bravery and courage by tackling the four skill sets of brave leadership. • Rumbling with Vulnerability • Living Into Our Values • BRAVING Trust • Learning to Rise

Based on the research of Dr. Brené Brown, Dare to Lead™ is an empirically based courage-building program designed to be facilitated by organizational development professionals. Brené is a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington Foundation – Brené Brown Endowed Chair at The Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, and most recently completed a seven-year study on courageous leadership. She is the author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, and Dare to Lead, which also debuted at #1 on The Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly lists.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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In today’s global workplace, it’s unlikely that we will go back to 100% in-person meetings. But how do you make sure that all participants, both in-person and remote, stay engaged and feel like they’re all in the same meeting? This course examines the typical pitfalls that occur in hybrid meetings and explores four variations on the hybrid meeting. Participants will discover practical and imaginative tools including specific ground rules, engagement strategies, and participation tracking that will keep everyone actively involved.

This convenient, two-day course is designed to help you improve your daily meetings with smart (and practical) meeting facilitation skills and techniques. This course also expands on how to create a meeting “revolution” inside your organization to help others stop the common problems perpetuated in most meetings: late starts, misuse of time, discussions without purpose, and group dysfunction – all culprits of wasted resources and money. You will walk away with a transformed vision of effective meetings plus the necessary tools to equip you in your everyday meetings.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

This convenient, two-day course is designed to help you improve your daily meetings with smart (and practical) meeting facilitation skills and techniques. This course also expands on how to create a meeting “revolution” inside your organization to help others stop the common problems perpetuated in most meetings: late starts, misuse of time, discussions without purpose, and group dysfunction – all culprits of wasted resources and money. You will walk away with a transformed vision of effective meetings plus the necessary tools to equip you in your everyday meetings.

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.

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.

Our flagship course, The Effective Facilitator covers the 10 principles of facilitation, more than 100 techniques, and includes 6 exercises culminating a videotaped 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.

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.

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.

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.

This convenient, two-day course is designed to help you improve your daily meetings with smart (and practical) meeting facilitation skills and techniques. This course also expands on how to create a meeting “revolution” inside your organization to help others stop the common problems perpetuated in most meetings: late starts, misuse of time, discussions without purpose, and group dysfunction – all culprits of wasted resources and money. You will walk away with a transformed vision of effective meetings plus the necessary tools to equip you in your everyday meetings.

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.

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.

Our flagship course, The Effective Facilitator covers the 10 principles of facilitation, more than 100 techniques, and includes 6 exercises culminating a videotaped 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.

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

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.

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.

Customers have a style of communication when they buy – a buying style – that successful salespeople match to gain their customers attention and close the sale. If your work involves you selling to others in any way, or if you coach people in enhancing their sales effectiveness, this workshop will show you how to use buying styles to maximize your bottom line. This workshop offers tools that participants can use right away, enabling them to recognize why their selling approach causes certain people to move to action, while the same approach turns others away! Unlock powerful catalysts designed to create effective customer and teambuilding skills that help participants understand themselves and others.

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.

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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 your strengths and gain practical strategies for maximizing performance, organizational impact and individual satisfaction.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

View More

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.

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.

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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.

View More

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.

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.

All too often cross-functional teams and task forces, right from the start, are missing one or more of the key essentials for success. Other times the desired outcome is hindered by distrust, power struggles and poor communication. In this workshop, you will learn the eight essentials for team success and a proven process for accelerating the time needed to move from a group into a well-functioning and results-focused team.

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.

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.

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Our flagship course, The Effective Facilitator covers the 10 principles of facilitation, more than 100 techniques, and includes 6 exercises culminating a videotaped 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.

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.

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