Leadership Topics

From your executive team to your high-potentials we partner with you to create customized leadership development programs to suit every level of learning you need across your organization. Here are the topics we cover today (and we’re constantly in the midst of custom creating new topics for clients):


Building Trust

Trust is the cornerstone of any successful team yet is a challenge for many to develop and maintain. In order to overcome the challenge, it’s important to look at how trust, or lack of trust, contributes to the way our teams and organizations function. With trust, candour is encouraged, information is shared, and collaboration becomes the norm – without it, organizations start to function as distinct and separate silos. This session focuses on trust at three levels: self-trust, relationship trust, and organizational trust and how each contributes to the success of teams and organizations.

Creating Strong Teams

Effectively building strong teams is the cornerstone of successful organizations. The building blocks that create a high functioning team are trust, healthy conflict, and alignment. When these aspects are secure, the outcome is an engaged, results-driven team. The session explores ways to increase connection, cooperation, and clarity, with a focus on improving cohesion in order to get the most from team collaboration.

Decision Making

Decision making is a crucial aspect of a leader’s job and, at times, one of the most challenging. This session walks through a tested model for weighing options and making decisions. Leaders will apply the model to a current situation. The model introduces ways to clarify the objectives of the decision, seek meaningful and reliable information to support decision making, generate creative options, consider outcomes and consequences of options, and evaluate options against desired objectives and outcomes.

Developing Others Through Coaching

As a leader, your boat only floats as high as the tide, and the tide is your team. It’s not how good you are that counts; it’s how good you can support the members of your team to be. Coaching creates engaged, autonomous, and empowered leaders. Great leaders at every level benefit from being coached and knowing how (and when) to take a coach approach. This session approaches coaching from a place of curiosity and openness, applying a framework for coaching conversations that produces consistent behaviour change and increased capabilities.

Difficult Conversations

Effectively managing conflict in your organization is key to building high performing teams and a stronger organization. Sensitive or difficult issues are often softened or avoided. Honest conversations are difficult for many leaders and the first step to mastering them is to shift our mindset to a growth mindset, wherein these conversations are opportunities to develop as leaders. In this session, participants apply a framework to prepare for a difficult conversation they need to have from a place of openness and collaboration.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ)* (Full Day)

Emotional Intelligence defines a set of skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, cope with challenges, develop and maintain social relationships, and use emotional information in an effective way. The focus of this session is to identify behaviours that support or hinder effectiveness. Leaders will build a strong foundation of Emotional Intelligence to support individuals, relationships, careers, and business results.

Emotional Intelligence Module 2

With a focus on practical application, Emotional Intelligence Module 2 builds on the foundation of emotional intelligence by elaborating on key concepts. This session explores the role of values and beliefs in behaviour, leverages specific tools to improve emotional intelligence, and invites leaders to become increasingly aware of the impact of their emotions.

Giving and Receiving Feedback

Because we often think of feedback as uncomfortable, it may require a mindset shift to embrace it as a developmental tool versus a difficult conversation and as something we should seek as much as we give. This session introduces a framework for giving feedback and provides keys for soliciting and receiving feedback from others, both essential to improving performance.

Influencing Sideways

Influence and persuasion are key elements to building and leveraging strong working relationships. This session gets people thinking about how influence affects them day-to-day and helps participants develop competence in using influence. This session will introduce major sources of influence in the workplace and deliver an understanding of how and when to use key sources of influence. Participants will identify their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement in influencing others.

Leading By Example

How leaders think and behave has an impact on team values and culture. Most people would agree that leading by example is crucial. Yet, few people ever stop to ask what leading by example looks like, how leaders can practice it more rigorously, and how to leverage the power of leading by example to drive business results. This session provides a practical model for learning to talk the talk and walk the walk in a way that is consistent with the leader’s unique skills and the organization’s vision, strategy, and values.

Leading Change

An organization’s success depends on its ability to adapt to a changing environment and coordinate many moving parts. It is all too common that organizational change initiatives fail, mainly because the organization never wins its employee’s commitment. This session explores how to manage change from an organizational, personal, and leadership perspective.

Leading Effective Meetings

Productive meetings move work forward; unproductive meetings waste valuable resources in lost time, money, and opportunity. Knowing when to hold a meeting (and when not to), how to craft a purposeful and efficient agenda, developing meeting norms and facilitating meeting dynamics are all crucial leadership skills. Knowing how to follow up on actionable meeting outcomes and create accountability structures is essential to complete the work loop and move the work forward. This session focuses on practical tools to create meaningful change in meeting norms and, therefore, team culture and productivity.

Opening Lines of Communication

Communication is more than technique, it’s a reflection of how we think about and see the world. The most significant opportunity to improve collective team performance is improving the way we interact with people who are different from us. By knowing that communication is less about what we say (or don’t say) and more about what we think and believe to be true, we can shift how we communicate with others. This session explores a powerful communication model that will help participants to engage others with accountability, self-awareness, and collaboration, resulting in mutually beneficial relationships.

Performance-Based Leadership

When we make an overall assessment of someone’s abilities and lead them based on that assessment, we may create a mismatch between what they need and how we lead them. Defying the one-size-fits-all leadership approach, this session provides a roadmap for aligning our leadership style with people’s competence and motivation levels.

Presentation Skills

A leader should always be ready to convey a clear succinct message to their audience. Strong presentation skills are a key way to influence beliefs and inspire action – increasing acceptance of new ideas and helping you lead, influence and inspire others every time you speak. This session helps participants increase their confidence to speak with certainty, credibility, and create genuine connections with people. Participants will learn best practices to enable them to choose the right communication strategy for any situation, ensuring they present ideas clearly, concisely, and memorably.

Resilience

Leaders are measured by their ability to handle tough situations and recover quickly from setbacks. In other words, they are measured by how resilient they are. This session focuses on four primary aspects of cultivating resilience – managing stress, fostering a growth mindset, leading under pressure, and developing resilient teams. The result: leaders develop more grit, work becomes more enjoyable, and teams become more adaptable.

Strategic Thinking

Thinking strategically means thinking with the future in mind. It requires a shift from short to long-term thinking regarding our teams, our areas of business, across the company, and where the organization fits into its competitive landscape. This session empowers participants to stay future-focused by building habits that look beyond what’s happening now and make choices based on a strategic vision of the future.

Time & Energy Management

It is not uncommon for leaders to spend their days overwhelmed with email, meetings, and in-the-moment demands on our time. Being able to exercise conscious control over where we spend our time allows us to make an important shift in focus from activities to results. This session explores the tools and habits that support effective time management by introducing new routines and patterns of behaviour to better manage conflicting priorities and reduce the time-related stress in our lives.

LEADING REMOTE & HYBRID TEAMS PROGRAM

Leading with Empathy

Great leaders work to understand the perspectives, needs, and goals of the people they lead. As people navigate challenging situations that impact their day-to-day, this kind of empathetic leadership is more vital than ever. This session explores how to practice and demonstrate empathy by seeking to understand the feelings and perspectives of others and using that understanding to guide their actions.

Cultivating Resilience

During times of higher stress, leaders need to prioritize their well-being so they can show up grounded and present for those they lead. This session focuses on two primary aspects of cultivating resilience – managing stress and fostering a growth mindset. The result: leaders develop the tools to endure challenging times with adaptability and strength.

Fostering Trust on Remote Teams

The foundation of any team is trust. A common challenge for leaders of newly remote teams is the assumption that productivity and commitment to work will decline; this doesn’t need to be the case. This session seeks to shift the leader’s mindset towards trust and offers practical ways to provide the clarity and autonomy teams need to be productive.  

Communicating During Uncertainty

During times of change and uncertainty, communication should be frequent and consistent, grounded in reality, and provide a sense of confidence and appropriate optimism. This session focuses on communicating with empathy by considering the weight and impact of your message, being transparent about the current reality, and sharing what you know, don’t know, and what you are doing next.

Supporting Remotely through Coaching

Using a coach approach is a great way to foster critical thinking, create connections, and empower those you lead. It is also a way to support your direct reports during a time of higher stress and uncertainty. This session offers best practices in adapting and leveraging coaching skills to support remote teams, to continue to increase people’s capabilities and help them stay motivated to do their best work.

Remote Meeting Best Practices

Meetings take on new levels of importance for remote teams. Working remotely means that much of the spontaneous collaboration and connection found in an office doesn’t exist. This session breaks down key components of leading productive virtual meetings, including choosing the right tool for the job, setting an appropriate meeting rhythm, ensuring your meetings stay on track, and keeping attendees engaged, connected, and productive.

Pricing

Each session is a half-day unless otherwise specified, and part of an overall program. To learn more about our pricing, get in touch!