Empowering Individual Contributors

Hiring: Mastering the Most Important Decision

Employees are the single most important drivers of every company’s success. That makes hiring one of the most
important, if not the most important, decision we can make as leaders. A bad hiring decision can disrupt team dynamics,
drain resources, and ultimately undermine the organization’s goals and objectives. It can also affect a leader’s
credibility and confidence. For these reasons, it is crucial to invest in a thorough and thoughtful hiring process.

THE OBJECTIVES FOR TODAY’S SESSION ARE TO:
• Delve into the major blind spots that can sabotage your hiring decisions;
• Explore practical methods to avoid these pitfalls;
• Discuss ways to ensure you make the best possible hiring choices.

Conversational Leadership

Conversational Leadership is the practice of taking responsibility for problems and opportunities by initiating and nurturing the conversations that might not otherwise happen.
This approach to leadership values participation over control and curiosity over certainty. Conversation becomes the medium through which meaning is made, trust is built, and collective action becomes possible. Conversational Leadership is ultimately about attending to the conversations that shape our future.

In this topic we will:

Why hierarchical leadership is insufficient for addressing systemic problems.
How hyperconnectivity changes what is required from leaders.
How Conversational Leadership supports sensemaking, agility, and collective agency in complex times.

Climate Actions for Every Employee (2025 template)

Public opinion has shifted in the last few years. Now most people — regardless of their political orientation — have realised that climate change is happening and is caused by humans. There is a shared understanding that we all need to act fast to avoid dramatic consequences for ourselves, our organizations, our communities, and everyone on the planet.

However, while there is a willingness to act, many are unsure which climate actions they should take, both in their private life and especially in the work place and within their sphere of influence.

In this session you will:

Create a vision for a positive future.
Gain clarity around some of the key terms underpinning the best solutions such as Net Zero and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (CO₂ e).
Focus on practical climate solutions for at work and in your home, especially the ones that have a high impact on reducing global warming.
Begin to design an action plan together.

Active Hope for Employee Resilience (2025 template)

Higher rates of absenteeism, burnout and turnover are forcing organizations to recognize that they must play a key role in supporting their staff’s emotional and mental wellbeing. This topic acknowledges that we are living through challenging times and that climate change is having an impact on mental health and workplace behaviours. To completely suppress our deep feelings about our world while at work would be to miss a powerful opportunity: the physical or virtual workplace is an ideal place to build individual and organizational resilience, in addition to promoting creative, breakthrough solutions for all.

This session will help you to:

strengthen courage for individual and organizational resilience;
appreciate the growing impact of eco-anxiety in the workplace;
practice a simple yet powerful guided process that helps people move through stuckness, despair, or resignation into strengthening their ability to bring about positive change.

Reflection (2025 template)

How often do you wonder not just about what happened but why it happened and how it differs from other happenings? This topic introduces the importance of reflection in managerial work.

Reflection is about getting the meaning from everyday experiences. Managers may too easily allow ‘doing’ to drive out ‘thinking’ and ‘thinking’ might miss out on the clues provided by feelings and intuition. By bringing conscious awareness into the moment, the result will be more informed, effective action for the future.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Learn from your own experiences and the experiences of others through reflection.
Appreciate the importance of collective and individual reflection in managerial work.
Find ways to combine managerial reflection and action.

Awareness-Based Systems Change: Planting Seeds for Change (2025 template)

The key leadership challenge of our times is to cultivate creativity, innovation, and leadership capacity at all levels of our systems. But what makes the difference between an organization where people regularly take new action and step into new territory and one where people prefer to ‘keep their heads down’ and play it safe? It likely has much to do with the quality of the social field.

This topic challenges you to dive into the “soil” of your organization to see and sense behavioural patterns within the social field which may be giving rise to unwanted results. When we can attend to what we see, say, and do (what is visible) while simultaneously attending to the inner source of attention and intention from which we operate (what is invisible), we can break free of patterns rooted in past experiences to create powerful breakthrough ideas.

This session invites you to:

Understand organizations from a social field perspective;
Gain insight into the deeper qualities of the social field of your organization;
Reflect on your own role shaping the social field.

Practical Tips for Leading Meetings that Matter (2025 template)

This topic is dedicated to any of you who have ever said, “Oh no, not another meeting.” Leading “meetings that matter” is a critical leadership skill that promotes learning and support among participants, and facilitates responsible action. By applying simple techniques to your meetings*, you will be able to guide participants towards common ground and shared goals, while making creative use of dissenting opinions. These techniques have proven strong antidotes against the “shorter, faster, cheaper” meeting syndrome and the challenges of running meetings in a multi-cultural world.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Learn practices to keep groups whole, open, and task focused.
Decide how to apply these practices to enhance meetings within your own organization.

*Our focus here is on interactive, face-to-face, group meetings.

Five Ideas about Teamwork (2025 template)

Most people like the idea of being on a team—although working on a team can be another matter. Not only can frictions create problems; the teams we work on rarely match up with the ideal vision we have of teams. When we think of a team we draw on images from sport: a small stable group of people working towards an important common goal. In organizations we might be on several teams, they may have dozens of people, and not be aligned. And many teams are now virtual, so we may never even meet face-to-face, or are at least a hybrid team.

In this topic, we will look at the world of teamwork and give some tips to navigate through the challenges.

The objectives of this topic are to:

Increase your understanding of the different sorts of teams you might work on.
Review some of the research on what makes teams work well.
Identify some specific things that you can do to improve how your teams function.

Gender Inclusive Leadership (2025 template)

“Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” Verna Mayes

Organizations with gender inclusive cultures consistently achieve superior business results in retention, productivity, and profitability. Gender inclusion goes beyond diversity quotas and affirmative action to ensure that both men and women feel recognized, valued, and believe that they have full access to growth opportunities. Inclusion strategies promote a deep sense of engagement throughout the organization which is critical for innovation and the bottom line.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Appreciate the importance of gender inclusivity in the workplace.
Introduce a range of reflection tools to help identify the current status of gender in your workplace.
Encourage practical actions that will help you develop and shape your organizational culture into one that is more welcoming and inclusive.

I.T. Does Have an Off Button (2025 template)

I-phones, I-pads, Blackberries, Androids, and Kindles are transforming our lives: at work and at home, for better and for worse. These technologies offer obvious benefits but also pose hidden threats that managers need to understand.

This topic asks you to evaluate the impact of these technologies on your managing and then generate some ideas for taking command of them.

The objectives for this topic are to:

Appreciate the benefits and threats of these technologies.
Harness the technology to improve your effectiveness.
Understand the importance of soft information in managing effectively.

Hiring: Mastering the Most Important Decision

Conversational Leadership

Climate Actions for Every Employee (2025 template)

Active Hope for Employee Resilience (2025 template)

Reflection (2025 template)

Awareness-Based Systems Change: Planting Seeds for Change (2025 template)

Practical Tips for Leading Meetings that Matter (2025 template)

Five Ideas about Teamwork (2025 template)

Gender Inclusive Leadership (2025 template)

I.T. Does Have an Off Button (2025 template)

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