In-demand skills for the modern world of work
Spanning the modern manager's mindset, creative thinking, conscious inclusion, data-driven decision making, tools for transition and so much more; our take on these topics is rooted in the real challenges of our community right now, developed alongside diverse subject experts and enlivened by the experiences of everyone we engage weekly. Join us in our continual learning as we explore and energise these opportunities live virtual courses and really helpful resources.
Our Top Ten topics for your teams today
Based on sessions delivered in Feb—April this year
1. Neurodiversity Awareness
Developed and co-facilitated with academic and specialist HR practitioner Dr. Anne Cockayne, this session opens conversation and closes knowledge gaps among teams around neurodiversity at work, and gets everyone working proactively towards small steps they can be taking in their working cultures for greater neuro-inclusion the moment the session ends.
2. Mastering Miro, and virtual collaboration
Our Miro 'Mountain Morning' session, gets teams together, tooled-up digitally and thinking differently about ways of making decisions, opportunities and processes more visual when working in distributed ways. Working together on a collaborative canvas, we scale a virtual mountain and in doing so focus on a challenge live in the group right now.
3. Hybrid Health-check
This new and timely session helps teams reflect on their readiness to sustain performance and inclusion as more hybrid and remote-first approaches to work are embraced. Throughout the session, and through follow on missions, you'll collectively codify a playbook to support the journey. Pre-work gets an audit of the current state of play into the group, to purposefully and positively build upon.
4. Beating Bias for Better Decisions
Sustaining the conversation around unconscious and implicit biases, this session will get your team critically evaluating key decisions within their lives and workflows right now — how bias might be showing up in relation to them, and the tactics and tools they can deploy to 'outsmart themselves', and shift into slower and more intentional styles of deliberation. Fast paced group exercises also get teams focussed on choices that need to be made collectively, with accountability to one-another as 'bias busters'.
5. Coaching me, Coaching you
Coaching mindsets, both for managers and their teams, are critical when building and sustaining cultures of learning and performance. In this super-practical session we get everyone into the coaching mindset; appreciating the impact we can have on others when we intentionally listen, curiously question and hold up a mirror to others. Supporting diagnostics, team tools and individual and team missions provide the fuel to sustain coaching conversations.
6. How to have Ideas
The beauty of this session is that we can put your live business or team challenge right at the heart of it; and get the team applying an array of new tools for idea generation directly to it. Skills building meets problem solving! From visual collisions to thinking hats, related worlds to 60 second stories — the techniques your team take away from this session, will get used again and again in all kinds of knotty contexts.
7. Behave Yourself.
This collaborative and cognitively invigorating session is all about discovering and decoding the potential of behavioural insights — and immediately experimenting with their application to our real-world decisions, relationships and opportunities. Teams get hands on with bitesize behavioural nuggets; from social proof to the Ikea effect, fluency shortcuts to loss aversion — and with their own real challenges on the table, design behavioural experiments to put into practice right away.
8. Feedback First Cultures
One of the most common insights we here from partners' teams is that "we need to get better at giving and receiving feedback with each other." And it's no surprise that the highest performing teams with low-team turnover and evident psychological safety are those nurturing cultures of continual learning. To do so, they're breaking down the barriers of perceived awkwardness, reframing difficult conversations as learning conversations and collectively committing to a cadence of both providing, and pulling in, feedback from all around them. This session puts proven tools into peoples hands, and creates accountability for action.
9. Facilitating Remote Groups
Particularly popular with managers and those having to lead distributed groups (whether team meetings or client workshop), this session is all about enhancing your ability to bring energy, focus and participation to meetings, workshops and any other kind of gathering. To facilitate means to 'make something easy', but it's likely you'll have been in a group situation that felt difficult — that lacked purpose, energy and impact. As an antidote to that outcome, we work through our 5E framework, with all participants taking away transformative tools and approaches, and a clear sense of what they'll enable at the earliest next opportunity.
10. A Values Audit
Do you have a set of company values? Or values that your team has co-created together? If so, how well do they stack up against evident behaviours, and a common understanding around the specific ways we should expect our values to manifest within our teams day to day? This popular session takes your company, or team, values as a starting point and stress-tests them against such behaviours, outputting a collectively drafted playbook of behaviours to live and build on daily; at an individual, team and organisational level. A positive and productive session, for purpose driven organisations.
Key theme — Conscious inclusion
Talking for building belonging, in distributed teams
If you've observed non-inclusive behaviour in your team, how can you most appropriately raise it? In exploring this topic there's lots to reflect on around relationships, hierarchy and how we articulate our feelings.
Diversity is nothing without inclusion, and we can all become more intentional about how we make each other feel part of the teams we're in — wherever we're working from.
We all think differently, and by raising awareness of each others' thinking styles we create more inclusive workplaces; where strengths are played too and outcomes enriched.
Microaggressions come in many forms, intentional or otherwise — as do microaffirmations. These small pieces of communication that can make a big impact either way. So how do we get wise to them?
As much of the world continues to work from home, we need to be purposefully practicing approaches to bringing our distributed teams together and supporting one-another through individual and collective challenges.
Intentional, inclusive onboarding makes future colleagues feel part of something well before their first day 'in the office'. And in the disstributed, post-Covid world of work, the opportunity is live for creative and memorable approaches.
Privilege can be difficult to admit experiencing; but when understand the nuance our own privilege and how to use it for good, we take steps purposeful towards positive allyship..
Inclusive Conversations
We're partnering with Equity, Inclusion & Diversity Consultant Sereena Abbassi, to facilitate a series of conversations among our partners' teams around timely and pertinent themes. Coming up in May, our focus falls on the relationship between micro-aggressions, calling-out and calling-in.
Neurodiversity awareness training
Our NeuroAware programme is focussed on positively increasing practical understanding of neurodiversity at work. Delivered remotely through social sessions and self-directed resources, the programme is designed in partnership with subject experts including Dr. Anne Cockayne, who recently completed a PHD on the experiences of people-managers working with autistic team members.
Key theme — The Modern management mode
Tools for leading teams in 2021
Drawing on Goleman's classic research, and understanding where to flex in different situations.
What's going on the flag? Exploring how when we start with 'Why' our teams will follow up more readily.
In the post COVID world, managers need to be equipped to build belonging among their teams, wherever they're working from.
What to include in a 1-1? What's the impact of the Ikea effect, and how do styles flex to accommodate personalities?
Helping others reflect on what's next will often bring their mind and focus firmly to the now. Good questions lead to good outcomes
Exploring how we lead for change, and how the iterative, test and learn mindsets are valuable for change as they are for product innovation.
First Time Leaders
Our purposeful, social and performance-enhancing 12 week accelerator provides recently promoted people managers with practical and immediately applicable skills.
Key theme — Personal effectiveness
Don't call them soft skills, they're super-powers!
By refining our relationship with the ways we give and receive feedback, we'll enjoy more purposeful and productive relationships.
With the right mindset and techniques to hand, conversations we put off can become positive and transformative learning experiences.
In today's fast-moving and ambiguous world of work, it's no surprise that we often feel pressured and unfocussed. Hardly the best context for making good decisions.
If you know you deserve to be heard, and want to make a difference, actively working on your influencing skills is important.
Pick up proven tools to level up your listening skills, and deeply appreciate the benefits they'll bring to all your relationships.
We can all benefit from a stronger and more confident voice, and there are accessible and actionable methods of developing one.
By overlooking the power of habits in working towards our goals, we set ourselves up to fail. When we embrace habits, we change our behaviours for the better.
Exploring the principles and practices that can help us painlessly and purposefully meet the people we want to meet.
Mastering the art and science of running creative and engaging meetings, gatherings and other get-togethers.
By mastering the art of the negotiation, we can positively and purposefully pull others towards our point of view.
There are simple and easy to action ways to boost our sense of authority, presence and gravitas at work. And by mastering them, we can quickly create up our impact.
Refining and combining our skills of empathy, listening and questioning will enable us to purposefully manage relationships with those more senior.
With the right methods and mindsets, mentoring relationships — and internal programmes that facilitate them — bring transformative and mutually valuable development to all involved.
Master the art of successful delegation, arming yourself with proven tools and techniques and awareness of your mental blockers.
Crafting compelling questions can transform the way we communicate and move us forward in all areas of our lives
A coaching mindset, and methods for putting into into play, will enrich your management style in all directions
A great presentation is really a demonstration of authenticity, an understanding who it is we're presenting to and of getting out of our own way.
Rebooting our relationship with time itself — so we feel more in control of it, and are getting more done.
We'll deconstruct the notion of charm, unpack the behaviours of those that possess it — and learn ways we can effectively dial up our own charm for impact.
Exploring the notion of assertiveness, learning how to be more purposefully assertive and recognising our individual past and current blockers.
An often elusive feeling, confidence is something we can all learn, practice and intentionally improve. We'll demystify the idea of confidence and pursue practices for getting more of it.
Sharing practical and empowering approaches to addressing the inevitable conflict that arises in our work and lives.
Examining the purpose of a personal brand, and working through a proven process to identifying and defining one for ourselves.
Key theme — Creative Thinking
Opening up to new connections, and other ways of thinking
Getting hands on with a variety of tools and techniques for quick, refreshing and effective creative thinking.
Exploring playful tools for refreshing our creative thinking and communication in meetings and workshops — virtually or in-person.
Revealing the power of stories and how to harness them to persuade in all kinds of modern spaces.
A well-defined problem will often contains a solution inside it. Thinking more critically about how to do so will give us a better beginning into ideas.
We'll explore how art can enrich our work and life, rediscovering our inner artist and and learn tools to apply to all kinds of contexts.
Evolve the humble but all important creative brief — and taking it from practical tool to rocket fuel.
Key theme — Wellbeing
Building resilience and supporting transition
We'll explore the ways in which we can support ourselves holistically, to become better equipped for whatever comes our way at work.
The pressure to deliver more with less is a common challenge. How can we equip ourselves and our teams with tools to thrive in turbulent times?
By equipping ourselves with techniques for breathing more consciously, we can improve our sense of connection and wellbeing in the workplace.
Exploring the plentiful benefits of making a mindfulness meditation practice part of your routine.
Exploring mindsets and methods for positive and proactive mental agility — and ways we can support those around us too.
Building these skills in your teams
How we can immediately help
Interactive and immersive sessions, accessed in our open programme or delivered directly to teams anywhere. From 12 person virtual workshops to a 400 person 'all in'.
Bitesize and sticky eCourses and digital resources that fit with the flow of work, and people actually want to use. Behaviourally proven to reinforce and sustain knowledge transfer.
Enable people in your own team to deliver and replay our content, adapted and licensed to reflect your commercial challenges and cultural feel.