Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
In this workshop, you will practice the fundamental tool of great leaders: how to engage, empower, and improve performance in direct reports through the use of skillful coaching. The result: team members become more self-sufficient, learn how to help themselves and others resolve problems faster, and make more valuable contributions to the team.
Pre-work: Come ready to discuss a work-related conundrum you currently have (anything from how to motivate your team to how to start meetings on time). A classmate will coach you through the issue.
During this workshop, you will:
After this workshop, you will know how to:
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
INFLUENTIAL COMMUNICATION
Employees are usually hungry to make a greater impact on their organization and gain support for their ideas. Even individuals who have leadership roles prefer leaning on their influence rather than their authority to achieve results. But influence seems like such an abstract skill that most people don’t know how to start building it. When we think about earning influence, we tend to envision projecting confidence or becoming more persuasive – skills that take years to master. Instead, we can become more influential immediately just by changing the quality of our questions. The result? A questions-first culture in which employees are eager to hear one another’s perspectives and empowered to pursue their ideas proactively.
During this workshop participants will:
• Think about their personal definition of influence
• Learn research about the role questions play in earning influence
• Practice activating curiosity in difficult moments (20 questions technique) and pivoting to better understand the person they want to have influence with (stakeholder analysis)
• Learn and practice the 6 key questions that improve influence: blur questions, split tracks/playbacks, scaling questions, reasoning questions, forward questions, and next step questions
• Pick a developmental focus for themselves to continue increasing their skills
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Pivot perspective to better understand their stakeholders
• Create clarity in any conversation
• Build forward momentum and action when a conversation or project gets stuck
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
MEETINGS MASTERY
We spend so much of our time in meetings, yet few people are trained to be outstanding meeting leaders. When team members learn how to make small changes to the format and flow of their meetings, the entire organization becomes more productive and aligned. In this workshop, participants learn how to design meetings well. They also learn how to be excellent virtual and in-person meeting facilitators, able to handle typical meeting issues such as topics going off track, under- or over-participation, entangled issues, or stalled decision-making processes. Participants leave with an essential skill-set that can be applied to any meeting, large or small.
Pre-work: Come to this session with a meeting in mind that you would like to optimize.
During this workshop participants will learn:
• The responsibilities of being a meeting owner: choosing the right meeting structure to meet the goal, sequencing the agenda, and timeboxing agenda items
• Opening: How to open the meeting using a purpose statement that focuses the group. Practice making a 4P statement: purpose, product, personal benefit, and process
• During a meeting: How to keep a meeting on track, including using a visual agenda/ progress markers, summation and transition statements, time statements, parking lots, and use of tools (digital and in-person) when focus has been lost
• Closing: How to close the meeting, including using action-owner statements
• Advanced tools to use for each meeting type: status update/ alignment meeting tools (including use of timers and round robins), brainstorming (including idea quotas and inclusivity tools for introverts), and group decision making (including dot vote, cluster analysis, and criteria matrix)
• Intervention techniques when something goes wrong, including use of our difficult situations guide
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Design meetings well, including creating optimized agendas
• Facilitate meetings well, including knowing how to intervene
• Follow up well after a meeting, including documenting decisions and action items
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
INFLUENTIAL COMMUNICATION
Employees are usually hungry to make a greater impact on their organization and gain support for their ideas. Even individuals who have leadership roles prefer leaning on their influence rather than their authority to achieve results. But influence seems like such an abstract skill that most people don’t know how to start building it. When we think about earning influence, we tend to envision projecting confidence or becoming more persuasive – skills that take years to master. Instead, we can become more influential immediately just by changing the quality of our questions. The result? A questions-first culture in which employees are eager to hear one another’s perspectives and empowered to pursue their ideas proactively.
During this workshop participants will:
• Think about their personal definition of influence
• Learn research about the role questions play in earning influence
• Practice activating curiosity in difficult moments (20 questions technique) and pivoting to better understand the person they want to have influence with (stakeholder analysis)
• Learn and practice the 6 key questions that improve influence: blur questions, split tracks/playbacks, scaling questions, reasoning questions, forward questions, and next step questions
• Pick a developmental focus for themselves to continue increasing their skills
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Pivot perspective to better understand their stakeholders
• Create clarity in any conversation
• Build forward momentum and action when a conversation or project gets stuck
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
We are all biased, and yet bias doesn’t have to stop us from being deliberately inclusive and leveraging our differences. In this workshop, you will learn the psychology of unconscious bias and its impact at work. Then we’ll practice behaviors of inclusion – small habits that improve 1-1 interactions, gatherings, meetings, feedback, and decisions. You’ll leave with greater confidence and simple tools to be a better advocate for yourself and others.
During this workshop participants will:
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
To be adaptive, every manager needs to know how to manage well remotely, at any time and on demand. How is managing a remote or partially remote (what we call ‘hybrid’) team different? In this workshop participants will get trained in the unique challenges of remote and hybrid-remote management. They’ll learn how to optimize work and collaboration in the biggest challenge areas: communication, connection, trust, fairness, and growth. The result: employees that are engaged and productive, no matter their location.
During this workshop, participants will:
• Discuss the unique challenges (and benefits!) of distributed setups
• Learn the 3 unique drivers of distributed employee success: managing communication, managing connection, managing energy
• Learn how to optimize communication dynamics. Exercises include creation of faster feedback loops, practice with expectation setting and resetting, understanding how to provide contextual information, and analysis of distribution of knowledge that is unique to the remote environment. Also includes awareness-building exercises showing how misinterpretations in the meaning of silence can occur, and how to avoid those misinterpretations
• Learn how to optimize connection and developing team inclusion habits
• Learn how to optimize trust dynamics. Exercises include practice with a 4-point checklist for clarity of responsibilities, consistent 1-1s, checkpoints, and results-based metrics (focusing on output and deliverables rather than simply input)
• Learn how to optimize growth dynamics, including how to help remote employees stretch their skills, create development goals, give them exposure to the right people within the organization, and helping their projects and successes become more visible
• Learn hacks to immediately improve hybrid meeting dynamics
• Create a plan to put what was learned in this workshop into action in the week ahead
After this workshop, participants will:
• Increase engagement and workflow for remote and in-person employees
• Know how to diagnose and fix unspoken issues that are unique to remote management situations
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
STRATEGIC THINKING
When things move fast, it’s easy to get stuck in a short-term, shoot-from-the-hip mindset. To scale and collaborate well, you and your team need to think and execute strategically. In this workshop, you’ll sharpen your team’s long-term thinking skills and practice tools to help everyone on the team identify objectives, diagnose obstacles, avoid unintended consequences, and involve the right stakeholders at the right times, even when timelines and priorities shift.
During this workshop participants will:
• Learn the “behavioral units” of strategic thinking and explore research on how to turn this type of thinking into a team-wide habit.
• Apply strategic thinking tools and frameworks to a real project they are working on now and get feedback from other participants. Tools include:
• Link maps (inverted triangle method), to map activities to team and company goals
• Gap Analysis, including determining lag and lead measures
• 3 Lenses Model – to diagnose root causes of issues and practice systems-based thinking
• Consequences Check – to practice mitigating risk and build a habit of tradeoff awareness, as well as how to lead skillful pre-mortems
• Inclusive Planning – to practice involving the right stakeholders at the right time during all phases of setting up a tactic, project, or strategy
• Identify situations in which they are at risk of thinking reactively rather than proactively
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Pause regularly and ask questions that focus on long-term impact vs. short term demand, org-wide systems vs. individual perspectives
• Apply strategic thinking habits across contexts
• Communicate ideas more strategically and inclusively
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
Change-readiness is now an essential skill for any team. When managers understand the science behind change, they can equip their teams to be more adaptive, resilient, and agile. In this workshop, you will learn everything you need to know. We’ll explore change curves, what happens neurologically when we experience unexpected shifts, track different coping styles and how to respond to each, and practice easy techniques to reduce resistance and increase commitment and action in yourself and others. You’ll practice devising solutions and crafting communication using a change template that will make you a more effective and inspiring leader.
Pre-work: Come to this meeting ready to talk about a change you are leading or would like to lead.
During this workshop you will:
• Discuss the science behind change curves and coping styles via a series of micro-experiments
• Learn about the stages of change (freeze, unfreeze, refreeze) and collect tools to help stakeholders adapt faster to change within each stage
• Practice communicating change initiatives to reduce resistance and increase commitment
• Learn to set up change initiatives so that they are more likely to succeed (create early wins, design behavioral cues, and communicate small steps toward action)
• Discuss how to turn what they learned in this workshop into action
After this workshop, you will know how to:
• Understand and predict reactions to change
• Design an inspiring and effective change initiative
• Create structures that increase the change-readiness of a team over time
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
MEETINGS MASTERY
We spend so much of our time in meetings, yet few people are trained to be outstanding meeting leaders. When team members learn how to make small changes to the format and flow of their meetings, the entire organization becomes more productive and aligned. In this workshop, participants learn how to design meetings well. They also learn how to be excellent virtual and in-person meeting facilitators, able to handle typical meeting issues such as topics going off track, under- or over-participation, entangled issues, or stalled decision-making processes. Participants leave with an essential skill-set that can be applied to any meeting, large or small.
Pre-work: Come to this session with a meeting in mind that you would like to optimize.
During this workshop participants will learn:
• The responsibilities of being a meeting owner: choosing the right meeting structure to meet the goal, sequencing the agenda, and timeboxing agenda items
• Opening: How to open the meeting using a purpose statement that focuses the group. Practice making a 4P statement: purpose, product, personal benefit, and process
• During a meeting: How to keep a meeting on track, including using a visual agenda/ progress markers, summation and transition statements, time statements, parking lots, and use of tools (digital and in-person) when focus has been lost
• Closing: How to close the meeting, including using action-owner statements
• Advanced tools to use for each meeting type: status update/ alignment meeting tools (including use of timers and round robins), brainstorming (including idea quotas and inclusivity tools for introverts), and group decision making (including dot vote, cluster analysis, and criteria matrix)
• Intervention techniques when something goes wrong, including use of our difficult situations guide
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Design meetings well, including creating optimized agendas
• Facilitate meetings well, including knowing how to intervene
• Follow up well after a meeting, including documenting decisions and action items
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
ADAPTIVITY AND RESILIENCE
When things are uncertain, many people freeze, make wrong decisions, or feel overwhelmed. In this workshop, you will practice techniques to stay calm, clear-minded, and adaptive even when things are quickly changing. Skills include how to diagnose and optimize your default style under stress, how to make good decisions (even when information is confusing or limited), and how to create structure when things feel unstructured – for yourself and others. You will leave feeling more capable and prepared for whatever comes your way.
During this workshop, participants will:
• Explore brain reactions to uncertainty, including common coping styles and movement patterns through the Kubler-Ross change curve.
• Dive into research on what expert ‘adapters’ do
• Analyze their default style under stress and know how to diagnose colleagues’ styles.
• Practice techniques to decrease anxiety on command.
• Practice scenario planning to decrease anxiety and increase strategic responding.
• Learn techniques to add structure and decision-making clarity in complex situations.
After this workshop, participants will:
• Be equipped to effectively manage uncertainty and their reactions to it.
• Understand and use best practices that create structure for themselves and others, even with limited information.
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
The 1-1 is the best opportunity for tracking your direct reports’ engagement and development, but most of us don’t put this time to good use. You’ll walk away from this workshop knowing how to transform your 1-1s into productive, motivating, and energizing sessions.
During this workshop, you will:
After this workshop, you will know how to:
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
This workshop bundles the most effective techniques for working smarter when time and resources are limited. You’ll learn to diagnose your and your team’s productivity challenges and walk away with tools for improving time awareness, prioritization, organization, and focus for yourself and others.
During this workshop, you will:
After this workshop, you will: