Building Psychological Safety
In this workshop you’ll learn about the most important skills to build and maintain psychological safety on any team you’re a part of. Here’s what you’ll walk away with:
A process for creating psychological safety on new and existing teams.
Tips on how to create productive vulnerability
Skills for how to build and maintain trust even across different teams and cultures.
Note: apply your Catalyst code during checkout and it’ll waive the workshop fee.
When people are trained in how to interview candidates fairly and effectively, the entire company benefits. In this workshop, participants learn how to engineer a well thought-through interview experience, including creating and selecting interview questions with minimum bias and maximum predictive validity, how to assess answers and debrief on results. Participants in this workshop also learn how to make candidates feel welcome and included through deliberate nonverbal and verbal cues. Participants practiced all skills via role play.
Pre-work: Come to this workshop with a role in mind for which you are hiring or would like to hire in the future.
During this workshop participants will:
• Understand the role that bias plays in the interview process and how to mitigate it
• Reverse engineer their goals to identify job criteria, including:
• determine which knowledge & skills are needed for the role
• determine which ‘values fit’ and ‘culture add’ characteristics matter for the position
• Create well-crafted interview questions that exactly target the job criteria
• formulate behavioral questions that get to the essence of the criteria you want
• detect common interview question errors and fix them
• create a scoring system to quickly and discreetly record answers
• hold effective debrief conversations to fairly assess candidate performance
• Learn how to ask deepeners, clarifiers, follow-up questions, and pivots
• understand how to frame/set up a structure to the interview
• use the CAR method (context, action, result) to know where to ask follow-on questions
• practice asking deepeners, pivots, synthesizers
• Learn how to make the interview an inclusive experience (even if you don’t want to make and offer)
• opening, using nonverbal cues, making good transitions, handling questions, politely interrupting to keep timing on track, closing
• Discuss how to put what was learned in this workshop into action in the week ahead
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Identify bias hot spots in their interview process
• Develop predictive job criteria
• Help the team discuss candidates in an efficient and fair way
• Facilitate interviews that provide insight and increase the quality of hiring decisions
• Create a great candidate experience, even when the person is not being selected
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.
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.
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.
One of the most common reasons employees switch jobs is that they don’t feel that they are learning and growing. Most managers assume the only way to give their reports a feeling of growth is through promotions, but this solution is limited – especially when career paths aren’t clear or there are skill gaps. Instead, talented managers help their teams find opportunities for development in their current roles, transforming every day at work into a new chance to stretch and grow. This workshop teaches them how.
During this workshop, participants will:
• Learn how an employee’s feeling of growth and development are linked to engagement and retention, and how to think about “developing people” as part of their everyday role.
• Discuss common challenges managers face when it comes to developing their reports, including how to handle skill gaps.
• Practice utilizing a “job crafting matrix” to help direct reports become more self-aware and gain momentum using task crafting, relational crafting, and cognitive crafting.
• Practice each component of a career coaching conversation, including helping direct reports think through growth opportunities using a 3Es Model: experience, education, and exposure.
• Practice moving people toward action, overcoming obstacles, stretching, and naming the win.
• Explore opportunities to integrate development into everyday tasks and conversations.
• Learn how to strategically think about team-wide development: succession planning and future skills that will be needed to hit ideal targets.
• Practice turning any conversation into a development opportunity, including “adaptive development”- how to help people develop skills quickly in uncertain times or shifting roles.
• Discuss how to put what they learned in this workshop into action in the week ahead.
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Support their reports in creating a growth plan
• Give their direct reports the attention they need to continually develop
• Help perpetuate a learning culture by regularly extracting insights from experiences
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.
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.
When leading a meeting, giving a presentation, or handling difficult conversations, a speaker’s body language often matters as much as the words they use. In this workshop we use hacks from advanced perception research to make small changes in a meeting leader’s delivery style, leading to a big improvement in the ability to be persuasive and connect with an audience. We cut through the obvious stuff that everyone knows and move straight to the things that make the biggest difference. Participants walk away with a visible improvement in their delivery skills – both in person and virtual!
Topics covered:
• Interpersonal perception research: how to understand the interplay between warmth vs. competence domains, both in person and virtual
• Exercises in eye contact, gesture, energy leveling, reduction of nonverbal noise, purposeful movement, strategic pause, emphasis and inflection
• Use of ‘marker gestures’ to add structure when topics are complex
• Filmed practice exercises to determine default positions (and optimizations) when under pressure
• Practice exercises with Q&A sessions and handling difficult questions
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Optimize nonverbal and verbal habits, so that they come across as both competent and warm, flexible and structured, and able to handle pressure well
• Add structure to complex topics and handle difficult questions well
• Create an action plan they can immediately use, focusing on one improvement area per week
CAREER GROWTH
Innovative, fast-growing organizations are constantly changing. This organizational reality means that there are rarely predictable “career ladders” to climb. Instead, career growth is more like rock climbing. It requires employees to collect a variety of skills and experiences and “own” their own development without expecting their manager to tell them how to grow. In this workshop, we teach the three things that research shows makes the biggest difference for individuals who successfully grow their careers: they understand their own strengths, they cultivate a diverse network, and they proactively build their skills.
During this workshop participants will:
• Experience a mindset shift about career growth (from ladder climbing to rock climbing)
• Identify their personal career priorities
• Complete a series of exercises to discover their strengths and energizers
• Identify gaps where they can build skills that support the team and organization
• Become aware of their opportunities to increase the diversity and openness of their network
• Walk away with a plan to increase growth in three Es: Experience, Education, Exposure
After this workshop, participants will know how to:
• Proactively identify opportunities to grow their careers
• Communicate their motivation and work interests to their manager
• Increase their social capital by diversifying their social network
• Identify skill development opportunities that benefit the team and/or company
• Make a case for taking on a stretch assignment