Conversations Worth Having: Bootcamps

Communication

It remains the top issue for organizations, teams, and relationships. Almost everyone struggles with how to effectively communicate when they are frustrated or facing conflict. The effects of poor communication are costly. They show up in organizations as:

• Employee disengagement, malaise, and turnover
• Dysfunctional teams
• Poor performance
• Inability to give and receive critical feedback
• Negative attitudes, cliques, and gossip: a culture of “me”

If you’re dealing with any of these outcomes, the Conversations Worth Having Bootcamp will give you the skills and tools to turn them around. This program is grounded in Appreciative Inquiry, one of the most widely used positive change approaches. Two simple Appreciative Inquiry practices can turn your entire culture around, creating a culture of conversations worth having.

Conversation Bootcamp 1: Conversations Worth Having

Step into Your Capacity to Fuel Productivity and Meaningful Engagement!

Following this workshop, you will have tools to establish communication practices that will support productivity, engagement, high performance teams, regular feedback, positivity, and a culture of “we.”
You will walk away prepared to:

• Keep your cool when you want to explode!
• Effectively challenge assumptions and preconceptions, including yours.
• Deal with conflict quickly and effectively.
• Fuel productive and meaningful engagement.
• Communicate successfully with people who hold negative attitudes or defensive positions.
• Give and receive critical feedback in ways that promote learning and high performance.
• Ask the kind of questions that deepen understanding, strengthen connections, and inspire possibility.
• Talk with colleagues in ways that invite them to collaborate on projects and strategic outcomes.
• Listen with genuine curiosity.
• Frame any conversation, even one around a highly complex problem, to inspire creative and innovative thinking and solutions.

Conversation Bootcamp 2: Strategic Conversations

Step into Your Capacity to Foster Whole System Strategic Thinking, Planning, and Leading

A lack of strategic thinking and planning in organizations is costly. The greatest expense is the investment of time and resources into activities that do not support company goals or the mission. In addition, employees show up, do their work, and go home. This results in missed opportunities. Without a context for their work, employees are not inspired to think or plan creatively about process improvement, innovation, or cost savings. And anyone who has tried knows, it can be a struggle to get teams to buy-in to strategic goals, much less think and work in alignment with those goals.

Developing your leadership ability for strategic thinking and planning, coupled with the skills to engage in strategic conversations significantly improves your value as a leader. The days of hiring an outside agency to create a strategic plan for your organization are over; so too should be strategic plans developed at the top and handed down for others to implement. Organizations poised for growth and success have leaders who are adopting strategic thinking as an on-going way of doing business and strategic planning that engages employees across the whole organization as well as external stakeholders. They engage everyone in developing agile plans, cycles of experimentation and learning, innovation, and measuring actions against relevant metrics.

This bootcamp will support your capacity and develop capabilities to have strategic conversations at the level of the individual, team, division, and the whole organization or community.