Programs
Building Influence
The How and the What
No matter what your role or experience level, this course will help you get better at increasing trust, listening, thinking critically, and becoming more persuasive. All of these things can be accomplished by focusing on presence and storytelling. We will develop skills and mindsets to become connected and reliable leaders, and communicate with clarity and purpose.
Course Objectives
Identify behaviors and mindsets to increase impact and influence
Practice behaviors that build trust and encourage respectful communication
Practice intentional behavioral choices aligned with influence & relationship objectives
Understand the power of story as a meaning-making and learning tool
Acquire tools for identifying your key message and the needs of your audience
Use structures to create well-organized narratives that drive your key message
Use action and description to craft compelling and customized stories
Practice adapting stories in the moment based on listener reaction and feedback
Identify ambient narratives and communication traps to avoid
Receive and apply individual coaching and feedback
Who is it For
Any leader who want to build communication, connection, and influencing skills.
Length
Two modules*
3-4 hours of content on the “How” (Status, Presence, Personal Performance) and “What of Influence (Storytelling and Honing Your Message)
1-1.5 hour small group coaching sessions as desired
Align Your Team
Session to Ramp Up-Pivot-Realign for Results
Savvy leaders recognize that change today is not an event but a constant process. When you assume responsibility for a new team, how do you quickly align the work with the strategy/vision? How do you pivot at high speed when conditions change?
To remain agile you need a simple, reliable process for taking stock of your team’s current reality and priorities, conveying a new vision or challenge, and realigning the work to get there. In this practical working session you and your team will:
Refocus on the customer and the highest leverage drivers of results
Re-align work priorities & team goals • Simplify and eliminate work based on insight into highest ROI
Build shared understanding and team commitment
Create the “dashboard” you need to manage execution going forward
*Session involves intact team. Specific content and timeline configured based on pre-conversation with the leader.
Improv is the gym
Exercising your Leadership, Communication, Creativity, and Collaboration
Organizations are preaching the value of high emotional intelligence, creativity, and communication skills. What used to be seen as “touchy-feely” or “soft”, are now recognized as indispensable. But creativity, empathy, flexibility, awareness, risk-taking and courage are not bodies of knowledge. They are skills that must be practiced, muscles that must be exercised.
Cutting edge companies of all kinds are turning to the world of improvisational theatre for their training and development needs in these areas. Improv is the gym. Improvisers make up scenes, songs, whole plays, on-the-spot, in front of paying audiences demanding to be entertained. They are masters of instant collaborative creativity, and they have developed a unique set of activities and principles to enable anyone to grow those abilities. In this activity-based program, we will explore how to apply improv to organizational development to:
Exercise empathy and awareness
Celebrate risk-taking to expand people’s ability to innovate, deal with change, and step into new roles
Unleash creative genius so your people can solve problems and design solutions quickly and effectively
Build collaborative momentum by supporting others, building trust and maximizing your influence
Storytelling for Influence
Inspire, Problem-Solve, and Deepen Connection
The ability to influence others when stakes are high can have huge impact on a career, a team, an organization. Storytelling, the ancient communication method, taps into the fundamental way our brain makes meaning and helps us understand new concepts, engage deeply, ignite our passion, and connect with others to have greater impact. In this active, practical session, you will unpack the building blocks of great storytelling to make this innate, unconscious meaning-making process conscious.
Participants will leave with a fully crafted story of their own, and a storytelling toolkit to apply in business contexts and beyond to communicate with clarity and purpose and engage audiences both formal and informal. Participants will:
Understand the power of story as a meaning-making and influencing tool
Acquire tools for identifying your message and the needs, values and preferences of your audience.
Use key structures to create well-organized narratives that drive toward your key message
Distinguish between action and description in order to craft compelling and memorable stories customized for the moment and the audience
Learn the Secret Sauces of Story
Recognize your individual storytelling strengths and habits
Perform with Presence
A Presentation Skills Intensive
Whether you’re an experienced presenter wanting to fine-tune your skills, a beginning presenter with a bad case of nerves, or fall somewhere in between, Koppett’s presentation skills intensive will strengthen your impact as a presenter.
Participants will learn and practice skills and tools for delivering polished, compelling presentations. Through a series of highly-interactive activities and individual coaching, participants will:
Strengthen their physical presence and range with practical tips and tricks
Learn three core presentation structures that aid retention and clarity
Identifying key messages and objectives
Practice understanding and connecting with the audience
Receive individual coaching and feedback
Harness the power of storytelling
The Power of WE
Building and Nurturing the Team
This interactive session is about learning to mobilize your team to contribute their best. It starts with our own practice in building connections with others as we think about crafting situations for others and ourselves to generate stronger cohesion. We then dive into 3 tools to building and nurturing the team:
creating safety and belonging
inviting courage and vulnerability
establishing a shared purpose
By learning small ways to shape the culture of our team through our words and actions, we can have big effects on growing community and collective capacity
together. Participants will
Identify ways to communicate connection and belonging
Discuss strategies for investing in collegial relationships across differences
Learn to reinforce healthy habits that build trust and support risk-taking
Identify stories that create shared goals and values on a team
Recognize when complex challenges require leaders to facilitate a share reality among the team
Leading with Power
Using Status, Authority and Influence for Good
Suspect you might be caught in a power struggle? Do you want to have influence at a higher level? Would you like to be able to shift the group climate to be more collaborative and productive? A conscious awareness of the dynamics of status and power can help you inspire trust, have your ideas heard and taken seriously, minimize unhealthy conflict, and create environments where people feel engaged and respected.
In this module, we will:
Learn the non-verbal vocabulary of status, authority and power
Expand awareness of your habitual status behaviors and where they help and hurt your cause
Understand what positive status moves look like
Practice applying status fluency to communicate with confidence and in difficult situations
Listening 3.0
Working this Super-Skill for Increased Connection and Relationship Building
We all know that listening is important for our success in relationships, but what does it really mean to listen well? How can we expand our awareness so we listen for nuance and capture not just information but needs, values, and emotions? How can we exercise our listening “muscle” so that we notice more, understand more deeply, and engage with more curiosity?
In this interactive session, we will:
Test our listening skills
Distinguish "listening as a partner" from "listening as a competitor”
Expand our tolerance for silence and exploration
Practice multi-dimensional listening
Receive individual coaching and feedback
Explore listening as a relationship- building and problem-solving tool
Creative Problem Solving
Exercising and Motivating Creativity
Creativity takes courage, playfulness and trust. Creative people don’t try to be creative: they are simply curious, open to moments of inspiration when they hit and are always willing to try a new way.
Creative people are masters of “failing forward,” accepting and learning from outcomes, expected and unexpected. In this session, participants will not only exercise their own individual creativity and risk-taking but explore how to support others in doing so. They will think as leaders about:
Creating motivating environments
The benefits of taking risks
Distinguishing creative mistakes and growth from systemic issues and performance gaps
Developing a culture of authentic, open communication and support
How to create trust and foster courage
Design thinking and process improvement techniques to support the above
Bridging the Virtual Divide
Skills to Establish Presence and Trust
The skills and mindsets that make effective leaders remain the same, even as the logistics of how we talk to people, manage projects, and prioritize have changed. We make choices about how we show up in this new frontier, and we want those choices to match the moment and our objectives.
In this interactive session, we will explore how to expand your range of your options to meet the new logistics of our world, and to have the impact you want. Participants will:
Learn how to establish presence in virtual space, and adjust it to meet your objectives
Practice the sophisticated listening skills necessary for building connection and trust
Get comfortable managing focus in virtual space with practical tips
Give you a break from Zoom fatigue, and offer tips on how to counter it in the future
Painless and Productive Role-Play
Creating and Facilitating High-Impact Scenarios
Role-play is an especially useful development tool. It gives participants a chance to try new strategies and tactics, strengthen their communication skills, prepare for difficult conversations, and so much more, all with no actual client or real-world impact.
While role playing is frequently used in training initiatives, it is also often cited as the most dreaded activity. It is considered artificial at best; humiliating and irrelevant at worst. There are simple techniques to learn to make role-play painless and productive.
Through this 4-module program, participants will:
Learn about the different types of role-play scenarios
Create their own role-play scenarios
Practice facilitating role-plays
Lean how to debrief and process role-plays in alignment with their key objectives
Practice playing the sparring partner effectively in different scenarios
Making Meetings Work
Practical, Playful, and Meaningful Strategies
Meetings are a necessary and ubiquitous part of organizational life. However, many meetings miss the mark, leaving attendees alienated, unclear about decisions made and next steps, and feeling their time and energy were wasted. In this session, we explore how to make meetings more focused, productive, and engaging.
Participants will learn:
When to have meetings (and when not to)
Who to invite (and who not to)
How to make meetings more enjoyable and inclusive (while remaining practical)
How to maintain focus without rigidity
How to identify and design your process for the three types of meeting
What questions to ask before, during, and after a meeting
How to follow up for maximal impact
Mastering the Feedback Process
Giving and Receiving Valuable Feedback
Have you been putting off giving valuable feedback to someone because you don’t know how to word it, or are afraid of what their reaction will be? Have you asked colleagues or managers for ways you can improve your performance only to receive answers like “you’re doing great,” or “keep doing what you’re doing”? Have you ever given feedback only to have it be violently rejected? T
he ability to give and receive constructive positive and negative feedback is an invaluable process for continuous growth and learning. This session offers an opportunity to explore and practice this vital skill for learning and growth.
In this fun, interactive session, participants will:
Learn what makes feedback most effective and impactful
Gain a deeper understanding of what happens when we receive feedback
Practice giving feedback
Practice asking for feedback
Building Cultures of Inclusion
Creating and Supporting Inclusive Cultures
It’s not just morally imperative that leaders and workspaces create and maintain inclusive environments- the best practices that make this possible deeply impact the success of a team.
The ability to connect effectively across multiple dimensions of diversity is a foundational competency for leaders and teams. It requires a set of skills and mindsets that allow people to build trust, exercise curiosity, open their minds to other points of view, and show up flexibly and creatively.
In this highly-interactive, experiential program, participants will exercise their skills and awareness in a wide variety of situations as we explore:
Individual dimensions of diversity and their impact on us as leaders
Identifying where individuals land in the spectrum of inclusion in a given context
Listening to understand and connect
Understanding of themselves, their assumptions, and values
Building a Resilient Workforce
Manage Stress and Bounce Back with Improv
There is no such thing as stasis in today’s workplace. As soon as one initiative is launched, the next is on the horizon. Landscapes are constantly shifting, colleagues cycle through at increasing rates, and constant innovation is assumed, and it seems that workloads are constantly increasing. How can anyone possibly survive intact?
In this interactive, practical and comforting interactive session you will learn how to build the resilience necessary to help yourselves and others thrive in our fast-paced, volatile, and high-stress environments. Through the lenses of applied improvisation, you will experience the benefits of philosophies and exercises that teach us how to:
Expand personal resilience for your own well-being and those around you
Create supportive and motivating environments
Accept and build with what exists, rather than fighting or resisting reality
Engage optimistically with yourself and others
Learn a variety of tools and exercises for use back on the job
Manager Bootcamp
Leading with Impact
“People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers.”
Research suggests that organizations benefit significantly from investing in good management practices that prioritize trust, well-being, and adaptability, which in turn enhances employee satisfaction and organizational success. Yet, many people managers never get the training they need to excel.
6-Module Program: Participants will learn to…
Recognize the value and impact of managing others
Identify the key practices and mindsets of great managers
Enhance the core management skills of managers at all levels
Provide a structured development approach that sustains learning and systematically increases performance for managers and reports
Modular Design: Delivery can vary from a series of live virtual segments over time to a 3 day in-person intensive. Individual and small-group coaching available as support.
Topics Include*:
From Individual Contributor to Manager: Why Managing Matters
Setting Expectations: Goal Setting, Delegation and Support
Team Alignment and Supporting Inclusive Culture
Making Meetings Work
Performance Support: Feedback, Coaching, and Performance Reviews
Navigating Conflict and Performance Improvement Planning
Managing Up
*Additional topics may include: Trust and Engagement, Self and Team Well-Being, Adaptive Leadership and Resilience, etc.
From IC to Manager
Manager Bootcamp Session 1 (or stand alone)
“People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers.”
Description: Transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager is a significant career shift that comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities. This workshop is designed to provide you with tools, insights, and practical skills to navigate the transition successfully. This includes understanding the value of being an effective people manager, spotting common challenges and strategies to overcome them, learning practical tips for managing teams, and creating a personalized development plan to support ongoing growth.
We will discuss the transitions from:
Doing the work to supporting and guiding the work
Being a subject-matter expert to developing others
Task focus to big-picture thinking
Intra team collaboration to inter-departmental collaboration
Topics include:
Recognizing the transition
Qualities of effective leaders
The who, why, and how of managing
Managing yourself white managing your team
Who is it For
Any leader who want to build communication, connection, and influencing skills.
Length
3 hours - In person or virtual
Say, What? The Art of Listening in a Technological World
We all know that listening is important for our success as salespeople and leaders.Working this super-skill helps us to build relationships, solve problems and create opportunity.
But what does it really mean to listen well? How can we expand our awareness so we listen for nuance and capture not just information but needs, values, and emotions? How can we exercise our listening “muscle” so that we notice more, understand more deeply, and engage with more curiosity?
Test our listening skills
Distinguish "listening as a partner" from "listening as a competitor”
Expand our tolerance for silence and exploration
Practice multi-dimensional listening
Explore listening as a relationship-building, sales, and problem-solving tool
Let's Keep in Touch
Ready to unlock new possibilities?
Schedule your complimentary consultation now.