Leadership Series

The Leadership Series Wellbeing webinars teach skills to...

...develop a culture of care.
...become more accountable.
...model emotional flexibility and wellbeing behaviours.

...develop a culture of care. ...become more accountable. ...model emotional flexibility and wellbeing behaviours.

A Manager’s Guide to Accountability & Care

Company, Team & Personal Commitments

Accountability breeds response-ability.

Stephen Covey

A Manager’s Guide to Accountability & Care

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers

Available formats:

2-hour, 3-hour (half-day), 1 day sessions

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Accountability has been defined in a multitude of ways. Nevertheless, framing it as a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results feels the most conducive.    

Excellence is built on a foundation of accountability. When accountability is the norm within teams, team members (1) feel safe to take ownership of problems, (2) cooperate instead of pointing fingers, and (3) find sustainable solutions that make the whole organisation more effective. Team accountability begins, however, with changing managers’ mindsets and behaviours.

A Manager’s Guide to Accountability & Care session is a practical workshop to equip participants with impactful tools to demonstrate accountability and care towards their company and each member of their team.

Accountability and care towards the company
  • Defining what accountability is and what it is not

  • Main areas of accountability for managers 

  • Understanding the big picture: accountability’s impact

  • Beware: six common ways of deflecting accountability

  • Main accountability practices: aligning on results, asking for accountability feedback, building the wisdom to solve issues, acting on issues

  • Further accountability practices: shifting to an ownership mindset, making effective decisions

Accountability and care towards team members
  • Defining what caring is and what it is not

  • Understanding the big picture: the impact of caring leadership

  • Caring leadership practices: authentic presence, empathy and empowerment 

  • Main accountability practices: training accountability, coaching accountability, holding people accountable, rewarding accountability  

  • Role-modelling accountability

  • Distinguish between accountability and responsibility 
  • Recognise their accountabilities related to driving business performance, company resources, company culture and the workforce 

  • Stop their victim cycle (e.g. ducking responsibility not to have to deal with the hassle of extra work, avoiding blaming, practising the “wait and see approach” and withholding action, etc. ) 

  • Invite candid feedback about their performance 

  • Practice accountability through taking the initiative, staying engaged and persisting, thinking differently, creating new linkages, etc.

  • Demonstrate caring leadership by showing up more authentically, making themselves more accessible, adapting to team members’ needs, acknowledging and validating people’s experiences, etc. 

  • Ask a number of impactful questions to correct poor accountability behaviours within their teams

  • Recognise and reward people who step up and take accountability

  • Hold people accountable through a three-step model

A Manager’s Guide to Accountability & Care

Would You Like More Information About This Webinar?

Caring Leadership

Building Bonds, Harnessing Strengths

It turns out that trust is, in fact, earned in the smallest of moments. It is earned not through heroic deeds, or even highly visible actions, but through paying attention, listening, and gestures of genuine care and connection.

Brené Brown

Caring Leadership

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers

Available formats:

2 x 1,5-hour, 1-day sessions 

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Optional add-ons:

Stress & Wellbeing Assessment

During COVID-19, employees saw unprecedented kindness and care from their leaders. Managers proactively reached out more frequently to check in, counsel, empathise and provide practical assistance. They learned more about and became more sensitive to their employees’ wellbeing needs.

To some extent, the pandemic has also shed light on what matters the most in leadership: the unique connection forged between a leader and every individual team member. It is the strength of this one-on-one relationship that creates mutual trust, increases the leader’s ability to influence employees and elicits high levels of engagement, even in the face of the most difficult challenges.

After experiencing a more humane leadership style, employees are unlikely to welcome a revision to a command-and-control and all-business relationship with their managers.

Will leaders backslide to old, habitual ways of interaction? Or will they build on the fundamental shifts in focus and style to which they so adeptly pivoted at the onset of the pandemic?

This two-part Caring Leadership series will aid managers in becoming stewards of their most precious assets: the individuals they have been entrusted to lead. During the two workshops, participants will learn a toolbox of concrete, easy-to-apply practices to demonstrate Caring Leadership.

1

Self Leadership & Essential Stewardship

When people cared about each other, they always found a way to make it work.

Nicholas Sparks

  • What is caring leadership, why it matters, and the ROI of caring leadership 

  • The Leading yourself first practice: answering the why, embracing intentionality, allowing support  

  • The You are important practice: giving recognition, increasing connection, providing accessibility 

  • The I see your growth potential, and I will support you practice: allowing people to shine, giving tools 

  • The I would appreciate your help and involvement practice: sharing the burden, releasing control, creating involvement

  • Understand their “why” for being leaders

  • Be more intentional in how they speak and behave with their team members 

  • Recognise team members in more tailored ways 

  • Become accessible to employees in meaningful ways

  • Help others to find their voice 

  • Better grow the gifts and talents of others 

  • Release control and use their teams as sounding boards for their own thinking

  • Help team members to make contributions

2

Building Team Resilience & Psychological Safety

Leaders who do not listen, will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.

Andy Stanley

  • Creating a culture of listening: seeking, reflecting, affirming, connecting  

  • Creating psychological safety: earning trust, showing openness, extending invitations    

  • Empowering employees to make decisions: loosening up, clarifying expectations, inviting risk-taking

  • Building team resilience: modelling resilience, being a guide 

  • Practising holistic leadership: seeing the whole person, paying attention to details

  • Use the three levels of listening within the organisation 

  • Establish a culture where others can speak up, pose questions or present countering views   

  • Practice psychologically safe interactions

  • Release their need to micromanage team members and allow more freedom instead

  • Represent a different way of thinking about employees’ current circumstances

  • Reframe change and business challenges   

  • Show more empathy and compassion  

  • Relate deeper to the people they lead on an individual level

Caring Leadership

Would You Like More Information About This Webinar?

Developing Emotional Flexibility

Train-the-Trainer: Enhancing Wellbeing for Self & Others

Flexibility is the new workplace currency.

Dr. Naira Velumyan

Developing Emotional Flexibility

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers, HR Specialist, Wellbeing Champions, Employees   

Available formats:

2 x 1,5-hour, 1-day sessions

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Emotional flexibility is employees’ capacity to manage and adapt their emotions across various situations.  It involves being open to different emotional experiences (pleasant and not-so-pleasant), controlling emotions effectively, and adjusting emotional responses to situational demands. Emotional flexibility is associated with resilience, improved relationships, and better mental wellbeing.

When employees are emotionally flexible, they significantly increase their tolerance for internal and external stressors. Emotional flexibility also allows them to shift their perception and actions when confronted with change and novelty.  

In this two-part webinar series on Developing Emotional Flexibility, managers, HR specialists, and wellbeing champions are trained on six interactive elements: first, to establish their own emotional flexibility and wellbeing, and then to support employees in becoming more emotionally flexible.

1

Finding Anchor in Values, Presence
and the Unknown

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

Viktor Frankl

1. Values and Purpose: Your North Star

The foundation of emotional wellbeing lies in understanding our purpose and why we show up to what we do in everyday life. Consciously reflecting on purpose and values is essential since it forms our inner compass, especially when we feel the most challenged.

  • Becoming self-authoring

  • Outlining an inner compass 

  • Defining your strengths: what gives you energy?

  • Best-self aspiration: the pull of your future self 

2. Mindfulness: The Power of Your Focus 

The next element is mindfulness. This element is about building a mental muscle and creating a single-minded focus in your key daily activities. This element is at the core of all other elements of the framework.

  • Noticing and using the pause button at work

  • Oxygenising and nourishing your cells

  • Mindfulness throughout your workday: when & how

3. Acceptance: Looking Fear in the Eye

When we are scared, we try to avoid complex challenges at work, we are afraid to fail or make mistakes. While this is entirely understandable, becoming flexible includes consciously going out of our comfort zones and learning from the experience. We must look our deeply held fears in the eye, with presence and without judgement. Doing so will reduce their negative impact by half.

  • Growth versus fixed mindsets

  • The “Saying yes to challenges” challenge 

  • The practice of self-compassion  

  • Reframing anxiety

  • Reflect on how their thoughts about their past, present and future inform their perceptions, actions, emotions and behaviours in the present

  • Identify their core personal values and align them with organisational values and goals 

  • Assess their strengths and areas where they excel

  • Identify activities and situations that energise them
     
  • Better manage stress and increase focus through practical mindfulness exercises

  • Schedule various types of intentional breaks during their workday
     
  • Evaluate their mindsets, and the impact of these mindsets on the people around them
     
  • Apply simple growth mindset principles

  • Identify opportunities for personal and professional growth by accepting challenges

  • Teach these emotional flexibility tools to others

2

Springing Into Smart Action

Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear.

Norman Vincent Peale

4. Defusion: Keeping Worries in a Healthy Distance 

At the beginning of the second webinar, we continue with the fourth element – defusion – and look for triggers for worries, anxiety, and ‘what ifs’ in our minds. With defusion, we distance ourselves from our real or imagined fears. We do not ignore their presence but change our relationship to them. We leave them outside our nervous system so that we can focus on our task at hand and stay calm.

  • Naming your inner critic 

  • Creating space and staying focused: the bubble technique 

  • Practising psychological halloweenism 

5. Self-in-Context: Taking the Helicopter View 

The fifth element – self-in-context – is about building the ability to look at challenges from a distance. Often, we are so caught up in our busyness that we do not have an overview of everything that is happening. Here, we focus on taking the helicopter view and putting things in perspective.

  • Learning to zoom-in and zoom-out

  • The art of taking a flexible perspective

6. Committed Action: 5-4-3-2-1 Go!

The last element – committed action – is about creating a clear plan, supported by micro-level actions and a support network that we integrate into our lives to achieve our goals. 

  • Why are you not taking action? 

  • Overcoming self-sabotage and quitting your brain tricks

  • Mitigating excuses for success

  • Setting up your personal board of advisors

  • Identify and name their inner critic’s negative self-talk patterns

  • Manage and reframe their inner critic’s commentary for improved self-confidence and decision-making

  • Make physical and mental space for what matters to them
     
  • Use the attention bubble techniques and break down anxiety-inducing tasks and find  “small missions” they can complete in six minutes

  • Use techniques to step back from immediate issues and see the bigger picture

  • Identify their reasons for procrastination and inaction

  • Use the NASA technique to overcome procrastination and inaction

  • Recognise their self-sabotaging behaviours and have an action plan to counter them
      
  • Help others to take action

Developing Emotional Flexibility

Would You Like More Information About This Webinar?

Mental Health in the Workplace

Fostering a Culture of Care

Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.

Erik Erikson

Mental Health in the Workplace

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers, HR Specialist, Wellbeing Champions, Employees   

Available formats:

1-hour, 1,5-hour sessions 

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-low

Optional add-ons:

Stress & Wellbeing Assessment

Accountability has been defined in a multitude of ways. Nevertheless, framing it as a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results feels the most conducive.    

Excellence is built on a foundation of accountability. When accountability is the norm within teams, team members (1) feel safe to take ownership of problems, (2) cooperate instead of pointing fingers, and (3) find sustainable solutions that make the whole organisation more effective. Team accountability begins, however, with changing managers’ mindsets and behaviours.

A Manager’s Guide to Accountability & Care session is a practical workshop to equip participants with impactful tools to demonstrate accountability and care towards their company and each member of their team.

  • The five components of optimal mental health 

  • Current wellbeing themes and statistics

  • Wellbeing modelling and psychological safety   

  • The vigilance framework: monitoring for signs of decreased mental health 

  • Assessing individual and team wellbeing 

  • Failure to intervene: common blocks   

  • A step-by-step guide to raising mental health concerns

  • Clearly understand and communicate their roles in their teams’ wellbeing

  • Introduce vital elements of psychological safety into team dynamics 

  • Recognise the emotional, mental and physical signs of mental health decline

  • Monitor individual and team wellbeing in a concrete way 

  • Initiate empathetic mental health conversations

  • Guide team members to available mental health support

Mental Health in the Workplace

Would You Like More Information About This Webinar?

Multigenerational Teams

Dimensions of Wellbeing

Managing multigenerational workforces is an art in itself. Young workers want to make quick impact, the middle generation needs to believe in the mission, and older employees do not like ambivalence.

Harvard Business School

Multigenerational Teams

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers

Available formats:

1,5-hour, 2-hour, 3-hour (half-day) sessions

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Today’s workforce is a kaleidoscope of five generations, where each generation brings its values, communication styles, work habits, and wellbeing needs to the (often virtual) table. 

When multigenerational differences are not understood, managed and positively integrated, manager-employee communication, team cohesion, and productivity suffer. At the same time, employee mental health can take a deep dive.  

The focus of the Multigenerational Teams session is to help managers develop an awareness and understanding of inter-generational differences and the five fundamental roles they need to fulfil to keep team members motivated and engaged.

  • Wellbeing within teams: defining optimal mental health, understanding mental health stigma

  • Managers’ top five roles in managing team wellbeing: monitoring for signs of decreased mental health, signposting, modelling health behaviours  (roles 1-3)

  • Multigenerational wellbeing: understanding generations –  characteristics, strengths and difficulties, training needs of the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z (role 4)

  • Promoting psychological safety, diversity and inclusion: eliminating generational assumptions, practising generational diversity (role 5)
  • Understand the attributes of a genuinely well-functioning employee

  • Spot physical, mental and emotional signs of declining mental health, especially among team members who belong to the “vulnerable population”

  • Signpost employees to company-wide wellbeing resources

  • Model positive wellbeing behaviours (personal and corporate) to team members

  • Understand the strengths, difficulties and training needs of the five different generations

  • Better manage and motivate individual employees based on generational preferences 

  • Manage their assumptions about generational differences

  • Establish and encourage generational diversity within their teams in practical ways

Multigenerational Teams

Would You Like More Information About This Webinar?

Psychological Safety

Creating an Ecosystem of Collaboration

A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people that trust each other.

Simon Sinek

Psychological Safety

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers

Available formats:

1-hour, 1,5-hour, 1-day, 2-day sessions 

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Optional add-ons:

Stress & Wellbeing Assessment

Organisations can expect tremendous change and unpredictability in the next decades. To adapt while staying creative, innovative, and resilient in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, team members will need more interdependence than ever. At the same time, team leaders must ensure they have everybody’s brains and voices in the game, which is only feasible when workers enjoy psychological safety.

Psychological safety is a lived experience in which employees feel actively included and appreciated within their teams. It allows them to express their ideas, voice their concerns, ask questions, admit mistakes, learn, and challenge the status quo without negative consequences.

Managers’ knowledge, leadership style, and daily leadership behaviours are significant in creating and maintaining psychological safety. However, a discrepancy may exist between managers’ perceptions of their team’s culture and team members’ actual experiences. While people leaders believe they have created a psychologically safe environment, the team’s daily interactions and behaviours may tell a different story.

Psychological safety is not just another fashionable leadership concept but a necessity. Its absence can stifle potential, neutralise performance, and erode an individual’s sense of self-worth. Managers who fail to establish psychological safety may witness their team members withdrawing, self-censoring, and redirecting their energy towards risk avoidance. Conversely, in psychologically safe environments, employees are more likely to take ownership and initiative, show discretionary effort, and actively seek and value input from colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

This highly interactive Psychological Safety session will equip managers with a practical toolkit to build, maintain, and model psychological safety so their team members can bring their whole selves and best ideas to the table.  

The content of the extended sessions (1-day and 2-day sessions) is available upon request.

  • A quick review of psychological safety: theory, research, tragedies and triumphs 

  • Recipe for disaster: how to damage performance, motivation and wellbeing 

  • Leadership styles that support and hinder psychological safety 

  • The four quadrants of employee experience based on leadership behaviour
      
  • Igniting the four stages of psychological safety: inclusion, learner, contributor and challenger safety

  • Five types of leadership and team behaviours to elevate psychological safety 

  • Measuring psychological safety in teams – quantitative and qualitative strategies
  • Become better social architects
     
  • Answer some challenging questions about whether they create psychologically safe environments
     
  • Understand how authoritative, consultative, supportive and challenging leadership impacts psychological safety
     
  • Actively included all team members, making them feel important and appreciated

  • Encourage team members to ask more questions and experiment

  • Inspire people to express their unique ideas
     
  • Provide space for people to question ideas, plans, ways of working, etc.
       
  • Allow constructive dissent
     

  • Acknowledge their own fallibility
     
  • Better grasp the interaction between motivation, accountability and psychological safety
     
  • Practice innovation, communication, inclusion, team cohesion and “learning from failure” behaviours to boost psychological safety

Psychological Safety

Would You Like More Information About This Webinar?

The Mindful Leader

Leading With Presence & Purpose

Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

John C. Maxwell

The Mindful Leader

Webinar details

Available versions:

for Managers

Available formats:

5 x 1-hour, 5 x 1,5-hour, 1-day, 2-day sessions

Place of delivery:

online, on-site

Interaction level: 

medium-high

Optional add-ons:

Stress & Wellbeing Assessment for people managers

It has become standard form to speak about the early 21st century as the era of ‘VUCA’: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. On top of the economic, social, geopolitical and health struggles we face collectively, we are called to address the widening gap between how we imagined our professional lives and the present, ever-emerging, hybrid work reality. We are facing countless adaptive challenges

Many employees still face the pandemic’s productivity, motivation, and mental health consequences. At the same time, managers continue performing a dual role: delivering team results and driving change while actively supporting their team members’ wellbeing – which became a strategic initiative.

In these trying times, mindfulness is an indispensable instrument in the managerial toolkit. Contrary to popular belief, mindfulness is not a relaxation tool but a series of practices that lead to a clear state of mind that helps to focus on what matters the most: keeping calm under pressure, developing leadership presence, fostering connection, enhancing motivation, driving effectiveness and increasing engagement and enjoyment. 

The Mindful Leader Sessions will help managers look after their own mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing and facilitate improvement in performance, job satisfaction, psychological safety and organisational citizenship among their staff by using powerful mindfulness tools.

1

Marrying Leadership & Mindfulness

A boss has the title, a leader has the people.

Simon Sinek

  • A state of flux: living and leading in a VUCA world

  • The six primary sources of workplace stress: are you one of them? 

  • Distinguishing six leadership styles based on emotional intelligence
     
  • Common leadership behaviours that arrest learning and growth
     
  • Defining mindfulness, understanding its impact, the ROI of mindful leadership

  • Practising a new kind of leadership accountability
     
  • Introducing distress tolerance
  • Grasp how the current VUCA environment challenges employees’ psychology and behaviour in five distinctive ways
     

  • Name the six key areas of work design that, if not adequately managed and supported, are associated with lower employee productivity and health and higher absence rates
       
  • Reflect on the (dis)advantages of their current leadership style
     
     
  • Practice radical self-reflection
     
  • Decrease power and leadership stress and increase presence
      
  • Better manage negative emotions and distress so they don’t impact their leadership capabilities 

2

Mindfulness Essentials

Great leaders have three things: inner light, inner vision, and inner strength.

Sri Amit Ray

  • Presence: the antidote to reactive leadership
     
  • The four foundations of mindfulness

  • Orienting: anchoring in the present moment
     
  • Pattern recognition: who is leading your team, really?
     
  • Observing the monkey mind: creating your leadership reality
     
  • Observing the landscape: recognising, honouring and diffusing emotions
  • Increase their (leadership) self-awareness

  • Recognise the three ways they tend to lose connection with everyday reality
     
  • Liberate themselves from the push and pull of their physical sensations, emotions and thoughts at work

  • Practice exploratory orienting as a response to stressful work situations

  • Recognise their deeply ingrained behavioural patterns that may damage manager-employee relationships and workplace dynamics
       
  • Observe and reframe their disempowering thoughts towards themselves and their colleagues
     
  • React to strong, negative emotions in the most beneficial way

3

Creating Leadership Presence

Posture is the architecture of our being. It represents and shapes our inner stance.

Marcel Boymans

  • The way you hold your body is the way you manage and lead
     
  • The leaders that impact us

  • “Good” and “bad” leadership embodiment
     
  • Developing your personal space: are your team members shrinking or expanding in your presence?

  • Saying your authentic yes, saying your authentic no
     
  • Demonstrating inclusiveness and acceptance towards your team members
       
  • Embodying desirable leadership qualities: what do you stand for?
  • Recognise their bodily reaction to the idea of leadership 

  • Recognise the habitual way(s) they hold their bodies and its impact on their leadership style
     
  • Say no with kindness and compassion; say yes with conviction
      
  • Recover to centre when triggered
      
  • Speak up without “aggression” or “collapsing”

  • Demonstrate warmth and inclusiveness
     
  • Embody coveted leadership qualities, e.g. humility, flexibility, optimism, integrity, drive
     
  • Shift out of body postures that work against their desired leadership effect

  • Shift into body postures and bodily states that support their desired leadership effect

4

Leading From Mindful Values

Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.

Stephen Covey

  • What “values” really are and their psychological importance
     
  • Defining your leadership philosophy
     
  • The no. 1 value your team members appreciate the most

  • Mind the shadow! Are you generating conflict?
     
  • Living your leadership values: tuning into your senses and feedback
     
  • Establishing core team values
  • Understand how having clear values creates simplicity and wellbeing in their lives
     
  • Verbalise who they are and what they stand for
     
  • Verbalise their wholesome values
     
  • Be more honest with themselves and others
     
  • Recognise their value violations and how they might alienate direct reports
     
  • Distinguish when they externalise vs internalise their values
     
  • Remind themselves in practical ways to keep their values even under pressure
     
  • Establish clear behavioural standards and stories around core values with their teams

5

Mindful Communication

Communication works for those who work at it.

John Powell

  • Conversation as nourishment: are you feeding or poisoning your team?
     
  • Communication with self vs communication with others
     
  • “Right” speech vs  “wrong” speech as a leader

  • Listening when it is hard to listen
      
  • The four foundations of mindful communication
        
  • Five ways to communicate support, understanding and care towards team members
  • Solidify peace and compassion in themselves and bring wellbeing to others
     
     
  • Practice deep listening and loving speech
     
  • Recognise conversation killers
     
  • Better communicate when angry
     
  • Talk more truthfully, consistently and peacefully
     
  • Give authentic presence and recognition
      
  • Better acknowledge direct deports’ stress, everyday experience, difficulties, etc.
      
  • Ask for personal, practical, emotional help if needed
      
  • Explicitly acknowledge meaningful moments during meetings, one-to-one conversations

The Mindful Leader

Would You Like More Information About This Webinar?

Contact Me With Your Inquiry

I will get back to you as soon as possible

Contact Form - Leadership

The content of this website is Copyright-protected and cannot be copied.