Services

In-House Workshops

Organizations that thrive start with people development. We offer a variety of in-house workshops “off the shelf” and are ready to discuss ways to customize our programs to align with your unique needs.

Our in-house workshops can help…

  • Improve your planning and process for daily, weekly and one-off meetings.

  • Visually bring your meetings to life.

  • Grow your innovation muscle and prepare you to lead change.

  • Develop your coaching, listening and leadership skills.

Make Meetings Work(shop)

A workshop experience for anyone who leads or participates in meetings with a desire to make them work better.

Duration: MIN 1.5 hours | MAX 2 days
Participants: 5-50 per session

  • There are many reasons why some meetings don’t work: no clear outcomes or agenda, dominating personalities, no follow-up accountability, information overload, conflict or conflict avoidance. What if we told you each one of those issues is avoidable and that you could fix it? The answer is meeting skills.

    Facilitators get paid to make meetings seem like magic using a secret bag of tricks that only they have. The goal of our workshop is to bring these skills to anyone who leads or participates in meetings. During this workshop, you’ll learn practical techniques for improving day-to-day meetings, as well as how to plan and deliver longer, strategic sessions.

    This workshop is ideal for leaders and professionals who lead meetings but have no formal facilitation training and for participants who want to support better meetings with their team. Those with facilitation training may benefit from this program as a “gap-filler” experience.

  • ● What makes a meeting work?
    ● Basic collaborative decision-making
    ● Kicking off a meeting
    ● Basic meeting management
    ● Planning and preparation
    ● Designing an engaging agenda
    ● Meeting etiquette and agreements
    ● Energizers
    ● Brainstorming techniques
    ● Action and follow through
    ● Group decision-making
    ● Navigating conflict and complexity

We offer this workshop publicly once a year via our MeetingMakers Academy.

Facilitating with Visuals

A workshop for facilitators and professionals who want to improve meetings through visual tools and draw their way to better meetings.

Duration: MIN 1 hour | MAX 2 days
Participants: 5-50 per session

  • Visuals are central to facilitating engaging meetings, but many people lack a strong design muscle and the confidence to pick up a marker and draw on a flipchart. Visual tools increase engagement and shorten decision-making time. Stop making boring, meaningless slide decks and start bringing visuals into your meetings in a fun, purposeful and creative way that will have a real impact on improving the outcomes of your meetings.

  • ● Introduction to meeting visuals
    ● Beginner drawing skills for adults
    ● Making visual aids with flipcharts and markers
    ● Creating your own clipart and animations for slides
    ● Designing and facilitating with visual templates
    ● Drawing live and on the fly while facilitating or coaching
    ● Quick, simple and purposeful visual energizers
    ● Designing visual aids using MURAL

This workshop has an online, self-paced course available on Voltage Control.

Strategic Planning and Change Management

A workshop for leaders and professionals who want to understand the fundamentals of strategic planning and apply it to creating a vision and rolling out change.

Duration: MIN 1.5 hour | MAX 2 days
Participants: 5-50 per session

  • We use visual tools to guide the strategic planning process commonly known as strategic visioning. Strategic visioning is a process for facilitating effective strategic planning conversations, and these tools can be applied to planning for and rolling out change. You will walk away with an understanding of various reactions to change and how to communicate and drive change in a way that brings others along. The result is increased buy-in, better learning and long-lasting change initiatives.

  • ● Understanding change
    ● Leading change
    ● Introduction to strategic planning
    ● Strategic visioning tools
    ● Designing a messaging strategy
    ● Creating a rollout plan

Learn about The Grove’s model for strategic visioning.

Innovation and Human-Centered Design

A workshop for professionals who want to learn a process of innovation following the scientific process of experimentation and beginning with a deep understanding of user needs.

Duration: MIN 1.5 hour | MAX 2 days
Participants: 5-50 per session

  • Continuous learning enables innovative thinking, and understanding the human element makes innovation stick. Human-centered design models start by empathizing with the needs of users and stakeholders, forming hypotheses, prototyping ways to meet those needs, and learning what works before designing the final solution. This approach to innovation means that teams and organizations can maximize learning while minimizing investment and arrive at solutions that customers and stakeholders will be excited to embrace.

    We utilize tools from IDEO and LUMA Institute, schools for design thinking.

  • ● Intro to human-centered design
    ● Exploring user needs
    ● Group ideation methods
    ● Designing solutions and prototyping
    ● Experiential design sprint
    ● Gathering feedback and lessons learned
    ● Forming hypotheses
    ● Creating an experiment canvas

Learn about human-centered design in our blog on facilitation design for whole systems.

Listening and Coaching

A workshop for leaders and managers to improve their listening skills and build coaching into their teams for the purpose of professional development.

Duration: MIN 1.5 hour | MAX 2 days
Participants: 5-50 per session

  • Coaching helps individuals define goals, understand challenges and design a path forward in their careers and lives. Coaching skills give leaders more ways to support their teams and organizations, without always having to give direction. Listening is a fundamental coaching skill, along with asking powerful questions and offering feedback. This workshop will expose you to basic coaching skills, with an emphasis on listening to ourselves and listening to others. We will get you practicing with others and identify key areas of improvement to help you grow as a coach and a leader.

  • ● Listening to ourselves
    ● Levels of listening
    ● Listening skills (asking questions, paraphrasing, empathy)
    ● Intro to coaching
    ● Coaching skills assessment
    ● Situational leadership
    ● Coaching through change
    ● Coaching yourself

Check out our blogs on listening and growing as a leader.

Leadership Development

A workshop for emerging and tenured leaders who are open to the process of improving how they lead others, beginning with how they lead themselves.

Duration: MIN 1.5 hour | MAX 2 days*
Participants: 5-50 per session

  • Historically, organizations have expected leaders to command their units from the top down. As organizations today are in a constant state of flux, leaders need a wider array of tools and ways of collaborating to enable their organizations to adapt and grow to meet new challenges and demands. Leading others starts with understanding ourselves at a core level. This program follows a flow of leading self, leading teams and leading organizations.

    *This program works well as a six- to eight- week peer-cohort experience, with two-hour weekly programs.

  • ● Understanding personalities and work styles
    ● Finding your unique leadership style
    ● Self-leadership and emotional intelligence
    ● Giving and receiving feedback
    ● Leading through turmoil and chaos
    ● Leading high-performing teams
    ● Leading through change

Check out our blog series for 10 steps to grow as a leader.

Looking for training in visual notetaking and live strategy mapping?

Check out Dancing with Markers for more.

Testimonials

  • “Daily, I hear positive reflections on our time together from various team members. You made a great impression and they are actively using the tools you shared with us. The session was fantastic and exactly what our team needed. I'm excited to see them implementing what we learned, and I hear from them often that they really appreciate the tools and training.”

    JULIE BREWER, USDA FOOD AND NUTRITION SERVICE

  • "Lauren is an emotionally intelligent and trustworthy coach and facilitator. She is is gifted and skilled at designing in person and virtual sessions so that individuals and groups contribute and grow."

    WORKSHOP PARTICIPANT

  • "This session took the fear out of facilitation for me. I was able to use what I learned in a meeting right away and found that the skills I learned helped participants stay engaged and on track."

    ANCA POPA, THROUGHLINE, INC.

  • "Lauren's friendliness is a beautiful entree into shared knowledge. She's so easy to work with and a real expert in digital facilitation, in-the-room facilitation, and graphic recording. She creates psychological safety with every group she leads."

    WORKSHOP PARTICIPANT

  • "Lauren is keeping her followers abreast of new equipment and online platforms for hybrid meetings. She hosted an excellent webinar with Mike Schlegel, where they describe in detail what equipment and setup you need to address the three key elements of hybrid meetings."

    WORKSHOP ORGANIZER

Ready to get started?

To start the conversation or learn how we can customize one of our workshops for your team, reach out on our contact page. We can help identify the right service for you and how we can best support your team.