Open Circle Coaching provides workshops in three areas that are critical to organizational success:  Team Development, Strategy Development and Individual Development.  Together we will tailor each workshop to fit your specific needs.

What is unique about our workshops?

  • Reflect your Culture. With input from you during our Planning Conversations, we tailor the workshops to reflect your organizational culture.
  • Create Personalized Tools. Through small (5-20 person) workshops, your colleagues experiment with and modify these tools to fit their personal styles.
  • Use Action Learning. With experiential or breakout activities at least once every 8 minutes, your colleagues actively learn and apply the material during the workshop.

How are these workshops delivered?

  • Stand-alone or as a Series: The topics below can be experienced as a single Workshop or threaded together to form a Workshop Series
  • For Teams or Groups: Workshop Series can be created for Departmental Teams, Leadership Teams and whole organizations
  • For Specialized Cohorts: Leadership Development Programs can be created for specific cohorts, such asEmerging Leaders, Departmental Leaders and Women Leaders
Click the titles below for full descriptions

Team Development Workshops

Build a Mindset of Abundance in Your Team’s Culture

Notice all that you have, instead of dwelling on what is missing

Early in adulthood, we develop a Mindset of Scarcity to notice what is missing, weak or broken in our workplaces.  But what about all that is great about your organization?  In this workshop, you will learn to:

  • Analyze you and your organization with a Mindset of Abundance by noticing what is good and how you can build upon those qualities
  • Consider that every organization has an “internal dialogue”. What is yours and how helpful is it?  What would you want the dialogue to sound like instead?
  • Learn behavioral economics tools such as: Building in Slack, Giving More of What You Want, Expressing Gratitude, and Freeing Up Bandwidth

How to Manage Change When Change is Difficult

Learn how to guide your team, clients or organization through an upcoming change

We are all asked to adapt to new environments and goals on a regular basis. This workshop provides you with:

  • A framework designed to identify the most important aspects of the change and how to inspire others to join in the change effort
  • A tool to identify what is critical to your team’s success using a classic quality control framework
  • A means of staying focused on your long-term goal, while addressing the various challenges you may encounter on the road to achieving that goal

Foster Trust to Build Your Colleague and Client Relationships

Learn how to listen and show curiosity so as to build trust

Trust is the foundation of a strong team.  Building this trust can be challenging when we feel overworked and overwhelmed.  This workshop offers ways to:

  • Employ deep listening in a way that makes people feel they can talk to you and trust that you will hear them
  • Understand the differences between Smart Trust, Blind Trust, Distrust and No Trust
  • Ask questions to show interest in and respect for the other person that naturally leads to deeper trust and understanding between both people

Understand Yourself and Your Team with DiSC

Understand team members’ styles, preferences and strengths to increase efficiency and trust

If you understand how your team members prefer to work, you can increase the productivity and efficiency of your team.  This workshop provides you with:

  • A DISC assessment for each team member identifying work styles and preferences for communication
  • An understanding of how each team member prefers to work and be inspired
  • An overview of how your DISC assessments are distributed across the team and a review of your team’s overall strengths and gaps

Identify and Capitalize On Your Strengths to Increase Team Engagement

Working from our strengths is energizing and engagingwhich makes us more likely to succeed

In this workshop, we will discuss how a person cannot be great across all areas, but instead can cultivate great strength in a few particular areas.  Topics will include how to:

  • Understand and leverage the 5 leadership strengths from Strengthsfinder 2.0
  • Explore how you can cultivate your organization’s strengths across all 4 domains so as to create a well-rounded and highly-functioning team
  • Identify your most natural and deepest strength and how it is valuable to your organization


Strategy Development Workshops

3 Horizons Strategy: Plan for Growth in the Near, Medium and Long Term

Compile a strategic plan that allows you to work towards long-range goals, while tending to short and medium term goals

The single greatest challenge of creating a strategic plan is investing in the long-term goals while also attending to the near and medium-term goals.  In this workshop, you will learn to:

  • Create a 3-part strategic plan that enables you to focus on short, medium and long-term goals that all support the current and future growth of your organization
  • Simultaneously act on the most important elements from each of the 3 Horizons of your strategic plan
  • Manage the immediate demands on your workday schedule while also following your vision towards what is most important to the future of your organization

Devise A Blue Ocean Strategy to Make the Competition Irrelevant

Create a strategic plan for your organization that is completely different from anyone else

Traditional strategic plans seek ways to outperform competitors.  Blue Ocean Strategy upends that approach by strategizing to make competitors irrelevant. This workshop offers how to:

  • Develop a strategy to tap into new customer segments where the competition has not yet reached, beyond the “red ocean”
  • Identify a few key factors on which your organization can wholly differentiate itself from the rest of the competition
  • Use the Four Actions Framework to create a new value curve for your industry that challenges its traditional logic and business models

Keep It Simple: Use a 3-Question Strategic Framework to Clarify Purpose and Mission

Use this plan if you are designing first-time strategy or doing a re-boot of previous strategies

This classic formula is versatile enough to work with small and large-scale strategy as well as for creating new plans or revamping old approaches.  In this workshop, you will learn to:

  • Ask the 3 Essential Questions to streamline your strategy
  • Explore how every decision is accompanied by a commitment.  Discuss how the leadership team will keep those commitments.
  • Identify what will and will not change as you implement your strategic plan to preserve your organization’s “positive core”

On the Balcony: A Bigger Picture and a Broader Perspective

How to separate yourself from the day-to-day tasks and see the big picture more often

Ronald Heifitz wrote that a leader’s role is to “move back and forth between the balcony and the action on the stage”.  A team can only remain focused and motivated if they learn how to adopt a “balcony view”.  Use this workshop to:

  • Learn how to view events with enough distance to be objective yet remain engaged and committed to a positive outcome
  • Understand how to move beyond “Right/Wrong Thinking” and instead see and appreciate the complexity of multiple perspectives from the balcony
  • Be aware of confirmatory bias and how to ensure you are actively seeking new solutions to old problems


Individual Development Workshops

Create 4 Agreements to Grow Into Your Best Self

Use the work of Don Miguel Ruiz to increase your self-awareness and self-regulation

Make 4 key agreements with yourself to increase your ability to recognize your emotions and regulate your moods.  We can then bring more self-confidence and happiness to our work lives.  In this workshop, you will learn to:

  • Be impeccable with your word – so as to only and always say what is true
  • Not take anything personally – to move beyond feeling hurt by the words and actions of others and instead simply recognize that other reasons for their behavior may exist
  • Don’t make assumptions – to notice when we have strayed from facts and are instead putting our interpretation on reality, possibly in an unhelpful way
  • Always do your best – to be less critical of yourself and more confident in your work

Note for DiSC Users: Has your team completed the “Understand Yourself and Your Team with DiSC” Workshop?  If so, then this workshop can be tailored as a follow-on experience.  Learn how your DiSC style effects your ability to make and keep these 4 Agreements.  Understand how you can use your DiSC style to increase your emotional intelligence.

Make New Practices Automatic: How to Create Sustained Change in Ourselves

Use the “Intentional Change Theory” framework to bring about long-lasting personal change

Richard Boyatzis, a pioneer in emotional intelligence, developed and refined a framework for creating sustained behavioral change.  This workshop will enable you to:

  • Re-frame mistakes to serve as roadmaps of how to succeed in the future
  • Define your “ideal self” and “real self” and the distance between them
  • Using feedback data from colleagues, discover ways to consistently show up as your “ideal self”

Fail Fast and Accelerate Learning with a Growth Mindset

Learn how to maximize the value from your setbacks so as to succeed sooner

The fastest way to success is to increase what you learn from your failures. By adopting a growth mindset, your team can learn how to be innovative and creative without fear of failure. This workshops offers you how to:

  • Re-frame mistakes into roadmaps of how to succeed in the future
  • Learn how to “fail fast” so as to gain the most learning for your team
  • Learn simple speech acts, such as adding “yet” to statements, to emphasize that failures are simply successes we have not achieved… yet

The Elephant in the Room: How to Guide Difficult Conversations

Re-focus your mindset to achieve positive outcomes for tricky conversations

We routinely face difficult conversations in our work.  So it is critical to find a way to navigate these discussions while remaining emotionally composed.  This workshop offers ways to:

  • Successfully open a conversation by appealing to one of the 5 elements to make the other person open to hearing your viewpoint
  • Achieve a fully open mindset for yourself by “seeking first to understand” what is most important to the other person.  Learn to temporarily release your own agenda
  • Use the “Complete Communication Wheel” to guide yourself and others through the key parts of a successful conversation

Note for DiSC Users: If your team has completed the “Understand Yourself and Your Team with DiSC” Workshop, then use the tailored version of this workshop to go deeper into communication skills.   Learn how your DiSC style impacts others in conversation and what you can do to be influential and empathetic.