Elevate Your Large Leadership Events with High-Impact Development Experiences
Have a large leadership gathering planned in the coming year? Your event has great potential to deliver major benefits, including strategic alignment, culture building, improved relationships and collaboration, and essential upskilling for the future of work. Yet too often internal leadership conferences, “all-hands” meetings, leadership retreats, and similar gatherings are PowerPoint-heavy information sessions that leave participants more dazed than dazzled.
MDA Leadership helps clients inject high-impact experiences into big events that participants often find the most memorable and valuable part of the agenda. MDA’s compelling keynote speakers and expert facilitators provide compelling content and help leaders grasp the essential power skills needed for a fast-evolving workplace with interactive designs that keep large audiences active and engaged. If you have an interest in any of the topics below or in others, let’s talk. We work to tailor the experience to your unique organization and event objectives. Our diverse offerings and expert presenters fit a variety of budgets and audiences—from a few dozen leaders to a gathering of hundreds.
Power Skills: 2-4 hour sessions
Increasingly, the true power skills in the new world of work are soft skills, interpersonal savvy, and human-centered leadership capabilities. The rise of AI, hybrid work arrangements, and other changes will only increase the value of these skills. Give your leaders a development boost with these high-engagement, high-application-based skill sessions.
- ExperienceChange™: A competitive, team-based simulation on leading human-centered change
- Creating a Speak-Up Culture: Proven practices to boost psychological safety, the top predictor of high-performing teams and cultures
- Strategic Storytelling: Mastering your most powerful influencing tool
Power Skills Sessions
Leading Change
Dramatically improve the success of your change initiatives
Two-thirds of organizational changes fail to produce their intended results. Many incur higher costs, lead to unnecessary ill-will among employees, reduce trust in senior leaders, and lead to productivity dips. Through simulation-based learning, your leaders will learn critical success factors, a rock-solid process approach, and smart tools that significantly increase their success driving important changes.
The simulation, ExperienceChange™, is an immersive, competitive, team-based experience that simulates the challenges of real-world change, without the real-world scars. From analysis through to planning and implementation, the experience delivers the essentials of a year-long change journey in a half-day workshop. It also creates a highly energizing, memorable team-bonding experience for participants.
The simulation focuses on a company fraught with realistic change challenges. Through careful application of change management best practices, learners build stakeholder buy-in and lead the company to success. The simulation provides learning-by-doing, where knowledge retention is optimized and change concepts become immediately relevant for real-world projects.
Among the many takeaways from this program, leaders will:
- Understand change management best practices and their role in driving success
- Gain experience piloting best practices in a no-risk environment
- Be ready to apply new knowledge and skills to support current and future changes at your organization
- Develop awareness of personal biases that may affect change management
- Gain alignment and collective knowledge, process orientation, skills, tools, and practices to more effectively drive strategic organizational change
- Mitigate risks involved in major changes while accelerating stakeholder buy-in and the sustainability of change initiatives
- Develop a common process, language, and toolkit for leading and implementing change
Creating a Speak-Up Culture
Boosting psychological safety – the top predictor of high-performing teams
Teams and cultures that demonstrate higher levels of psychological safety see a wide range of positive outcomes, including higher levels of engagement and retention, employee commitment, leadership trust levels, adaptability, learning, cost-saving process improvements, and marketable product and service innovations. In short, to learn, adapt, and win in today’s world, teams and organizations must operate in psychologically-safe environments.
This session helps leaders create the conditions for a healthy “speak-up” culture with clear, research-based methods, behaviors, tools, and practices. This program offers the most up-to-date theory, self-assessment, experiential learning, and tools that leaders can immediately apply to improve psychological safety in their teams and organizations.
Among the many takeaways from this program, leaders learn:
- Smart, targeted leader behaviors and practices needed to progress their teams through the four stages of psychological safety
- Why bad news is good news—and how to help bad news travel faster
- Concrete methods to shift the focus away from fear of failure and blame to a focus on learning and growth
- Top practices to create a speak-up culture where full-team input improves meeting engagement, continuous improvement, innovation, decision making, and speed of implementation
Strategic Storytelling
Mastering your most powerful influencing tool
Think of any great speaker and it won’t take you long to figure out that they are also master storytellers. Storytelling is increasingly becoming a “must-have” skill for leaders, but you still won’t find it in many MBA course catalogs. This skill-building session, taught by a master communications expert, Heather Thomas, will give you a deeper understanding of why story is such a powerful strategic tool, examples of how to transform your content into powerful stories, and an introduction to different story types and when to use them. You will leave with a new “antenna” for stories and insight into how to find, craft, and deliver high-impact stories that move and influence others in powerful ways.
Among the many takeaways from this program, leaders learn:
- The neuroscience that proves why stories work
- How to transform run-of-the-mill business content into powerful stories
- A story-building formula you can use to craft your own stories
- How visual language, interest-building phrases and personal reflections can make your stories more dramatic and memorable
- How you can use stories to win over skeptics, create chemistry, and build trust
- Different story types that you can use to sell your next big idea, present data or research results, facilitate a change, or increase clarity and understanding
- The importance of building a bank of different stories to convey important messages
Killer Keynotes: 1-2 hour sessions
Need a high-energy speaker to present compelling, research-based content that your people will find valuable and be able to apply right away? Check out three popular keynotes that make for memorable large audience sessions.
- Life or Death Listening: A hostage negotiator’s guide to mastering this essential communication skill
- Science Hacks for People Leaders: Simple, actionable, evidence-based practices for improving all aspects of leading self and others
- Leading with a Growth Mindset: Keys to instilling growth and continuous improvement in teams and organizations
Killer Keynotes
Life or Death Listening
Dan Oblinger is a hostage negotiator, commander, author, and international keynote speaker. He specializes in active listening and negotiation skills, sharing his craft and passion to enhance individual, team, and organizational performance. His keynotes have been hailed as memorable, striking, motivational, and poignant. Want a full range of emotions to well up in your audience? Need to set an energetic tone for your entire event? Want the sort of storytelling and audience interaction that nails the tough after-lunch session? Leaders walk away with proven methods and techniques that bring exceptional benefits in the areas of workplace negotiations and refined listening acumen.
Science Hacks for People Leaders
Simple, actionable, evidence-based practices for improving all aspects of leading self and others
Thousands of leadership books and articles spout advice for today’s managers, yet the vast majority of “best practices” are anecdotal, not backed by research or scientific studies. For 30 years, Jim Laughlin has had a passion for researching neuroscience and behavioral science findings for workplace application. This session provides over a dozen evidence-based practices leaders can apply to significantly improve their day-to-day leadership impact. The focus is on simple, actionable, easy-to-apply methods, practices, and “hacks” that address fundamental aspects of leading yourself and others.
Among the many takeaways from this program, leaders learn:
- The single most powerful weekly ritual that the best managers practice
- The bad habit most managers suffer from that reduces their productivity by 40% or more—and what to do about it
- The two key behaviors of high-performing teams—and simple behaviors the team leader can adopt to promote those behaviors
- Three proven decision-making remedies to the blunders and traps that cause half of all organizational decisions to fail
- Why a classic telephone call is a better choice than videoconferencing or texting for certain kinds of teamwork
- The best time to schedule team meetings to maximize attendance and the best time to meet to make important decisions (hint: they’re not the same time)
- The neuroscience behind scheduling different types of work at the optimal times each day to boost your energy and productivity
Leading with a Growth Mindset
Workplace success increasingly requires leaders and teams to demonstrate resilience, grit, and the willingness to tackle challenges for which there is no ready playbook. These are the hallmarks of a growth mindset—the belief that our intelligence, skills, and problem-solving capabilities can be developed through effort and learning. Research has shown that individuals, teams, and organizations that intentionally cultivate a growth mindset and embrace the habits and practices that allow them to thrive significantly boost their performance.
Among the many takeaways from this program, leaders learn:
- How to assess your own mindset and specific tips to move from fixed to growth mindset
- Seven practices for developing a growth mindset in individuals and teams
- How to deliver feedback that bypasses defensiveness and activates a growth mindset
- The core indicators of fixed mindset culture that limit business growth
- The key levers leaders use to shape growth mindset cultures that maximize business results
Testimonials
“Over my career, I’ve attended literally hundreds of training sessions on sales, presentations, motivational behavior and the like. This was one of the most profound, strategically-focused and relevant I’ve seen.”
“Really excellent. I immediately thought of ways to apply these techniques to my work tomorrow. Many thanks—great mix of engaging presentation and live practice!”
Let’s begin a conversation.
At MDA Leadership, we know there are no one-size-fits-all solutions for every organization. We take the time to get to know your business and your leadership needs and recommend a range of options that are the best fit for your growth goals. Let's see how MDA Leadership can optimize your Talent Strategy for the Long Run®.