Executive Leadership & DEI Training Sessions

Holistic is an employee engagement company and when we started the company we focused very heavily on a company's employee base, trying to look and understand what employees were experiencing and how we could attack those challenges directly. One of the things we found, however, is that leaders have a huge role to play in these efforts. If your leadership team isn't in the right place, then it's very difficult to work with the employees on a material level. This seems obvious, but I assure you it's not.

If your leadership team isn't in the right place, then it's very difficult to work with the employees on a material level.

Many companies are looking to employees to attack challenges that are simply manifestations of unclear leadership within their organization. It should be the opposite. They should be looking to the leaders of the organization to understand where there are opportunities to improve and how the process of improving those efforts can improve the outcomes for the whole company. And, it needs to be done in that order. A big part of the Holistic mentality is that employees should take responsibility for themselves. They should understand that there are many, many elements of the employee experience that are totally under their own control. They should be thoughtful and cognizant about the places where they can make an impact in those spaces, but this only works if there's been a down payment from the leadership of the organization. This is what we heard from you. This is what we are going to do. This is how we're going to endeavor to make ourselves better.

If it's ever perceived that the leadership of the company is just passing along the responsibility to the employees without taking it on themselves, this is a recipe for disaster. Instead, what we advocate for is a scenario where the leadership of the organization takes the first step and then reports back to the employees about what they're doing. Then and only then does it make sense to invite the employees to participate in the process by being thoughtful about their own opportunities and some different ways that they think they might be able to be involved. This is how you generate buy-in.

One of the things that Holistic has launched towards the end of this year is executive training sessions. Holistic has come up with eight modules for leadership teams to help train them in all aspects of their own opportunities as being leaders of organizations. These seven modules are interchangeable. They're not meant to be handled in order or in any specific order even. They touch eight different but related elements of the leadership process.

The Commandments and Tactics of Advocacy
Relationship Building
Developing Talent
Effective Communication
Employee/Leader Relations
Fostering Diversity and Inclusion in Your Organization
Navigating and Leading in Change and Uncertainty
Strategic Thinking

We recommend that most of our companies who are interested in leadership training take on four trainings a year - one a quarter. Any more than that and it just seems like you're constantly in training. There's not enough space to be thoughtful about what you're learning to see if things stuck, if improvements have been made, that sort of thing. As always, Holistic has devised a very specific and data-driven approach to addressing these training modules.

Here's how it works.

We always start with data. We look at the data from employee surveys and from other data collection apparatuses and we try and hone in on specific evidence that's going to help us shape and customize the training module.

The first part of the training is us presenting data to the leadership team and having a facilitated discussion about what that data shows us. This is really powerful. In the past, you'd go through a two-hour training and you'd hope that you come out of it with some sort of insight on which you could act. Now, we moved that to the front part of the event because we're able to leverage the materials that we've already got to be able to have a more productive conversation.

After the facilitated discussion, we go to a training module. This is one of our eight modules that is adapted and customized for your company based on pre-interviews pre-surveys, our existing employee survey data with you, whatever information we have.

These modules tend to last about forty-five minutes to an hour and are really the learning component of what we're doing in our sessions. Those are quickly followed up by a practice session. You got to get out and do it. We have a series of very creative activities that we've designed that allow our leaders to get out of their comfort zone and try some of the skills that they've learned using real-life case studies from the company's experience. This is very valuable to do this in terms of case studies and not in the abstract. You don't want people to have to imagine a scenario. You want people to be practicing how they deal with scenario with which they're already comfortable because it happens at their job.

Lastly, we do another facilitated discussion, this one around measurement tools and the way of going forward with this process.

Our goal at Holistic is not to have a good time in the session necessarily, but rather to make an impact that's going to be felt by the company for months and months afterward. And so that's what we do. We try and create a scenario where the company is going to be able to measure a consistent improvement in terms of its experience over time. If you're interested in leadership development and let's be honest, who isn't because everybody is interested in leadership development, you should definitely contact us and we can talk to you a little bit more about how we gather and collect this data and employ it to really change the fortunes for the leaders in your company. Because we know that changing the fortunes for the leaders is going to change the fortunes for the employees as well.

To learn more about our Executive DEI Training Sessions, contact us.