Rising to the Occasion

The RTTO training begins with a peek behind the curtain of your brain using a tool called Emergenetics. Emergenetics is a validated instrument rooted in neuroscience that measures your thinking and behavioral attributes and preferences. Emergenetics does not assess skill and does not judge you or your abilities. It is a wonderful tool that helps you learn more about yourself as a gateway to improved communication, decision-making, and leadership.

As you learn about yourself, you will also gain insight into the behavioral and thinking preferences of other people, including leaders above you, your peers, and your direct reports. You will leave this session with new understanding about how people think and behave, why they do what they do, and how you can adapt your own behavior and responses to lead from a place of understanding and strength.

This session is a deep dive into how organizations (really) work and why leaders succeed or fail. It offers a framework for understanding organizations, the types of issues and challenges they face, and the different approaches a leader might take in a given situation.

The increased awareness you’ll gain in this session will help you evaluate your issue, idea, or problem through different lenses to ensure that you truly understand what is going on in your workplace.

Building on the Emergenetics foundation from the morning, you will come to recognize your go-to frame for problems and the blind spots it creates.

You will leave the session ready to develop and adapt your own thinking and strategies to fit the unique moment or situation you’re in, in your own organization and even in collaborative engagements with partners.

Depending on where they sit and what they do, people in your orbit need different things from you. Your challenge is determining how to show up for each individual, so they get what they need to be successful.

In this session, you'll explore four situational leadership styles, learn when each one fits, and see what goes wrong when a style is misapplied.

You'll then examine six approaches to decision making, weighing the pros and cons of delegating, sharing, or retaining decision space—not only with your direct reports, but also with colleagues and partners.

When you leave this session, you'll be able to match your leadership style to others’ needs and choose the right decision-making approach based on your authority and who should be involved, setting yourself, your team, and/or your partners up for success.

Today’s leadership environment is characterized by urgency, both real and false. Successful leaders need to know how to break down complex problems, weigh trade-offs, and make confident choices under pressure.

The first part of this session focuses on a framework for this kind of deliberative analysis and decision making. It will help you develop new patterns of decision making, so you don’t just default to a common, easy, or proposed solution when you are stressed or rushed. Taking the time to define success and analyze options will help ensure that the decisions that you make are the best ones you can make with the information you have.

Then, you’ll next-level this understanding by learning how to assess the risk of the decisions you might make. Every decision a leader makes involves risk, and even doing nothing has risks that need to be acknowledged and assessed.

The second half of this session provides an overview of the different types of risks and helps you identify which risks are within your span of control and which are not.

You’ll leave this session ready to make, explain, and, if necessary, defend decisions, no matter the outcome.

Getting results often depends on people who don't report to you. This session explores how to build influence and work through disagreement without relying on your title.

You'll learn about different types of power and when each is useful and appropriate for meeting your needs. You will learn what your default conflict style is, as well as how it can help or hurt your ability to achieve your goals.

Finally, you'll learn how to approach conflict and practice new tools to increase your comfort and skill in conflict.

When you leave this session, you'll be able to better manage your own approach and performance in conflict in order to move forward and get things done.

Our working leaders have been through it all and have the scars and stories to prove it! Research shows that people often learn more when content is provided through stories, so we hold space in the afternoon of our second day together for you to learn the material through a different lens.

The trainers will talk about when they applied the approaches and tools offered in this training, how it went, and what they learned or wish they had known.

This is your chance to ask exploratory and expansive questions to help you truly wrap your head around all this!

Some of the best leadership advice comes from colleagues who face similar challenges. In this closing session, you'll bring all of this training to bear on a real problem of practice. Your problem can be anything that your thoughts keep returning to, that isn't already resolved, and that centers on your own actions rather than on changing others.

You'll frame it as a focus question, then work through a structured protocol with a small group of peers. You’ll get advice from your group and then share your takeaways and maybe your new course of action.

You'll also serve as a consultant for your peers, offering them your own wisdom and experience for their problem.

When you leave this session, you'll be ready to head back to the office and get to work implementing your group’s advice and leading in a whole new way.