group coaching

Resilient leaders come in all forms. Whether people manager or individual contributor, at some point in your career, you will face volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. These obstacles will become a stumbling block, threatening to prevent you from moving forward towards accomplishing your goals. What separates good leaders from great leaders is the ability to persevere through these moments of extreme challenge and arise victorious.

In this session, I share my personal story of how I overcame ambiguity, corporate politics, and fear of failure with 4 behaviors that helped me become a resilient leader. This engaging session will be 45 mins personal experience and 45 mins Q&A.

If you are looking to become resilient and up your leadership game, this is one session you don’t want to miss.

Do any of these situations sound familiar to you?

You’ve had a perfect track record the entire year and you made one mistake and you are now branded as a complete failure When you ask for personal feedback and it is given, the person described does not reflect who you are When sharing your opinion in a collaborative setting with co-workers or managers, you are told that you are difficult to communicate with

If you resonate with any of the points above or something similar, you my friend are dealing with a perception problem.

We have all faced perception problems in our career, and when we do, how do you handle it? Do you fold under the pressure and frustration or use it as an opportunity to learn, grow, and master the art of influence.

In this session, I share my personal story of how my annual evaluation almost ruined my year. I discuss how three simple techniques can help you transform negative perceptions into positive ones.

This engaging session will be 45 mins personal experience and 45 mins Q&A.

If you are looking for ways to help change negative perceptions about you and build a positive professional brand, this is one session you don’t want to miss.

Most professionals limit their earning potential the moment they answer the recruiter's first question about target compensation.

Companies won't pay you what you deserve, they'll pay you what you negotiate. Getting this right can add over $1M in pre-tax career earnings while also increasing your perceived value among your colleagues.

In this session, I'll share how I regularly help clients maximize initial job offers then increase them by another 10-20% without using high pressure tactics that could burn bridges (or the offer itself).

Leadership is about people and startups are about growth. “Manager as coach” is fundamental to a new principle of learning, growing and retaining talent in dynamic organizations. Perhaps there was a time when managers were expected to have all the answers, to simply impart their wisdom to reports with critical performance feedback. But startups are change machines and old approaches to management don’t work. Great engineering leaders grow their people. They give support and guidance, understand how to give feedback and allow employees to learn how to adapt dynamically and realize their potential in a culture of learning. To be truly successful, managers must reinvent themselves as coaches whose job it is to draw energy, creativity, and learning out of the people with whom they work.

This is a hands on workshop with instruction, direct experience, practice and feedback. As much as we will cover techniques and tips, this workshop is for folks who want to build their emotional intelligence and are willing to actively participate and be vulnerable in a group of like-minded colleagues with a skilled and experienced facilitator guiding the process.

What kind of leader are you? Are you happy about the way you show up in your life? How do you handle conflicts? Do you feel fulfilled?

Many things can take over how we live our life. Old emotions, sickness, and a busy schedule, are just some examples as to why life can feel like a hamster wheel or out of our control. These reasons can take away all the excitement in life. In this session you will learn to re-assess yourself, gain awareness about patterns, and identify action steps necessary to become the leader and person that you want to be. Hop in - it’s time to take the driver seat!

How do the best leaders create resilient teams who thrive during change and stress? They know how to leverage conflict and use it to drive innovation and high performance. In this session Executive Coach and Organizational Development Consultant Michael Papanek will provide best practices from top tech leaders in Silicon Valley and around the world, sharing how they make decisions, build relationships, lead innovation and create positive culture change.

This session is not about Agile processes, such as Sprints and Scrums - this is about leading Agile teams which are Strong, Flexible and Fair.

Please bring your hardest and most difficult people issues to the coaching session for an in depth discussion of both established and emerging strategies for building unbreakable teams.

www.michaelpapanek.com

Difficult Conversations are a fact of life, and work. In this session, we'll dig in to how to have them at the right time, and manage them to a productive conclusion.

Change Initiatives come in all sizes – from a small process change to the transformation of an entire company to Agile methodologies. In all cases, it takes walking a thin line to demonstrate early successes vs. falling into the pitfalls that create change fatigue. Common causes of change fatigue can include the over-designing or over-planning the changes, and mistakes in managing individual and organizational resistance. There are pathways to success.

In this session, I will share the insights I’ve gain from leading major change initiatives. I will share the top reasons change efforts fail and how to mitigate them. I will also be sharing my learnings from my experience as a leader and the Chief Architect of the Agile Transformation at PayPal.

I ask you to come prepared to talk through your specific change initiative challenges. Whether you are currently leading or participating in a change initiative today or will be in the future, take the opportunity in this coaching session to learn how best to operate a change initiative in real time.

Do you feel like you’re the one person who’s working the hardest in your organization, who's staying up the latest, and is the only one who's really accountable for "all of it"? Creating a culture of accountability and speed is hard when we're face to face - and the complexity increases when we're remote. Learn simple, practical tools to stop rescuing your team and start holding them accountable in a way that feels good for everyone. Increase throughput and decrease the waste and frustration that's built into all organizations. Hear from your peers and leave with a list of actions you can put into practice right away.

Complexity is the name of the game now. All of us live in a world that's Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. To scale, we can’t just work harder, longer; be smarter or make more people happy. Many of us are running on leadership habits that were formed earlier in our careers - and now are strained to the max. It's possible to thrive and outcompete in complexity. Come learn the top five things you can do to level up your leadership for the future and avoid the pitfalls that affect all leaders in complex times.

Do you report to a non-engineering leader, such as a CEO or COO, or have a goal to become a technology executive? Or do you feel that sometimes engineering is not understood by non-technical leaders in your organization? Reporting and managing up to a non-technical leader requires different skills than reporting to an engineering leader. As a former CTO and CEO, I’ve coached hundreds of engineering leaders to evolve into a true technology executive who can successfully lead an engineering organization and manage up to a CEO, COO, etc. This coaching session is for any Dir, VP, CTO, or other aspiring engineering leaders with a goal to lead larger engineering organizations and become part of the conversation at an executive level. Learn the important skills to build a successful relationship with CEOs, COOs, or other executives and bring your own engineering leadership challenges to this coaching session.

Tech Debt is a reality of life for all Technical and Product Leaders. Anytime a software company is successful, the software that fueled the growth is normally not the software that supports the scaling, increased load and expansion of the business. All of this is (perceived or real) ‘lack’ of the product tends to hold the company, the business or the team back. This inevitable reality of software cycle is called “Tech Debt” and is normally left on the shoulders of the technical leaders to resolve. The skills set required to address this work is not what they teach you in the computer science classes, it is also not what they teach you in management classes. It requires a unique set of intersection of Business, Technical and Communication skills. This session will focus on building a framework for evaluating and prioritizing your own tech debt. In a workshop style exercise, we’ll talk about your individual situation and work with real examples. We will wrap up with building narratives around how to convince your fellow executives and your own teams.

Presenting "up" -- to your CEO, executive team, or Board - is often a high-stakes proposition, with one chance to get it right. There are easy ways to make it go more smoothly and to increase the chance of getting your desired outcome. In this interactive session, Spencer will invite two volunteers each to deliver a real executive-facing presentation, critiqued by the rest of the attendees. We've found this format is more engaging than a lecture; and, since most presentations have the same problems, the most important lessons end up getting covered :).

The VC presentation is a unique animal. The audience is typically "cold" (meaning they don't know you), and they can also be - dare I say - a bit jaded. The first few minutes of your pitch are critical in attracting the audience's interest and influencing their emotion. In this interactive session, Spencer will invite several volunteers each to deliver a real VC-facing presentation, critiqued by the rest of the attendees. We've found this format is more engaging than a lecture; and, since most presentations have the same problems, the most important lessons end up getting covered :).

Teams are complicated groups of people with numerous pushes and pulls. Let’s talk about the power and dysfunctions of teams and how, as a tech leader, you can change the dynamic to achieve higher performance. Boost your collective productivity by building agile, accountable and aligned team(s). We will discuss: Lencioni’s concept of “trust”, a team (organizational) resiliency model, the role of the leader and team member, a model for accountability, agile performance management systems, and related topics.