The Human Edge: Future-Proofing Teams and Careers
Equip yourself, your teams, and your organization to adapt, persevere, and thrive during the most drastic workplace transformation in history. Everyone is upskilling their technical acumen. Human skills will distinguish exceptional teams from the rest.
human skills are the future of work
Organizations everywhere are facing two stark truths:
Technical expertise is becoming increasingly important, but people skills are just as necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing work environment.
Most people haven’t been taught how to work with other humans, especially in high-stakes, fast-changing environments.
We all know we need to build a greater technical acumen, staying ahead of the curve with AI and analytical skills. To fully leverage new technical skills, teams also need to develop better people skills. In the midst of current technological advancements, 80% of professionals say soft skills are more important than ever.
According to the World Economic Forum, over half of the global workforce will need upskilling in these areas by 2030. The 2025 Future of Jobs Report lists a combination of cognitive, self-efficacy, and interpersonal skills in the top five skills for the future of work. Companies from every industry emphasized the importance of having an agile, innovative, and collaborative workforce, where both problem-solving abilities and personal resilience are critical for success.
These are no longer “soft” skills; they’re durable, evergreen skills that ensure organizations and their employees stay rooted even when everything around them changes. In a world where only 31% of US employees are engaged (the lowest in a decade), 87% of companies are facing skill gaps, and AI is reshaping 44% of core job skills, success over the next five years depends on an organization’s people skills and culture just as much as its adoption of new technologies.
The Sessions
A traditional hub-and-spoke leadership model designed for predictable change management in the 80’s falls apart in a company that’s constantly changing. It’s too much for any one person to be solely in charge of a team’s direction, and dynamic, adaptable teams can’t share the strategic load unless they have the tools, rituals, and relational intelligence to ensure everyone plays to their strengths.
Traditional change management built a bridge from one operational steady-state to the next, but steady-state operations are a thing of the past. These sessions are tailored to instill the essential people skills and behavioral habits every organization needs to surf the waves of change in an uncertain future.
Culture Happens Either Way: Make Yours a Learning Culture
Being Wrong: It’s Not What You Think
Who’s Driving This Thing? Self-Awareness as a Career Advantage
Resilience, Adaptability, and Grit: Keeping Steady in Times of Change
Influence and Leadership: Build Trust from Wherever You Sit
Future-Proof Yourself: Curiosity, Communication, and Emotional Intelligence
I offer the first workshop from this session at no cost with the hope that your team will leave with a shared language, personal insights, and a sense of what could change if they practiced these skills intentionally.
If you’d like to explore which of these workshops would be the most impactful for your organization, let’s have a conversation.
What to expect
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Concepts
Expect to leave each workshop with a nuanced and intuitive understanding of the subject matter. Because Why workshops are designed to challenge conventional wisdom and understand concepts from multiple perspectives.
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The Work
Conceptual learning works best when it’s put to practice. Because Why workshops employ a learn-by-doing approach that encourages participants to try out new tools and approaches in the moment.
Expect to come away with practical skills you can use to think, communicate, or problem-solve more effectively, both at work and at home. -
Layered Learning
Each workshop stands on its own, but the learnings from each build on the others. Ideas and skills introduced in one will resurface with new context and depth in another. Over time, the workshops reinforce each other, facilitating steady growth and self-reflection.
tHE sESSIONS
Culture Happens Either Way: Make Yours a Learning Culture
Every organization has a culture, whether it’s intentionally designed or not. This session provides teams and leaders with the frameworks to create a culture of learning, experimentation, and honesty, where growth becomes part of “how we do things around here.” A feeling of inclusion doesn’t happen by accident, and 45% of employees cite culture as their #1 reason for leaving. That's not a future problem– it’s happening today.
The safety and ability to say “I don’t know”
Learning as part of our personal and organizational identities
Behaviors and norms that kill a learning culture and increase employee attrition
Rituals like pre-mortems and post-mortems that normalize learning
Being Wrong: It’s Not What You Think
Reframe your relationship with being wrong, establishing a disagreement framework that fosters communication rather than conflict. Google’s Project Aristotle examined 180 teams and 37,000 employees to find that psychological safety was the key distinguishing factor in the most successful teams. Learn to see mistakes as opportunities and as necessary aspects of innovation and progress.
The unintuitive phenomenology (what-it's-like experience) of being wrong
Discuss the counterproductive cultural narratives we carry about being wrong and failure
The unexamined interpersonal dynamics that result when we disagree with others
How these narratives and dynamics affect our performance and relationships at work
The intrinsic relationship between imagination, creativity, and being wrong
Who’s Driving This Thing? Self-Awareness as a Career Advantage
Get clear on the blind spots, biases, and behaviors that counterintuitively ensure the outcomes you’re trying to avoid. Come away with tools and insights that help you identify and shift these behavioral patterns.
Understanding our blind spots
What are biases, why do we have them, and how do we work with them (instead of being ashamed)?
Understanding sneaky behaviors that keep us stuck or even ensure the outcomes we’re trying to avoid
Tools to recognize these patterns in ourselves and the necessity of including our social circles in our efforts to continue growing in our self-awareness
Resilience, Adaptability, and Grit: Keeping Steady in Times of Change
Change is a constant, and most of us struggle to stay the course in the face of uncertainty and the unknown. We’ll cover the psychological concepts, mindsets, and behaviors that help us navigate the unknown with a level head.
Defining and building emotional and intellectual agility
Resilience - what is it, how to build it as a team, and what are its limitations?
Redefining our relationship with uncertainty. What happens when we have questions without answers?
Grit as a superpower - what’s needed, how to reinforce it, and why grit alone won’t get you there
Influence and Leadership: Build Trust from Wherever You Sit
Leadership and Social Influence have risen in importance more than any other skill required for success in the future workplace. The most effective leaders understand the importance of tailoring their approach to the context and team they’re in. Relationships and trust are at the core of adapting one’s leadership style. Whether you're managing a team or trying to lead cross-functionally, your ability to influence starts with how people feel around you.
What makes someone worth following (it’s not their title)
Leadership in times of crisis: People rally around the calmest person in the room
How to build rapport and relational trust without forcing it
Everyday leadership behaviors, regardless of title: leading from the front, beside, and from behind
Future-Proof Yourself: Curiosity, Communication, and Emotional Intelligence
The skills that ensure everyone on your team is pulling in the same direction—skills that carry teams further than technical excellence alone. Over the long run, investment in EI can deliver ROI as high as 10-14x, reducing employee turnover, improving productivity, bolstering reputation, and driving employee engagement.
Building and sustaining curiosity as a learnable, practical habit that leads to critical thinking and a more profound sense of agency
Explore the concepts and practical applications of emotional intelligence
Clarify the relational challenges top ICs face after they transition to leadership roles
The simplicity and outsized value of effective communication skills like active listening and evocative questioning
Curious? Ready? Somewhere in between?
I’d love to hear what your team is working through right now. Let’s talk.
