Delivering great results AND a healthy culture is exhausting.
But it doesn’t have to be.
We’ll show you how
“It’s exhausting.” We hear this from nearly every leader we work with. See if this sounds like you:
You put people first. Not just because it seems like the right way to lead, but because it delivers better results. You’ve experienced this throughout your career. People thrive when they’re part of a great team doing meaningful work. They’re more creative, productive, and innovative. They have a positive impact on the bottom line. It’s a smarter way to run a business.
But it’s also the right way to run a business. For too many, work is needlessly disengaging. Power grabs, mind-numbing bureaucracy, and clique-dominated politics turn the office into a place where “everybody’s working for the weekend.” There’s no safety or trust. People end up exhausted, burned out, and demoralized.
In the worst case, this becomes a cultural death spiral. Without safety or trust, results suffer. Everyone from investors to management feels pressure to deliver. They become reactive. The harder they push, the less safe people feel, and results drop again. Now the best performers are quietly reaching out to their networks looking to make a move.
But not your people. You choose to create a culture where people feel safe and significant. They bring their whole selves to work, knowing their perspective and unique capabilities are valued. Their work isn’t satisfying because it’s easy, but because it matters. And work that matters stretches us. It requires us to listen beyond our beliefs, to learn beyond our specialties, and to connect beyond our usual tribes.
Leading this way can be exhausting. As one of our favorite CEOs put it, “people are the hardest.” It requires tremendous mental and emotional energy to maintain this kind of culture, and most leaders don’t think it’s possible or worth it. You’re swimming upstream, misunderstood, treated with skepticism and cynicism. But you push on because it’s the right thing to do.
And while it often feels like it, you’re not alone. At Humanizing Work we’ve been searching for more leaders like you. And we’ve been helping shift organizations towards more meaningful, human-centric cultures that outperform on business results. We’ve learned what works and what doesn’t, and we want to share it with you and connect you to a like-minded community.
Humanizing Work’s Leadership Intensive is an eight-week cohort-style program designed to help leaders thrive in complexity, scale leadership capability, and lead effectively without burning out.
On This Page
How it Works
Many leadership training offerings are scheduled over the course of a few consecutive days. This structure is particularly good at creating what is known as a “peak state,” where participants feel great and confident at the end of the training. However, research shows that peak states rarely translate to successful application of the content.
Short Sessions
For that reason, the Humanizing Work Leadership Intensive is structured as a series of practical half-day workshops on the concepts, skills, and tools leaders need to lead empowered teams and individuals effectively. The workshops are spaced out to provide time for practice and integration between sessions. No more drinking from a firehose for two or three days while email and tasks pile up back at the office.
Expert Coaching
Between workshops, participants attend instructor led, group coaching sessions to help work through practical application challenges. The workshops have plenty of inspiration packed in, but the incremental and iterative structure lets participants practice using the content before the trainers leave the (virtual) room, leading to much stickier results.
Cohort Connection
This program is deliberately designed as a cohort-style learning model where leaders engage in deep discussions, drawing upon diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. By collaborating within a cohort, participants not only deepen their understanding of leadership concepts, but also develop lasting professional connections that extend well beyond the program’s duration.
Program Schedule
Click on session titles or continue scrolling to view session descriptions.
| Week | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Session 1: Leading Through Complexity: Empowerment, Adaptability, and Creative Leadership |
| 2 | Group Coaching Session |
| 3 | Session 2: Crafting Purpose and Vision: The Heart of Effective Leadership |
| 4 | Group Coaching Session |
| 5 | Session 3: Creating High-Performing Teams & Org Structures |
| 6 | Group Coaching Session |
| 7 | Session 4: Coaching for Growth |
| 8 | Group Coaching Session |
Meaningful Results
Previous participants have shared the following benefits:
- Thrive in Complexity. Navigate the ever-changing business landscape with confidence using the Cynefin framework, a powerful tool for matching process and strategy to the level of uncertainty of the work
- Scale Leadership Capability. Use the 3 Jobs Model and Mindful Coaching techniques to increase leadership capability at all levels
- Lead without Burning Out. Learn how to shift your leadership from reactive to creative, allowing you to amplify your unique leadership gifts while reducing the downside costs
- Nail Org and Team Structures. Learn how to create the three essential conditions and three enabling conditions for high performing teams, and how to structure networks of teams using the Collaborate/Coordinate distinction
- Craft Purpose & Vision without the Corporate Speak. Learn a fast technique to create inspiring, concrete purpose and vision statements at all levels to create clarity on where we’re heading
Our leadership team’s development work with Humanizing Work was purposeful and actionable. It gave our team a clearer understanding of how to lead our organization to thrive in complexity.
The knowledge, experience, and models shared weren’t presented just for philosophical contemplation of leadership concepts or responsibilities. Rather, they helped us make sense of different aspects of our work as leaders and gave us a structured way to act upon it.
—John Bigay, Chief Revenue Officer, Universal Audio
Beyond the core program, you’ll have the opportunity to:
- Join a Community of Like Minded Leaders. Become part of a global network of leaders committed to results-driven, people-first leadership. Learn from others, share what you’re trying. This ongoing collaboration beyond the training sessions enables you to be part of a community dedicated to sustaining and amplifying the impact of positive leadership.
- Choose Elective Workshops Tailored to Your Needs. Continue learning with a range of electives focused on enhancing your leadership capabilities, from giving inspiring presentations to leading effective meetings, resolving conflict, setting engaging goals, and mastering feedback.
With the Sr Leaders group, I found a select group of people who have been innovating across different industries, and I felt like I found “my crowd”. We discussed challenges we face day-to-day and either heard case studies from people who have tried to solve it or we co-created ideas on how to solve it together.
I walked in feeling that my case was unique, but I learned that, even though my industry and company size was different from many, the challenges around recruiting, team management and organizational structure, backlog management, etc, were very, very similar and we had a lot we could help each other with.
—Vivian Sobral Rhoads, President, Women’s Health Business Unit, Pharmavite
Workshop Details
Session 1: Leading Through Complexity: Empowerment, Adaptability, and Creative Leadership
Today’s leaders face the daunting challenge of navigating an ever more complex business landscape, where the old ways of leading fall short. This complexity not only demands a new level of adaptability but also requires a leadership style that balances the pursuit of business results with the fundamental human need for empowerment and creative expression. This core half-day session in our leadership series addresses this challenge head-on by introducing participants to the Cynefin framework for navigating complexity, the Three Jobs model for managing empowered teams, and the Leadership Circle for personal leadership growth. By the end of the session, leaders are equipped with the tools and insights to lead with confidence in unpredictable environments, ensure their teams achieve peak performance, and foster a culture that brings together business success with a deeply human-centric approach.
Session 2: Crafting Purpose and Vision: The Heart of Effective Leadership
The skill most highly correlated with effective leadership is the ability to create clarity through strong purpose and vision. This is as true for a project as it is for an organization. Unfortunately, the typical purpose or vision statement is too vague and “corporate” sounding to inspire and to set as a clear foundation for strategy, goals, and execution. In this session, you’ll learn the characteristics of effective and ineffective mission, purpose, and vision statements, as well as a method for reliably harnessing the creativity of a group to write a great one.
Session 3: Creating High-Performing Teams & Org Structures
Establishing the optimal team and organizational structure directly impacts a company’s ability to succeed, but it’s a complex puzzle. Without the right structure, teams work on the wrong things, get stuck waiting on others in order to deliver anything of value, and never get into the flow that is the hallmark of all great work. This workshop reveals how leaders create the six conditions for effective teams and introduces strategies for effective organizational structures that emphasize the importance of collaboration within teams for complex tasks and coordination across teams for ordered tasks, thereby enhancing overall team performance and organizational agility.
Session 4: Coaching for Growth
As leaders try to be less directive, to avoid the micromanagement everyone hates, they can end up adopting a hands-off approach that provides neither clear direction nor growth for employees. Turns out coaching is a skill most leaders haven’t had a chance to develop. And just asking more questions doesn’t do the job. In this session, you’ll learn and practice a coaching approach leaders use to catalyze individual and team growth, broader and deeper thinking, and greater collaborative capability. This session is consistently rated among the most immediately applicable and transformative concepts we teach leaders—coaching skills really are a multiplier!
The Instructors
Peter Green 
Peter helps leaders discover how to create the outcomes they care about the most. He draws on a unique combination of deep empathy and keen insight developed by an almost stubborn insistence on staying actively involved in seemingly disconnected fields, including the creative arts, business, psychology, leadership, organizational design, and philosophy. Peter majored in music composition at Arizona State University. He is an in-demand trumpet player and recording engineer.
At Adobe Systems, Peter led an Agile transformation that enabled the shift to a subscription business model. He co-developed the Certified Agile Leadership program for the Scrum Alliance. He has trained, coached, and advised dozens of organizations to create outcomes that range from leadership development, to creating vision and strategy, to creating a culture of innovation, to clarifying and validating customer segments and needs, to reinventing business models and products, to creating high performing, Agile teams.
Peter is a Certified Scrum Trainer, a graduate of the ORSC coaching system, a certified Leadership Agility and Leadership Circle coach, a certified Innovation Games practitioner, and the co-founder of the Humanizing Work company. He is an avid reader and idea-combiner. He is a firm believer in the power of range and a growth mindset. He spends his working hours dedicated to nudging the world of work towards a more human-centric, meaningful, and prosperous future. He spends his other waking hours enjoying time with his wife and five kids, running, hiking, playing golf, and making music and visual arts.
Richard Lawrence 
Richard Lawrence’s superpower is bringing together seemingly unrelated fields and ideas to create new possibilities. Drawing on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, design, and political science, Richard trains and coaches people to collaborate more effectively with other people to solve complex, meaningful problems.
Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book, Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2019 (for more information, visit bddwithcucumber.com).
When he’s not working with clients, you’ll often find Richard cooking, playing music, practicing Muay Thai, or flying down a mountain on his mountain bike.
Private Workshops
Bring this training program into your organization! Public offerings are great for individuals or small groups to grow their skills in a cost-effective way. But there’s nothing like a private engagement that just includes people from your organization. Private workshops allow for the incorporation of additional elective options to align with your organizations’s unique challenges and strategic goals. Explore our program electives here.