The leadership moments you don't get much practice at
The situations that catch out even good leaders, and the three new workshops members asked us to build.
Some parts of leading come round every week. You run one-to-ones, give feedback, chair the odd meeting, and you get better at them because you do them constantly.
Three of the hardest parts don't work like that.
You take over a team a handful of times in a career. Honest feedback on how you lead arrives once in a blue moon, usually by accident. A real clash between two of your people lands rarely enough that you never build the habit of handling it.
So when one of them does arrive, your instinct tends to be wrong. In a new role, the urge is to prove yourself and change things before you understand what you're changing. When you hear something hard about yourself, the urge is to explain. When two people clash, the urge is to pick a side.
These three workshops are built for exactly those moments. They're here because members asked for them: over 100 of you named these situations when we asked what the Leadership Toolkit still needed. We build what members request, and every member gets it.
This week's three new leadership workshops
- Stepping Into a New Leadership Role for landing a new role or an inherited team
- Knowing Your Impact for finding out how you really come across
- Handling Conflict in Your Team for stepping into a clash between two of your people
Each is a ready-to-run, two-hour session with a full facilitator guide, built for a room and adaptable for remote.
Each ends with something the leader walks out with: a plan, a question, or a next step they can act on straight away.
To see which one to run first, three questions. Jot down your answers.
1. Have you just taken on a team, or are you about to?
Taking over a team someone else built, or leading people who were your peers last week. The pull is to show you're up to it, so you start changing things in the first week, before you know why they're the way they are. That's how new leaders break what was working.
Stepping Into a New Leadership Role starts by having you stand in the corner of the trap you're most likely to fall into: changing too much too soon, hiding in the work you were already good at, or needing to be liked. Then you practise the thing that's harder than it sounds, a listening conversation with a new team, while an observer catches every moment you slip into fixing instead of listening. You sort what you've inherited into keep, let go and start, and you draft the first honest conversation, including the awkward one with a former peer.
You come out with a three-month roadmap, listen first, then test, then change, and one action for your first week.
2. When did someone last tell you something true about how you come across?
Not "you're doing great." Something real. For most leaders the honest answer is a survey, a 360, or an exit interview, months after the fact. The gap between what you mean and how you land is where trust leaks, and the more senior you are, the less anyone tells you.
Knowing Your Impact builds the muscle for hearing it. You map your blind spots on a Johari window, using words the people in the room pick for you, then drill the one response that keeps feedback coming: someone reads you a real piece of it, and your only reply is thank you, and a question. Nothing else. After that you practise asking for ideas about the future rather than verdicts on the past.
You come out with one clear question to put to three real people this week, and a simple log to track what you hear and what you change.
3. Are two of your people quietly working around each other?
A clash between two of your team rarely stays between them. It slows the work, splits the room, and eats your time. The instinct is to wait and hope it passes, or to wade in and pick a side. Both make it worse.
Handling Conflict in Your Team teaches the version that works. You learn to see past the positions people take to the interests underneath, where the overlap usually hides. You practise the separate conversation with each person, without taking sides or carrying messages between them. Then, in a Fishbowl, one leader runs the joint conversation live while everyone else watches for the moment a side gets taken, or the words that cool the heat, and anyone can tap in when it stalls. You also draw the line for when a clash is not yours to mediate and needs HR.
You come out with a plan for your own real case: when to step in, your opener for each person, and a first conversation with a date on it.
What the three have in common
None of them rewards your first instinct.
In a new role, you hold back the urge to change things and listen instead.
With feedback, you hold back the urge to explain and just take it in.
In a conflict, you hold back the urge to fix it your way and find what each person actually needs.
The skill, in all three, is the same: when the moment is rare and the stakes are high, find out before you act.
What it costs
WorkshopBank Pro is $192 a year (at the time of publishing this article).
That's the full library I've built over 15 years, trusted by more than 200,000 facilitators and leaders.
You get all 361 workshops the day you join, these three included, plus unlimited modifications with our AI.
That's 53 cents a workshop. Set that against what it costs you to design one from scratch, or to buy a single session anywhere else.
Why join today
The price goes up as the library grows, and it never comes down. A fortnight ago there were 348 workshops. Today there are 361, with more joining the Leadership Toolkit over the coming weeks.
Join now and you keep today's price, with every workshop we add after included.
Have a good weekend,
P.S. Not sure where to start? If you've just taken a team on, start with Stepping Into a New Leadership Role. If not, the one you're quietly avoiding is usually the one to run first. Join Pro here