How People Work

In 4 weeks, teams learn how to become more influential, build stronger relationships, communicate clearly, and focus on what matters.

What is this?

It’s an intensive, hands-on, four-week coached program for technology teams.

Over eight sessions of three hours each, we take cohorts through group teaching, then follow-up with collaborative, group feedback exercises. All based on your real work to practice applying what you’ve learned.

Who this is for

It’s for your team and it’s for you.

It’s for teams. Teams working on complex and complicated technology projects for clients, from digital transformation to legacy modernization, from discovery to big-bang implementations.

Teams that aren’t being listened to, or teams that are stuck. Teams that want to work on bigger problems than the statement of work. Teams that need to rebuild trust, and teams with a million tricky stakeholders. Teams that have figured out they’re doing consultancy, but they’re not consultants.Teams that want to be more than okay.

It’s for you, because no matter where you spend your time, whether it’s in Github or Outlook, Excel or Asana, Figma or Visual Studio Code, Confluence (sorry) or Sharepoint (also sorry), and no matter your role on your team, you’re someone who needs to understand other people and communicate clearly with them — which also means thinking clearly about goals, strategy, and tactics.

Why you want this right now

You want to increase your influence

Get people to listen to you. Get the right person to listen to you. Know who to influence. Know what to ask leadership for and how to get it. Get people to change their behavior. Manage those vendors. Get people to change their priorities. Influence that backlog. Get what you need.

Teams can’t deliver on their own. So increase your influence by understanding how people really, really, really work in organizations. Learn how to

• work with stakeholders as thinking and feeling humans, and understand their position and relationships

• Build better mental models of organizations, by seeing and understanding peoples’ behavior outside explicit organization charts and hierarchies

• Recognize and support the key individuals critical to success, wherever they sit

• Make and validate predictions about peoples’ motivations and fears

• Manage expectations, clarify roles and responsibilities, and how to consult and inform stakeholders

You want stronger relationships

Learn the truth, faster. Know when people don’t know what they should know. Smash silos, build bridges, and detox that disaster area. Create space for a better chance of success. Do a better job for stakeholders, users, and clients. Increase the chance of repeat business.

Great work needs strong relationships built on trust and empathy. Learn how to get the most out of people by

• listening and talking with candor

• spotting where and when everybody lies (sometimes a lot, sometimes a little)

• doing your research to develop empathy and compassion

You want to communicate clearly

Get your point across. Lead the fight against bullshit business speak. Reduce misunderstandings. Turn that meeting into an email. Send emails that get read. Create decks that aren’t skipped over. Translate the complicated and complex into the clear and accessible.

Earn their trust and respect by communicating simply, with clarity and purpose. Get rid of filler and get to the point by

• learning to respect peoples’ time

• practicing how to spot bullshit, admitting when you use it, then learning how to remove it

• meeting the different communication needs of different audiences – from executive leadership to middle management

• knowing when a presentation isn’t a presentation, and a meeting shouldn’t be a meeting

• learning how to be respectful, candid, and communicate bad news 

You want to focus on what matters

Get unstuck. Practice getting rid of distractions. Turn around that bad idea. Deal with the shiny object. Stop doing the wrong thing, faster. Learn how to figure out the right thing. Learn to be pragmatic. Make strategy and tactics work for you.

Delivering better always, always comes down to goals and focus. Which means it also comes down to your client’s strategy. Strategy is hard! Learn how to focus on the right goals, right strategy, and right tactics by

• seeing work in the context of the bigger picture

• understanding the interplay between how you work and how your stakeholders work

• diagnosing how an organization’s focus problem affects your work

• recognizing when a strategy isn’t really a strategy, and how to use Lafley and Martin’s Playing to Win framework to get started and and what to do about it

Learn How People Work

Learn how people work, and your teams will deliver better, faster.