LEADERS REFRESH
Leaders Refresh Workshops and Retreats are offered throughout the year to provide unique opportunities for individual leaders both to enhance their leadership skills and to connect with leaders of secular community service organizations and faith based organizations while nourishing their minds and spirits. Workshops are held virtually on a range of topics. The annual Leaders Refresh retreat, held in real space, addresses management strategies and incorporates inter-spiritual rituals, yoga and other body movement, healing practices, individual and group coaching sessions.
Leaders become leaders because they demonstrate passion, commitment, and strong skills in particular areas that meet organizational needs. To lead organizations to even greater mission impact requires that leaders set the pace for going beyond what enable the current level of success. To support organizational growth and manage organizational change – that is, going into the unknown – requires leaders to go beyond their own comfort zones. This workshop helps you identify the parameters of your comfort zones relating to different aspects of your leadership and provides beginning tools for your own personal growth as a leader.
Leading Beyond
Your Comfort Zone
January 23, 2025
1 pm ET/ 10 am PT
$79
It is often said that it is “lonely at the top”. Leadership often brings loneliness and isolation as they have no peers in the organization. This common experience is greatly heightened for leaders of color in predominantly white organizations, for LGBTQ leaders in predominantly hetero cisgender organizations, Leaders with disabling conditions in organizations that do not have specific mission for disabled persons, and leaders who experience constant Challenge and sabotage. These are just a few of the contexts in which leaders are likely to feel very lonely and isolated from the community of people they are called to lead in the midst of the organizations that they lead. This workshop offers you rich spiritual strategies and psychological resources for navigating this experience and enables you to network with other leaders who understand this distinct experience.
Alone in the Crowd
Leading While Grieving
Personal losses, challenges, and crises do not stop because you are a leader. Leaders are human and therefore are affected by the human reality of grief. Leading While Grieving provides a space for you to share with other leaders who can relate to the challenge of attending to the impacts of a personal loss when the demands on your time and your ability to focus remain great. This workshop provides a template for self-compassion and effective leadership.
Power struggles, at their core, are reflections of anxiety and fear that something highly valued to an individual or group is being threatened. As this anxiety mounts, so do the power plays and the use of every imaginable strategy to preserve that which is so valued for individuals and groups within the organization. To be effective in breaking through the power struggles:
Understand what is valued and why.
Convey respect and appreciation of what
is valued.Empathize with what the threat of loss feels like.
Recognize that it is ultimately not about you.
Develop strategic partnerships to identify ways to negotiate win-win solutions.
Love and pray for those who are trapped in their anxiety and fear.
This workshop helps you identify the issues present in your organization and the strategies needed to move toward a breakthrough and move toward creating beloved community.
Change and Conflict Management
Every organization has its own culture shaped by organizational history, current leadership and management practices, and the extent to which diversity is present and regarded among the staff at all levels. Although often regarded as an afterthought, organizational culture is as significant to mission effectiveness as funding and operations. The core elements of transformative organizational culture include:
Internal practices that are consistent with the organizational vision
Honoring the richness diverse cultural backgrounds identities, and life experiences bring to the organization
Diversities in all levels of staff and board positions
Ongoing learning about the impacts of identities, backgrounds and experiences On how people work together
Values-based decisions – both internal and outwardly facing
The willingness of leaders to model growing and learning publicly
Our workshops and consulting services provide the tools for identifying the pathway for aligning your organization’s culture with your expressed mission and values. This workshop also helps leaders develop strategies for going beyond diversity and inclusion efforts to expanded engagement of allyship across diverse communities.
Transformative Organizational Culture
Interpersonal
Communication
Among the skills that leaders need to be effective, interpersonal communication
skills are at the top most important. How
leaders communicate with a range of key stakeholders – staff, boards, funders,
community partners – greatly determines
staff retention, institutional development,
and the degree of ease or difficulty in accomplishing intended outcomes. At the
core of interpersonal communication is the
skill of listening. Building upon the book
The Gift To Listen, The Courage To Hear by
Dr. Cari Jackson, this workshop enables you
to identify your common listening styles
and their impact on your interpersonal communication, especially when you are stressed or anxious, and enables you to
practice using more effective listening tools.
It is not enough to have passion and commitment to an organizational mission to address or heal social issues. With the limited financial resources that most community service and faith-based organizations have, all the more important it is to have a clear and effective path forward. Our process includes 3 steps:
Clarifying vision, mission, and values
Mapping out a theory of change
Developing long- and short-term intended outcomes in the context of organizational operations, staffing, and budget
Strategic Visioning
Team Building
Many of us conceptually understand the meaning of such quotes as “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (Aristotle) and “united we stand divided we fall” (Aesop). Yet, the ongoing cultivation of teams is not easy. Team building requires a balance of effective interpersonal skills and management skills. Most leaders are more effective in one of these skill sets than the other. This workshop helps you build upon your strengths and identify specific strategies for moving beyond your comfort zone to strengthen the other needed skills.
Leaders are often expected to be the smartest person in the room. However, this expectation often impedes excellent leadership.
Most effective leaders are able to excel when they cultivate and
make space for the gifts and skills of everyone in the organization.
This way of leading engages both head and heart. Building
upon the leadership approach of mystic and theologian
Dr. Howard Thurman, this workshop invites you to practice
integrating your cognitive and intuitive skills,
using your business and emotional knowing.
This workshop will be led by Dr. Tejai Beulah Howard.
Dr. Howard Thurman's writings and teachings have
formed how Dr. Tejai teaches and how she leads.
Leading with Head and Heart
Personal Well-Being
in a Chaotic World
The complexities, pace of change, and collective grieving common in today's society are demanding and draining for everyone. In this context, leaders are not exempt from the impacts of crisis and chaos occurring in the world, their workplaces, their homes. There is often little time or focus given to the well-being of leaders as they seek to improve the lives of many others. This workshop offers a time of respite for you to share with other leaders in a safe/sacred space the challenges you are facing and strengthen the tools needed for your own well-being.