Essential Skills for Public Leaders

Utilizing the Continuum of Interaction tool from Learning Focused Supervision, explore four different stances for conversations with peers, employees, and supervisors. Learn to plan for complex conversations and also how to recognize when you unexpectedly find yourself in the midst of complexity.

Topics include:

• Calibration Conversations

• Consultation Conversations

• Collaboration Conversations

• Coaching Conversations

• Tips to decide which type(s) of conversations are best for the purpose at hand

Meet the Instructor: Dr. Whitney Meissner

Explore the power wheel and interpersonal dynamics that come from working with people who are different from us. In particular, understand the ways we are different from each other impact success in the workplace. Whether you are looking to strengthen your relationships with current staff, diversify your workforce, or both, this course will support your skills and extend your journey further down the path of inclusivity.

The Johari Window model of self-awareness is built on two key principles: building trust through appropriate information sharing, and fostering self-awareness by welcoming and learning from others’ feedback. This model divides personal awareness into four quadrants—open, hidden, blind, and unknown—each representing different aspects of our understanding of ourselves and others. These quadrants are dynamic, akin to window shades that can move and shift over time.

This model is incredibly useful for enhancing self-awareness in both personal and professional contexts. It serves as a tool to understand interpersonal dynamics within teams and organizations of all sizes, offering insights into organizational systems and how these dynamics unfold.

Effective communication is essential for successful leadership. In fact, strong communication skills are necessary for accomplishing anything else you’d like to achieve. When communication is identified as an area for professional improvement, J.Marie is often called in to help leaders build their skills and deepen their capacities.

In this session, leaders will learn practical skills and techniques that can be applied immediately. If you want to become a more trusted leader and connect more authentically with colleagues, board members, your organization’s constituents, and the general public, this session is for you. We’ll focus on the areas that most often trip up otherwise successful leaders.

Public agencies often require numerous meetings, ranging from routine staff, cabinet, board, and leadership team meetings to strategic planning retreats, open houses, and large public gatherings. It can feel like leaders are always in meetings. 

However, basic, easy-to-implement facilitation techniques can transform these meetings from dreaded calendar-fillers into productive, efficient, engaging opportunities for collaboration and progress. When done well, meetings can actually energize your work! With over 20 years of proven experience in making meetings both joyful and effective, J.Marie will help you significantly elevate your facilitation skills.

A community’s ability to influence its leaders’ decisions is not just a nice idea; it is the very foundation of our society. As leaders of public agencies, we have the responsibility to facilitate this influence, making it easy for our constituents to get involved, influence their local leaders, and know they have made a difference. Doing this is not only beneficial for our organizations, but it also strengthens our communities.

In this group training, we will explore the circle of influence and discuss specific strategies to close the loop for our constituents. We will also reflect on the moral purpose of our work and identify one actionable step you can take to elevate your effort when you return to your desk. Whether you are in your first year or your thirtieth, you will leave this session renewed in your professional purpose and ready to engage your community in tackling the big issues facing your organization!

When we think about communications, we often focus on what’s being said. However, effective listening is a critical component of a leader's ability to build or rebuild trust. A good leader must also reflect back what they’ve heard, specifically noting how constituent priorities have influenced their thinking. This is the ‘secret in the sauce’ that elevates your listening from merely informative to truly strategic and trust-building.

In this course, we’ll address listening on two levels: personal leadership listening skills and organizational strategies to deepen trust in your organization and in your leadership. We’ll explore how bringing increased clarity and purpose to your listening activities not only refines your decisions but also boosts confidence in public agencies overall. 

We will walk through new standards for serving the whole school community and share an overview of one district’s four-year strategy to implement them.

In 2022, the Professional Educators Standards Board released standards for districts in creating equal education opportunity for all students. Due to the depth of the standards, our implementation plan involved focusing on one area per year and working to build the collective capacity of our teams. This workshop will introduce participants to the standards and provide resources and indicators for each area.

What is important to you as a person and a leader? How do you link those values with your work? Identifying what is most important to us and those on our teams helps promote buy-in, commitment, and fulfillment. 

In this highly interactive and reflective session, we will provide time for public leaders to take a deeper look at our personal and professional values and how those values show up. We’ll also discuss ways to maximize our influence by communicating those values effectively with colleagues and your community. 

School board members are often in the hot seat these days, and not just during formal meetings. This session will cover communication skills and strategies specifically designed to help you grow your capacity and confidence as a school director.

We will explore personal communication and leadership skills, as well as organizational and process-related strategies that set you and your board up for positive, productive meetings. In particular, we will focus on strategies to help you navigate conflict with dignity, efficiency, and civility.

Whether you are new to board service or a seasoned veteran, you will come away with practical tips you can use immediately. J.Marie will also share a strong philosophical approach to guide you when you're caught by unexpected situations.

From school board meetings to our homes, from television news to community centers, disagreements are more heated and polarized than ever before. Conflict isn’t inherently negative; it naturally arises from holding different views in any given situation. When it is managed well, conflict can enhance outcomes and even bring people closer together.

In this session, we will explore methods to embrace disagreement and develop skills to navigate conflicts with dignity, civility, and respect. 

The way you navigate the first 24 to 72 hours of a critical incident sets the tone for how your schools will get through the crisis. When a serious issue is unfolding, staff and families are mad or traumatized, and the media is calling ... you want to convey calm competence. Handle the situation poorly, and the negative effects could live on for years. Handle it well, and your organization can actually grow stronger.

Join veteran communications strategist and crisis response manager, J.Marie, to learn how to conduct a quick, effective situation analysis, identify the constituents you need to connect with first, develop key messages, and craft and implement a messaging timeline. You'll come away with a basic communications plan outline you can customize and apply to any critical incident, as well as tips and strategies to help you be ready to do and say the right things when a challenging issue arises.

This class combines two foundational skills in one useful session! Listening is something most of us do every day without much thought. With the constant bombardment of information, many of us struggle to be good listeners. The good news is that, like all communications skills, listening can be improved with attention and practice. In this highly interactive session, we will explore ways to increase our influence and connection with others by being more intentional in our listening. 

Feedback often makes us cringe for a couple of reasons: we tend to compartmentalize it into annual events like performance evaluations or community surveys, which can lead to an overwhelming amount of information, and we fear hearing negative feedback. In this course, we’ll reframe feedback (it really is a gift!), and discuss ways to make giving and receiving feedback less painful. We’ll share strategies and tips to incorporate feedback into our daily lives, helping us build better relationships and achieve more.

You know that strong, effective communications skills are critical to accomplishing everything else you hope to achieve on behalf of your students. But if you're like most school leaders, you were lucky to get one module of communications training in your formal education. A handful of essential skills can genuinely elevate your effectiveness as a leader.

We’ll start with a review of core communication concepts, then dig into some practical, highly scalable ideas you can use right away. Put some fresh tools in your personal and organizational communication toolkits with this high-impact session for today's school leaders. This content can be delivered for a mix of leaders or targeted to the specific needs of superintendents, principals, or central office administrators. 

When hot topics catch your community's attention, such as disciplinary action, legal issues, or labor/management conflicts, one of the hardest parts is figuring out what to say when you can't say much. Saying ‘no comment' just won't do, so what can you say?

Walk through a veteran communication strategist’s tried and true approach to engaging the community appropriately and respectfully around these kinds of difficult issues. Come away with key ideas and talking points you can share with your leadership team so everyone can approach the issue consistently and appropriately... and so nobody feels caught off guard in the grocery store produce aisle when a curious community member asks about the topic du jour.

We've all been there. You set out with the best of intentions, wanting to help someone or a cause you care about deeply. But sometimes, our actions can have unintended consequences, creating challenges instead of solutions.

We’ll explore the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions. We’ll learn the importance of building empathy and understanding by shifting our focus from “fixing” to actively listening and learning about needs. We’ll discuss the difference between empowerment and dependency, and the importance of equipping others with the resources and skills to solve their own problems for long-term sustainability.

Authentic leadership is vital for both the leader and their team. When a leader is authentic, they create a genuine connection with their team members. This fosters trust, respect, and a sense of belonging. Authentic leaders inspire their teams by leading by example, demonstrating integrity, and being transparent. This creates a positive and supportive work environment where team members feel valued and motivated to contribute their best. Ultimately, authentic leadership leads to increased productivity, employee satisfaction, and overall organizational success.

We'll explore self-awareness, core values, building trust, empowering your team, and leading with empathy and emotional intelligence. Authentic leadership is about leading with your true self, which fosters trust, builds strong teams, and drives results.

In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the constant demands of work and personal life. Finding a sustainable balance between the two is essential for overall well-being and productivity. This guide will explore strategies to help you cultivate a harmonious work-life blend, enabling you to thrive in both realms.

We’ll challenge the traditional notion of work-life balance and explore a more holistic approach to creating a harmonious blend between your professional and personal life. We’ll delve into the importance of identifying your core needs and values, and discuss practical time management strategies to help you prioritize tasks and reclaim control of your schedule.

You’ll also learn the art of saying no, empowering you to set boundaries and decline requests that don’t align with your priorities. Finally, we’ll explore the significance of building habits for well-being, such as mindfulness and self-care, to foster a more balanced and fulfilling lifestyle.