How to get Nonprofit Leadership Training for Individuals and Teams

What are you dealing with?

Maybe your team moved up from the front line without ever being taught how to lead, and it's starting to show in avoided conversations and stalled decisions
Maybe you are aware of a conflict that keeps simmering, whether as passive-aggressive comments or as a lack of communication and collaboration.
Or maybe your team is running on fumes; you know they are overloaded and would love for you to hire more staff, but the budget won't ever let that happen soon.

Whatever it is, you've been trying to sort it out for maybe months, to no avail.

It's time to do something, and you're wondering if some team training with me might help. I'd love to see if that might work.

I always build training around whatever your team is actually dealing with right now. Sometimes I do one session, and that takes the edge off; other times, it's a short series, or something that goes deeper. Either way, it's not cookie-cutter training. It is designed with you, the leader, to meet your team's needs.

Not sure where to start?

Email me and let's figure it out together

That's completely normal, and it's honestly most of the conversation when a leader first reaches out. The real problem underneath what you're noticing isn't always obvious from where you're standing.

It might look like a communication issue on the surface but actually be about confidence
It might look like a time management problem but really be about a team that's exhausted and running on fumes.

The themes below will give you a feel for the kind of training I do with teams, but you really don't need to land on the exact right one before you reach out. Tell me what you're noticing, whether that's tension in meetings, staff who seem checked out, or just a nagging sense that something isn't working, and we'll sort out together what would actually help.

And if nothing here quite matches what's going on with your team, that's completely fine too. We can build something new, designed just for your team's situation.

Team Training Options

Strength Based Leadership

Your team has real talent, but chances are a lot of it is sitting unused because nobody's ever mapped out who's actually good at what. Maybe you've got someone quietly carrying half the team's workload because delegating still comes down to job descriptions or whoever's available, not whoever's actually suited to the task. Maybe you're noticing engagement slipping, and that may be because people don't feel like their particular strengths are being used or valued.

A strengths session starts with helping your team understand their own strengths, individually and as a group. Once they name and claim their strengths, we start to figure out how to make sure everyone is using their strengths effectively going forward. You'll begin to build a team culture where people's strengths actually get used instead of ignored.

Confidence

You might have people on your team who know their work inside and out but go quiet the second a meeting starts, or who second-guess every decision out loud before they'll commit to it. That could be a skill gap (they therefore lack the competence) or a they-don't-believe-in-themselves gap.

If you are looking to build the confidence of your leadership team, you'll want to help them understand that confidence starts with building the skills so they have the competence. They will then need to practice those skills before they feel confident doing them regularly. In a session like this, I'd walk them through what they feel confident in, how to identify gaps, and how to build their own plan for developing skills and confidence in those areas.

Time Management and Overwhelm aka Energy and Priority Management

Everything on your team probably feels urgent most days, and everyone's worried about dropping balls. Your team is busy “whacking moles,” as I say, putting out fires, dealing with crises, and running from meeting to meeting while trying to keep up with their inboxes and staff concerns.

But busy doesn't mean the right things are getting done.

Without pausing to check, it usually just means everyone's exhausted by five o'clock and staying late, or heading back to email after supper. When everything's on fire, priorities end up getting decided by whoever's yelling loudest that day, not by what actually matters most, and when that cycle repeats day after day, it feels like no one's ever getting anywhere, only further behind.

If this is true for your team, you might need a session that helps your team get honest about where the time is actually going, and builds a shared, workable way to prioritize when there's more on the plate than time to handle it.

Sustainable Wellness at Work

Stress and burnout are common across this sector, and they rarely stay contained to just one person. If you feel like you're living in survival mode, chances are your team feels the same way. When a team is running on empty, you'll see short tempers, corners being cut, people quietly checking out of meetings and conversations, and honestly, you're running a risk not just of burnout, but of creating a toxic work culture.

If you're waiting until evening or the weekend to recover, you're also role-modeling that pattern to your whole team, and it still doesn't fix what's happening during the workday itself. If you want a sustainable workplace culture, you all need to learn to take care of yourselves by building small, real wellness habits directly into the workday, not adding one more thing your team has to squeeze into an already full evening.

In these types of sessions, I'm always teaching how to add micro-moments of wellness into your workday, not because you'll feel better (but you will), but because you and your team will be better able to focus, be more decisive, and manage your emotions when you get triggered at 3pm and want to strangle someone.

Supervision, Feedback, and Conflict on Teams

Conflict on a team doesn't go away just because everyone's ignoring it; it tends to show up instead as passive aggressive comments, a breakdown in communication, or the tension that everyone can feel but nobody names out loud. Feedback that never gets said doesn't stop mattering either, and a lot of leaders end up too gentle, too blunt, or just avoiding it altogether, while supervision meetings quietly turn into status updates instead of the conversations that would actually help someone grow.

This work gives your team a workable structure for supervision, and gives you a way to have feedback and conflict conversations that don't feel weird, dreaded, or put off indefinitely.

Recognition and Appreciation

Teams that feel unseen don't always say so directly; it tends to show up instead as quiet disengagement, or people just doing the minimum because nobody seems to notice when they do more. And while you may have a formal recognition program, what people actually remember and hold onto is usually something much smaller, said by someone who genuinely noticed what they did.

If you're noticing that you need to build more engagement, building recognition into everyday conversations might be a good place to start. Building genuine recognition habits into how your team already works is a positive strategy rather than a fix-it strategy to create more good vibes on your team.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF ONGOING SUPPORT

Community of Practice

For teams and leaders who want something ongoing, not just a single topic.

Monthly training for your team

This is a recurring monthly session for your team, where the topic gets chosen based on whatever's most present for your team that particular month, rather than locking in one theme months in advance. It flexes to whatever your team actually needs, as it comes up.

A peer group across organizations

This is a facilitated group where leaders from different organizations meet regularly to work through real leadership challenges together, with me facilitating the conversation. I've run this model for multiple umbrella organizations wanting to bring peer leaders together. If this feels like the right fit, you don't have to bring it to me alone, it also works well as something you pitch to your sector's umbrella organization, to bring a wider group of leaders together.

"Being on our own computers made it easier to connect with Kathy and it personalized the experience for each person on our team. It also gave us an opportunity afterwards to debrief as a group."

Kathy Kim, Training Coordinator, AHVNA

"Kathy is great and easy to work with. She will make you feel comfortable in your learnings, team building and any initiatives you are wanting to work through. We decided to have each team member join separately from their own workstation, which was surprisingly more comfortable and allowed us to have our own space to reflect and think. This also helped everyone feel included and no one was left out or behind."

Chris Riley, Director of Operations, Tillsonburg and District Multi Service Centre

What Teams Say

"It was a pleasure working with you, and thank you so much for all the learning we earned that we can share with our team. You made me realize all the strength that I have which I did not recognize before."

Sabina Datahan, Programmatic Coordinator, URSA

"It's helpful to know other people experience the same things, we are not alone in the feelings we have or frustrations."

Training Participant, AHVNA Community of Practice

Let's talk about your team.

Before we decide what your team needs, let's talk about what's really going on, what you're hoping changes, and what would actually help. Once we've got that figured out, we'll sort out what it looks like and when.