Since bookings in our business are much slower in the summer, I’ve often used the time for writing books, reflecting, and planning. One of my projects this summer was to step back and look at the bigger and evolving picture of our keynotes and workshops.
Most of my keynotes and workshops are tailored to a group or organization’s unique priorities and desired outcomes. These keynotes, workshops, and retreats are often part of offsite strategy sessions, team building, special events like annual meetings or town halls, association conferences, corporate meetings, kickoff events, webinars or virtual learning, or leadership/culture development.
Customizing a keynote or workshop often involves mixing, matching, and redesigning our approaches and skill building modules to fit specific applications. That’s resulted in a growing number of slides, examples, research, assessments, and application exercises. The summer project gave me a chance to step back and look more broadly at topic trends from a broad sample of organizations.
Here’s our revised list of topic areas that emerged from this work (click on the link to read a short description):
- Lead, Follow, or Wallow: Inspiring Personal Leadership
- Leading @ the Speed of Change
- The High-Performance Balance: Management and Leadership
- 5 Vital Steps to Building a Peak Performance Culture
- Building a Customer-Centered Culture: The Service/Quality System for Exceptional Results
- 6 Steps to Extraordinary Coaching Skills
- Leveraging Leadership Strengths: Transforming Good Managers into Great Leaders
- Moose-on-the-Table: Fostering Courageous Conversations to Address Communication Breakdowns
- The Top 10 Factors of Innovation Leaders
- BOLD Leadership: How to Accelerate Performance and Results
- 8 Factors That Frustrate and Disengage Employees
- Big Breakthroughs in Health and Safety Effectiveness: Building a Powerful Culture for Dramatic Results
- Upward Leadership: Strategies to Manage Your Manager
My summer analysis shows that change — personal and organizational — is an enduring topic. Balancing management and leadership has continually been one of the most read sections of our blog and article library and a popular keynote/workshop topic area. Culture development as a broad topic or focused more specifically on customers or safety is growing in popularity.
Coaching skills development and building a coaching culture is emerging as one of our fast growing topic areas. Leveraging leadership strengths has also grown rapidly over the past few years. Both of those topics are tightly linked to an ongoing interest in employee engagement.
More recent topic areas that have surged forward in interest are BOLD leadership and innovation.
Have you reflected on your personal and organizational trends? What areas are you trying to develop so you can stay on the grow?
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