Programs
EPC Learning Labs' approach to leadership development accelerates leadership mastery. Our programs offer high value and effectiveness at a surprisingly low cost. This superior return on investment comes from a set of powerful inter-related innovations focused on tackling today’s most pressing leadership challenges to create value for customers, clients, and constituents.
Our programs are delivered in three phases: Learn, Practice, and Master.
In the Learn phase, our experts deliver unique and practical content that helps leaders stop and think first before engaging in behaviors. Based on leading-edge andragogy, these programs are designed to account for the unique challenges of how adults learn. All programs are delivered in a virtual format and specially structured and delivered to avoid “Zoom” fatigue.
The Practice phase offers the most innovative aspect of our approach. Using a proprietary process we call Expert-led Peer-group Coaching (EPC), our experts meet several times with groups of five to guide the application of principles in a leader's actual workflow. These “EPC meetings” not only accelerate the acquisition of mastery but also create micro-learning communities that are central to the next phase of the program.
During the Master phase, the micro-learning communities continue to meet on their own and use our proprietary peer coaching process to mutually advance each other’s mastery. After the formal phase concludes, micro-learning communities are encouraged to continue supporting each other. Our programs conclude by capturing narratives in which leaders were able to create new value for their organization by using their new capabilities that otherwise would not have been accomplished.
The combination of these inter-related innovations creates a groundbreaking STOP Doing and START Thinking Program Series that accelerates leadership mastery and offers more value to leaders and their organizations at a surprisingly lower cost compared to traditional approaches.
STOP Doing and START Thinking
Program Series
EPC Learning Labs presently offers five programs in our STOP and START series. Each program shares common leadership approaches to tackling wicked challenges and reveals why typical approaches often are fundamentally flawed. The program then goes on to offer novel approaches to thinking along with actionable skills to transform leadership capabilities.
The following programs will help you and your learners STOP Doing and START Thinking to accelerate the development of their leadership mastery.
STOP Solving Problems and START Thinking Strategically
STOP Managing Meetings and START Fostering Inclusion
STOP Evaluating Performance and START Inspiring Excellence
STOP Asking for Buy-in and START Leading Change with Bee-in
STOP Satisfying Customers and START Creating Value for Clients
STOP Managing Meetings and START Fostering Belonging
How can you create a culture of inclusion and belonging?
When leaders seek to create a greater sense of belonging and inclusion in an organization, all roads tend to lead to changing the culture of their organization. Culture is a multi-faceted concept that encompasses values and behaviors. It is reflected in both formal and informal settings, most importantly in meetings. If meetings can become an experience where all individuals are able to contribute and feel valued, it can begin to make a significant difference in the culture.
This program enables leaders to facilitate meetings in a way that ensures all participants feel welcomed, respected, supported, and valued. It introduces five key principles that are essential for success and provides practical steps, techniques and tips for translating these principles into tangible behaviors during meetings. Not only will participants feel a greater sense of belonging and inclusion, but also, for those meetings intended to solve problems, they will also achieve unanimity on problem formulation and accelerate implementation of solutions.
STOP Evaluating Performance and START Inspiring Excellence
How can you transform performance evaluations into opportunities to inspire excellence and engagement?
Evaluating performance is a necessary evil but, detached from day-to-day activities, rarely do annual evaluations offer motivation or learning to help employees build capabilities. Thus, ironically, performance evaluation all too often engenders mediocrity.
This program introduces to leaders at all levels of an organization — supervisors, managers, and executives — an approach and system that can transform the drudgery of performance evaluations into a strategic advantage for themselves, their workforce, and their organization. It introduces a system of coaching, communicating, and cadence of employee advancement. Mastery of these competencies inspires excellence and transforms a task into a value-creation opportunity.
STOP Asking for Buy-in and START Leading Change with Bee-in
How enthusiastically do you or others “buy-in” to change initiatives?
This program provides innovative methods that dramatically improve your ability to successfully develop and implement change initiatives. It introduces a new approach — Leading at the Crossroads of Change — on who, how, and when to engage stakeholders in the change process.
You will learn how to refine or establish an implementable vision for your organization; shift from a hierarchical buy-in mode of change to a collaborative “bee-in” approach; and learn how to identify and engage broad constituencies during change efforts. The model fundamentally revolutionizes how individuals can lead change in their organizations.
STOP Satisfying Customers and START Creating Value for Clients
How can you revolutionize customer service in your organization?
Nearly all organizational departments have customers, whether they be internal or external. To meet or exceed growing customer expectations, leaders must learn a new lexicon that describes the relationship between all parties. This program introduces you to a framework that explores the roles of a variety of actors (or clients or citizens) and set of processes so that you can improve the quality of your organization’s client value creation. You will acquire specific skills that help you create value for your clients and develop the thinking needed to lead a customer-service-focused organization.
The end result is the creation of a dynamic customer focus that strategically improves organizational performance.
STOP Routine Planning and START Formulating Strategy
How can you develop a strategic plan that accelerates organizational performance?
While strategic planning is part of the repertoire of most organizations, these plans rarely deliver the promised high organizational performance. To advance performance, organizations must break from routine and formulate strategies that create new and more value for customers, clients, and constituencies, compared to the prior year.
This program offers a specific set of processes to formulate organizational strategic goals and strategies so that your organization breaks out of routine planning. More importantly, these processes deliver necessary preconditions to help ensure successful implementation.
STOP Doing and START Thinking
Program Series
EPC Learning Labs presently offers six programs in our STOP and START series. These programs will help you and your leaders STOP Doing and START Thinking to accelerate the development of their leadership mastery.
STOP Solving Problems and START Thinking Critically
How can you solve the “right” problems the first time?
When tackling today’s most challenging problems, individuals and teams often end up solving the wrong problem, wasting time and resources and impeding results. This program provides tools and techniques to comprehensively formulate problems or challenges, thereby developing solutions that solve the right problem the first time.
In this program, leaders will learn how to recognize biases that undermine problem solving and engage in structured inquiry to uncover perspectives of all affected parties. You will learn the techniques of “triple-tier brainstorming,” which will help you reframe the challenge, thereby leading to an implementable solution. Mastery of problem formulation leads to dramatic improvements in leadership performance.