Center for Organizational Development
Our team serves nonprofit organizations, government entities, community coalitions and individuals in various areas of capacity building and developmental support. More information coming soon.
Organizational
Development
Our team helps organizations and communities create a shared vision, chart a course for progress, and hold participants accountable.
Leadership
Development
We prepare our partners to lead more intentionally and effectively by designing and facilitating individualized, immersive leadership experiences.
Learning
Development
We partner with you to envision, design, and implement a comprehensive suite of learning activities that puts your employees and learners at the center.
Let's partner together!
We specialize in:
- Board Development
- Coalition Facilitation
- Collaboration Support
- Facilitation
- Implementation of Collective Impact Ideas
- Information-Gathering
- Nonprofit Start-Up
- Process Improvement
- Project Management
- Strategic Planning
- Succession Planning
- Venues and Technology
- Communication Training
More Services Coming Soon
The New Next: Skills to be Prepared and Proactive
CEI invites you to join us for a series of skill building and network expanding webinars. You may be interested if you are currently work or plan to work in the nonprofit or association world, or you are someone who has some experience but not running the whole show (yet).
CONNECT WITH OUR TEAM
We are excited to partner with you and provide tools to help you reach your community and better accomplish your goals. Contact us directly with the email provided below!
collaborative services
Sometimes it is difficult to:
- Keep what’s important to you in front of you
- Recognize, synthesize, and communicate what you have learned
- Develop and manage productive relationships
- Imagine beyond your current perspective
Our team believes you have the capacity to adapt and thrive in changing times—knowing that all times are changing times!
Coaching is a development process individually tailored to help an individual or team meet short- and long-term goals. Many of our clients come to us through their organizations: executives, key staff, ongoing teams, and task forces. Other clients come because of their own drive to learn and make progress.
Our Coaching Promise
Through engaging fully in coaching, you will:
- Improve interpersonal or communication skills
- Address that elusive work / life balance
- Expedite priorities so you manage time optimally
- Enhance your capacity to hold tough conversations and manage conflict
- Improve individual or team performance
- Be invited to transform, at an individual and organizational level
Good Times to Start Coaching
- When your organization needs to consider succession/transition planning
- When you have had a learning experience and want to translate what you learned into action
- When you or a team member is on-boarding into a new role
- When you or a team member have a significant increase in responsibilities
- When you want to retain talent
- When you want to sustain shifts in organizational culture
- When you want to create a more “coach-like culture”—extraordinary results, accountability, and possibility
Coaching sessions may be held in person, over the phone, or via video chat for a duration suited to your needs.
Satisfactory teams get work done. Exceptional teams also work on themselves.
- Improve your effectiveness, efficiency, and communication
- Improve cohesion among team members.
- Address persistent, distracting conflict.
Our multi-faceted team development approaches achieve lasting results.
How we will work together:
- Our facilitators and coaches believe that your team is capable of the tough work of improving its own functioning at the same time it addresses the demands of meeting your mission. Your team has the capacity to adapt to changing times—and all times are changing times.
- Our approaches are grounded in concepts of adaptive work and the framework of the Kansas Leadership Center.
- Our system can involve people at all levels of the organization—at once or over time—leading to long-term behavioral change. We believe adaptation starts with you and involves others.
- Everything we provide is customized for your team and designed with your input.
Our promises:
- Greater understanding of your role in the team
- Increased awareness of each team member’s points of view and struggles
- Reduction of distracting conflict (and introduction of productive conflict)
- Common language and approach
- Improved morale and willingness to work together
- Sustained adaptive progress
Many organizations wait for “the one” to come along and solve their problems or establish a vision—that person who will bring everyone together.
You are that person who can change the course of events. The good news and bad news is that you are not the only one. Difficult, long-term problems require many strong voices to come together and create change.
Learning and practicing leadership skills—as an individual and as a team—improves your effectiveness in changing times. And all times are changing times.
Program:
- Our approach to leadership development is influenced by our longtime partnership with the Kansas Leadership Center. In addition, we draw on decades of experience teaching a number of leadership models.
- We specialize in customizing curriculum, allowing you to focus on the leadership skills that are most applicable.
- Our programs require no previous leadership experience or fancy titles – but an open mind is a pre-requisite!
Potential Outcomes:
- Enhanced ability to mobilize change in groups
- More tolerance for messy, nerve-racking situations
- Heightened understanding of others’ challenges and needs
Here are a few things we believe in:
- Leadership is a transformational activity- it changes the people leading and the people around them
- The activity of leadership is required to make progress on complex challenges
- Making a community a better place to live requires changing systems
- People don’t have to stay where they are; progress is always possible
Since 2006, our center has supported businesses, foundations, nonprofits, and individuals across the state of Kansas to make progress on complex, persistent issues and to lead in constantly changing environments. We accomplish this by:
- Providing challenging training and retreat environments to help foster individual and organization innovation and experimentation.
- Administering and interpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment - while giving valuable insight into how individuals and your organization can use the results effectively
- Leadership coaching that offers guided reflection and accountability for taking action
- Leadership consultation with your organization about the effectiveness of internal or ongoing leadership efforts
- Succession planning for organizations facing change in key management positions.
Leadership training is often the initial point from which individuals can act to build the groups around them. From here, many groups may find our team development programs and more extensive coaching services helpful in continuing their journey into leadership activities.
Appreciating Differences on Effective Teams
Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a starting place, learn how to harness what your team does naturally and to shine a light on your blind spots.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
KOLB Learning Styles ("The Egg")
Leadership Lessons from Kansas History
Two big stories from loudmouths in Kansas history—Carry Nation and the Rev. Gerald Winrod—have a lot to teach us about leadership, authority, holding to purpose, and working across factions. Think about the choices that faced these historical Kansans and decide what you would do.
Energizing Others Through Powerful Questions
From Socrates to Yoda, the great thinkers engaged people in learning and problem-solving through expertly built, positively focused questions. You can do this too. Togas and light sabers not included.
Understanding and Managing Triggers
You know the situations, people, and circumstances that set you off. You encounter one of them and you react quickly, without much thought. Probably the people around you know what these triggers are, too. Gain a better understanding of triggers, how to manage them, and how to navigate others’ triggers more effectively.
Creating a Coaching Culture in your Team
Sometimes in our work we spend a lot of time bumping into obstacles. Using a coaching approach is like putting on a pair of night vision goggles. The obstacles don’t go away, but we can help ourselves and the people who depend on us better spot and navigate them.
Compassion Fatigue and Burnout
The fast pace of our jobs often masks the impact of fatigue and how close we are to burning out. Learn why self-care is an act of leadership and what you can do about it.
Asset Mapping for Community and Organizational Issues
“Start with what you have” sounds like good advice, but it can be hard to take it when facing a complex challenge. Learn how asset mapping and an appreciative approach can launch your new efforts with energy.
Helping your Team Manage Conflict
The inability to communicate around touchy issues plagues even the best of teams. Enhance your team members’ relationships and mindsets through more effective communication that works to your team’s advantage—rather than its demise.
Establishing Action Learning Circles
Implement a proven method to enhance productivity, share accountability, and reinforce learning. This approach is particularly effective as a follow-on to other training when it is critical that the learning “sticks.”
After Assessments: More Effective Team Building
Your team may have completed assessments such as StrengthsFinder, Kolb Learning Styles, or MBTI in the past. Review those results and learn new approaches to sustaining effective teams in changing environments.
Shifting Culture: From a Management to Leadership
Recognize the essential functions of management and use them as a launching point to begin truly leading people to make progress on the work that matters most.
Encouraging Staff Creativity
Identify the systems and behaviors that get in the way of staff members’ innovation, and practice some approaches to thinking in new ways.
Supporting Supervisors
Team success begins with effective supervisors. Learn how to help supervisors build effective leadership and communication skills that drive team success and promote a positive, energized environment for increased productivity and employee motivation.
Strategic Planning for Organizations or Teams
A plan with no data is merely an opinion. Learn options for identifying and organizing relevant data, approaches to establishing a shared vision, and methods to move your team or organization to action.
Facilitating Effective Meetings
Running a meeting that people are happy they attended is not difficult, but it requires intention. Increase your awareness of how to plan for, manage, and follow up on meetings in order to achieve their purpose.
Manage your Stress: Manage your Time
We are all given only 24 hours in a day. What if those 24 hours could be approached more productively, with higher energy, and with a greater understanding of how to physically and psychologically impact that time? Choose specific ways to focus on what is most important to you, and learn easy strategies for re-engaging your brain and body in managing stress.
Either for individuals or groups, utilization of this model to improve communications, develop existing strengths, and make a daily difference in all interactions.