Corporate training & coaching · Hilversum, The Netherlands · delivered across Europe
Lead stream
Managing Change is a one-day workshop for managers leading a team through a reorganisation or a new way of working, covering how to communicate honestly when you do not have all the answers, respond to resistance without escalating it, and protect delivery while the change is still landing.
Outcomes
A manager nods along with the change in the leadership meeting, then stands in front of their own team and cannot say any of it out loud. They have a slide deck, a date and a set of talking points that answer none of the questions their people will actually ask. So they hedge. They say the words “exciting opportunity” without believing them, or they distance themselves with a quiet “this came from above”, and either way the team learns that their manager is not a reliable source of information about their own future.
What follows is predictable. People fill the silence with rumour, the good ones start taking recruiter calls, and delivery quietly slides while everyone waits to see what happens. The organisation usually blames communication and sends another email. The real gap is narrower than that: managers are rarely taught what to say when they genuinely do not know, how to stay in a conversation with someone who thinks the decision is wrong, or how to decide what work to stop when the team is running well below its usual capacity. This workshop covers those three things and very little else.
Participants bring their own change. Before the day, each person writes up the reorganisation or new way of working they are leading, what has been announced, what has not, and the two people on their team they are most worried about. That material is the content of the workshop. Louisa teaches in short blocks, roughly twenty minutes at a time, and the rest of the day is spent working on those live situations.
The morning is about the message. Participants draft what they will actually say to their team, then deliver it to a small group who push back with the questions they know are coming, including the ones about job security. Drafts get rewritten two or three times, usually shorter and more direct each time. The afternoon moves to the individual conversations, because resistance rarely shows up in a team meeting. It shows up in a one-to-one with the person who has been there eleven years and has stopped contributing.
Nothing here is generic, because everything was built on the participant’s own situation during the day. The takeaways are written, specific and dated.
Change does not happen on the day of the workshop. It happens over the following quarter, in conversations nobody rehearsed, which is why Pursue Your Potential treats the workshop as the start rather than the deliverable. Three follow-up options are available in any combination. Individual coaching sessions with Louisa give a manager somewhere to take the conversation that is not going well, usually the one they are avoiding. A 60-day check-in brings the group back with what actually happened, what they said differently and where they reverted. A short briefing for the participants’ own senior leaders sets out what these managers have committed to and what support they will need to hold it. Most clients take the check-in as a minimum, because it is the least expensive way to find out whether the message ever reached the teams.
Still unsure whether this is the right fit? Ask directly. A short call usually settles it faster than a brochure.
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