Special Interest Roundtable Groups
Invest in your future with Core Leadership: Special Interest Roundtable Groups. Professionals gain support from peers in similar situations as themselves to help navigate challenges, opportunities, and milestones.

TARGET AUDIENCE
This roundtable is designed for team leaders at any level, with varying years of experience. Whether you are new to team leadership, or you have been leading an in-tact team for years, the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team roundtable will offer new insights, tools and best practices for immediate application.
Experience Overview
One strategy to engage and retain your workforce and achieve exceptional results is to ensure cohesion and strong performance at the team level. Based on Patrick Lencioni’s NY Times Best-Seller, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, roundtable participants will use time in this roundtable group to explore the following five critical behaviors that build a cohesive team:
- Trust one another
- Engage in conflict around ideas
- Commit to decisions
- Focus on achieving collective results
- Hold one another accountable
Some shared best practices, tools and discussion prompts will encourage participants to identify the behaviors of greatest need for the teams they lead. In this five-month interactive roundtable setting, participants will also gain insights into how other team leaders are working to build each behavior within their teams. Specific focus areas will be explored, and each participant will conclude the roundtable with an action plan to produce better team results.
Session 1: “Building Trust” (2-hours)
At the foundation of every cohesive team is the presence of trust. In the presence of trust, team members are willing to be completely vulnerable with one another. To be vulnerable, members need to be confident that their peers’ intentions are good. In this roundtable, we will explore what vulnerability-based trust means, discuss some trust-building strategies and explore what may be needed for greater trust to exist on your team. Additional time is built into this roundtable session to meet the participants and build trust among the group before engaging in the program.
Session 2: “Engaging in Healthy Conflict” (90-minutes)
Effective teams understand the value of engaging in healthy conflict. But conflict, and how it is handled, often falls upon each person’s comfort level with it. To have productive conflict on a team, members need to recognize that while individuals may feel differently about it, the focus must be on concepts and ideas; mean-spirited and personal attacks must always be avoided; and there needs to be a team culture that supports the sharing of different perspectives. In this session, we’ll discuss how your team members voice their opinions, solicit one another’s ideas and confront/deal with issues before moving on.
Session 3: “Committing to Decisions” (90-minutes)
Have you ever debriefed a meeting with a co-worker and realized that you both walked away from the discussion with a different idea about next steps? Effective teams can only commit to actions when there is clarity around decisions. Clarity and commitment require complete buy-in from the team. In this session, participants will be introduced to a process called Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry is a framework that can be used to have exploratory, collaborative conversation, resulting in a preferred and productive way forward. We’ll explore how the framework can be used with your team to create buy-in for an upcoming effort and result in members committing to decisions.
Session 4: “Accountability is Key” (90-minutes)
It has been said that the single greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. For effective teams to hold one another accountable, they need to provide timely and meaningful communication in the form of feedback. Team members need to be willing to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team. In this session, we’ll introduce you to a structure that empowers team members to provide and solicit ongoing feedback. We’ll also discuss how you may modify the structure to work for your team dynamic.
Session 5: “Driven by Results” (90-minutes)
When a cohesive team has mastered the first four behaviors (trust, conflict, commitment and accountability), collective team results will often naturally follow since each layer of the model builds upon the previous. The key focus here is the emphasis on the word “collective” results, versus team members only focusing on individual results. Roundtable participants will explore and share strategies for keeping teams focused on collective results. We will also spend time reviewing the first four behaviors and deciding which one or two need the greatest attention to make your team more effective. Participants will build an action plan and leave feeling empowered to act with a detailed roadmap for success.
Outlined Schedule
The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team roundtable group will be hosted July – November 2023. See the dates and times below.
Dates:
Session 1: July 19, 2023; 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. EST
Session 2: August 16, 2023; 12 – 1:30 p.m. EST
Session 3: September 13, 2023; 12 – 1:30 p.m. EST
Session 4: October 18, 2023; 12 – 1:30 p.m. EST
Session 5: November 15, 2023; 12 – 1:30 p.m. EST
PRICING INFORMATION
$1,300 per participant
ENROLLMENT DEADLINE
Enrollment for this roundtable will open April 1, 2023. Contact us at info@corewaterleaders.org if you would like additional information.

TARGET AUDIENCE
Executive leaders in the Executive Director/GM role or members of the executive leadership team who directly influence workforce vision and strategies. The ideal participants are motivated by a curiosity to find creative solutions and can move those solutions forward at their organizations.
Note: Enrollment in this roundtable is limited to Public Agency and Public Utility Affiliate members only.
Experience Overview
The Leading a Transformative Workforce roundtable is designed to bring together executive leaders who are searching for a peer network and safe zone to discuss common challenges and desired opportunities as they relate to attracting, developing, engaging and retaining their workforce. The five-month, virtual roundtable format will provide a blend of light learning material, along with substantial peer-to-peer dialogue and best practice sharing to help develop a bond rooted in shared experiences and strategies for success.
Session descriptions will be shared soon.
Session 1:
Session 2:
Session 3:
Session 4:
Session 5:
Outlined Schedule
The Leading a Transformative Workforce roundtable group will be hosted September 2023 – January 2024. See the dates and times below.
Roundtable Session Dates:
Session 1: September 21, 2023; 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. EST
Session 2: October 19, 2023; 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. EST
Session 3: November 16, 2023; 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. EST
Session 4: December 14, 2023; 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. EST
Session 5: January 18, 2024; 2:00 – 3:30 p.m. EST
PRICING INFORMATION
$1,300 per participant.
ENROLLMENT DEADLINE
Enrollment for this roundtable will open June 1, 2023. Contact us at info@corewaterleaders.org if you would like additional information.