In times of change, innovation isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity. This workshop equips participants with practical tools and strategies to embrace uncertainty, reframe challenges as opportunities, and foster a culture of creative problem-solving. Using principles of design thinking and adaptive leadership, teams will explore new ways to generate ideas, test solutions, and drive meaningful change, ensuring they stay agile and future-focused in an ever-evolving landscape.
Leaders Aren’t Born – They’re Made.
We design transformative team + leadership development workshops specifically tailored for HR teams and people operations professionals. We understand that human resources professionals navigate relationship-intensive, culture-shaping environments that require leadership approaches emphasizing empathetic communication, organizational development, and employee experience enhancement. Our methodology focuses on elevating HR leadership capabilities that thrive through talent development initiatives, culture transformation projects, and employee engagement opportunities.
From talent acquisition teams and employee relations specialists to learning and development professionals, compensation analysts, and people operations managers, our people-centered, strategically-focused approach ensures immediate application and strengthened HR team effectiveness. We recognize that HR and people operations teams bring exceptional interpersonal skills, organizational insight, and employee advocacy expertise – our workshops amplify these people-focused strengths while introducing leadership frameworks that enhance strategic HR thinking, cross-departmental influence, and organizational culture development. Our HR leadership workshops integrate human-centered design principles with advanced team development, creating experiences that inspire HR professionals while driving measurable improvements in team collaboration and organizational people strategy. This HR-specific approach honors the relationship-building and culture-shaping mission that defines successful people operations, providing meaningful preparation for senior HR leadership responsibilities.
Suggested Leadership Workshops: HR & People Operations Teams
Shift Happens: Innovation in Times of Change
Leveraging Design Theory for Strategic & Creative Transformation
Learning Objectives:
- Define the CURRENT STATE and FUTURE STATE of the team’s collective goals and objectives
- Experiment with design thinking methodology to begin ideation of creative, implementable action plans to fully realize your team’s ideal future state
- Leverage positive psychology to create future-focused, behavior-based outcomes
Key Themes & Leadership Behaviors:
- Strategic Thinking + Goal Setting
- Creativity + Innovation
- Positive Psychology & Growth Mindset
Learning Objectives:
- Define the concepts of EMOTIONAL AGILITY and PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY, and explore the building blocks that allow this to prosper in an individual level and within a team environment
- Explore the five common “THINKING TRAPS” that get people stuck, and practice five communication and trust-based “ESCAPE ROUTE” strategies to help yourself and others break free
- Empower team members to speak their minds, and encourage emotional openness from others
Key Themes & Leadership Behaviors:
- Psychological Safety
- Building Trust
- Effective Communication
The Art + Science of Psychological Safety
Designing A Culture of High Trust & Emotional Agility
As conversations surrounding psychological safety continue to grow, a leader’s role takes on even greater significance in fostering that culture of trust. Research indicates that the most impactful style of trust is socio-emotional trust, or relational trust – I trust you because of the relationship we have, and the emotional intelligence that’s brought to the conversation. In this session, leaders review the psychological safety communication strategies of high-performing teams to allow for new ideas to succeed, diversity + inclusion initiatives to prosper, and the important, vulnerable conversations to happen effectively.
Thanks for the Feedback
Empowering Others through Coaching Conversations
In making the transition from individual contributor to leader, we rely on a new skill set that focuses on inspiring and motivating the people we work with. In this series, participants will focus on people and project leadership skills, specifically as it relates to the topics of coaching and motivating to inspire those we work with to take action. Through knowledge-sharing and discussion based learning, and an opportunity to directly experiment with coaching methodologies, participants will have the opportunity to learn from and alongside each other, and connect these practices to specific action plans to retain and grow their top talent.
Learning Objectives:
- Leverage feedback conversations to transform and inspire performance of peers, direct-reports, and other frequent collaborators
- Identify the theories behind three common negative reactions when receiving feedback
- Discover the three types of feedback to more effectively inspire peak performance
- Develop an action + implementation plan for positive, long-term behavior change
Key Themes & Leadership Behaviors:
- Giving + Receiving Feedback
- Navigating Conflict Conversations
- Positive Psychology + Trust
Learning Objectives:
- Clarify leadership and communication preferences, and develop a “user’s manual” to articulate our findings
- Discover the attributes, behaviors and common blind-spots of natural preferences, and explore and understand the same attributes and behaviors of opposing types
- Highlight specific actions we can take when working with someone who leverages opposing preferences, and develop a plan to adjust our styles with at least one current colleague
Key Themes & Leadership Behaviors:
- Effective Communication
- Collaboration + Trust
- Openness + Awareness
Building The Dream Team
Adjusting Styles To Enhance Relationships & Build Trust
In this workshop, participants will discover the elements of their working style and communication preferences within four key dimensions: how we like to communicate, how we take in and process information, how we make decisions, and how we organize our lives. Through group learning, individual reflection, and group discussion, participants will walk away from this workshop with an increased confidence in their ability to articulate their needs to others, and heightened ability to adjust their styles to meet the preferences of others. This session takes a humorous and informative look at how we operate, providing us with the tools to adjust our styles to work effectively with anyone.
Why HR & People Operations Teams Choose The Leadership Laboratory
HR team development requires sophisticated understanding of employee lifecycle management, organizational psychology, and culture development strategies. People operations professionals need leadership tools that enhance their ability to influence organizational change while building supportive, inclusive team environments that accelerate both individual HR effectiveness and collective people strategy impact. The Leadership Laboratory delivers people operations leadership workshops that are relationship-focused, strategically-minded, and designed to unlock the transformational potential within forward-thinking HR organizations.
Our data-driven HR team workshops blend the art and science of leadership development to create empathetic, interactive experiences – advancing HR leadership effectiveness and people operations performance. We understand that HR professionals demonstrate remarkable emotional intelligence, conflict resolution abilities, and organizational development instincts. Our approach centers on enhancing these existing capabilities while introducing HR leadership competencies that improve strategic workforce planning, employee experience design, and organizational culture facilitation.
Whether your team encompasses talent management specialists, HR business partners, diversity and inclusion leaders, or workforce analytics professionals, The Leadership Laboratory creates thoughtful, research-supported workshops that strengthen current people skills, enhance HR leadership influence, and generate improved organizational impact, employee engagement strategies, and culture development outcomes. Built on organizational psychology and human development research, our framework emphasizes people potential maximization over HR operational gaps, concentrating on HR excellence and organizational people success.
The Leadership Laboratory operates nationwide with both in-person and virtual healthcare leadership development workshops. We proudly serve healthcare organizations around the world and throughout the United States across the country, including Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Boston.
Strategic Considerations for HR & People Operations Development
HR leadership workshops address the distinctive role of serving both employee advocacy and organizational strategy that characterizes effective people operations teams. Our approach recognizes that HR professionals excel when equipped with advanced change management skills, strategic business partnership capabilities, and culture development methodologies that enhance both individual HR contributions and organizational people outcomes.
The Leadership Laboratory's people operations leadership training integrates employee experience design with strategic HR management, ensuring participants develop both the empathetic leadership skills and business acumen necessary for senior HR leadership success. We focus on building influence skills across all organizational levels, strategic communication abilities for sensitive conversations, and the emotional intelligence required to lead complex people initiatives while balancing employee needs with business objectives.
Our methodology acknowledges that HR teams face unique leadership opportunities including organizational culture development, change management facilitation, and employee experience optimization that require specialized people leadership expertise. We create workshop experiences that celebrate HR's people-first mission while introducing leadership concepts that enhance strategic HR effectiveness and organizational influence.
Our HR leadership development workshops implement specialized approaches designed exclusively for people operations environments, creating significant improvements in HR team collaboration, strategic people thinking, and organizational culture leadership to inspire enduring positive transformation throughout your people operations and broader organizational culture.
Building tomorrow's leaders today.
The Leadership Laboratory works across multiple industries - including start-up and established technology firms, non-profit and government agencies, finance companies, healthcare organizations and more. We are proud to collaborate with individuals and teams of all sizes.
Contact us and say hello! We're excited to get to know you and share our ideas on learning + leadership development.
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Collaborating Partners
“I laughed harder than I have in a while!”
Our workshop was engaging, informative, rejuvenating and pure fun. I laughed harder than I have in a while! This was a phenomenal way to get more comfortable as a team.
— Director of People, SpotHero
“You made this easy to apply and implement”
You listened to our needs and adapted on the spot to incorporate leadership lessons. Every element was backed up by research, and you made this easy to apply and implement.
— VP / HEAD OF PEOPLE, WARBY PARKER
Meet Jacob Goldstein
Jacob Goldstein is the founder of The Leadership Laboratory, and leverages his experiences in education, the performing arts, and corporate learning & leadership development to his work. As a performer, Jacob has sung as a backup vocalist for musical artists such as Josh Groban, Idina Menzel, and Patti LuPone, as a recording artist for Netflix series Sense8, and at venues including The United Center, The Chicago Theater, and Chicago Symphony Center. In the education space, Jacob has served as an educator for high school, undergraduate and graduate students, and has been a Guest Lecturer at Northwestern University since 2016. As a Learning & Leadership Development Consultant, Jacob has worked as a one-on-one coach and group workshop facilitator to organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies in diverse industries, including technology, healthcare, non-profit, and fashion/apparel. Jacob holds a Bachelor’s degree from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Master’s of Science in Communication from Northwestern University.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Typical Size of HR & People Operations Teams Leadership Development Workshops?
At The Leadership Laboratory, we customize each learning experience to align with your team and culture. Traditionally, we recommend between 20 – 30 participants per workshop, though often work with groups as small as 5 to as large as 5,000+. Knowing your audience size can help us to design a workshop partnership to maximize engagement and participation, and honor each participant at their respective knowledge and experience level.
Are HR & People Operations Teams Leadership Development Workshops Available Both In-Person and Virtually?
Yes! All of our programming can be facilitated on-site, virtually, or in a hybrid format (virtual facilitation to an in-person audience). For both on-site and virtual workshops, we traditionally recommend a lead time of 6 – 8 weeks to get your top choice of date for a facilitated partnership.
How Do We Choose HR & People Operations Teams Leadership Development Workshops?
When working with a new partner, we leverage a process called backwards design theory to curate a tailored learning experience. One of the first questions that we ask is “what would you like this audience to do differently as a result of this collaboration?” – in other words, what are the skills or behaviors you’d like this group to have, or the knowledge they want to possess?
Once we know and define these learning objectives, we can work backwards and partner with you to determine what content can support in making those goals a reality. For a sample list of workshops, feel free to check our Workshop + Experiments pages, or browse the Workshop by Industry or Workshops by Role pages for additional recommendations.
How Long are HR & People Operations Teams Leadership Development Workshops?
Each of our workshops is designed to be approximately 2.5 – 3 hours in length. For on-site partnerships, most groups opt for two back-to-back workshop topics to create a full day of learning. For teams looking for sessions outside of the standard length, please contact The Leadership Laboratory to discuss more customized options.
Can We Customize HR & People Operations Teams Leadership Development Workshops?
Yes! At The Leadership Laboratory, we leverage a process called backwards design theory to curate a tailored learning experience. As we collaborate with you to learn more about your goals, we can incorporate information about your team’s culture, organizational strategy, and industry trends to design an experience that truly resonates, with easy-to-apply concepts that lead to long-term, positive behavior change.
We know that each participant has their own unique learning goals, and have designed our leadership development experiences to customize our content to each person in the moment. We kick-off each workshop with an opportunity to learn more about the goals of each participant in the room, and align the experience to what is most top-of-mind for them. This differentiated learning allows us to adjust to each unique participant, as well as honor the diverse perspectives, roles, and experience in the room.
Does The Leadership Laboratory Work with Individual HR & People Operations Professionals?
At The Leadership Laboratory, most of our workshops are designed for teams or groups of leaders within organizations. As we focus on customizing each leadership development experience to the unique elements of each organization’s culture and team’s communication style, our work is focused on sessions that departments or groups within the same organization can participate in together, as opposed to sessions that individuals can sign up for on their own.
For individuals looking for one-on-one development, The Leadership Laboratory offers select executive coaching and thought partnership opportunities. Feel free to reach out directly for more information.