Mastering Workplace Collaboration
Stop “The Meeting After the Meeting” From Draining Your Team's Momentum
"The meeting after the meeting" costs you: teams with effective communication see 18% faster project completion. Mastering Workplace Collaboration builds that skill in real time, not theory.
Free, 30 minutes — no pressure, no pitch.
Led by
Karen Knab
Leadership & Communication Expert
Brian Hanley
Mediator & Executive Leader
Every team has them. The real conversations that happen in the hallway after the meeting ends. The decisions that get relitigated in side channels. The friction that never gets addressed directly because nobody knows how to start that conversation.
This is where trust erodes. This is where momentum dies. And this is exactly what Mastering Workplace Collaboration is designed to fix.
“The Workplace Collaboration training with Karen and Brian has had an immediate and meaningful impact on all 90 members of the State Fair team. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and the benefits continue to grow as we carry the work forward.”
— Renee Alexander, CEO, Minnesota State Fair
The program
Active Listening
Session One
We teach you to listen to understand, not just respond. Most workplace friction starts with assumptions. This session eliminates the most costly ones.
Effective Communication
Session Two
Shifting from listening, learn to deliver feedback clearly and respectfully, even in difficult conversations. Direct doesn't have to mean damaging.
Navigating Conflict
Session Three
We implement a shared roadmap for addressing friction and moving forward productively. Your team leaves with a framework they can use immediately.
How the Program Actually Works
These are basic human skills, not corporate ones. The listening, communication, and conflict skills we teach here don't stay at the office — they change how you show up with your partner, your kids, your friends. Every relationship you manage gets better, not just the ones on your org chart.
Active Listening
We start by asking people not to talk. In this first session, the focus is entirely on listening — really listening, in a way that makes the people around you feel heard and understood. Every skill that follows builds on this one.
Effective Communication
With real listening skills in place, we teach communication styles that let people make their point clearly — without dismissing what the other person feels or has experienced. Being direct and being respectful aren't in tension. This session teaches both together.
Conflict Resolution
Using both listening and communication, this session gives your team real tools for difficult conversations. We reframe conflict here too: a healthy team doesn't avoid it, it uses it. Conflict is what moves a team forward — without it, things just stay where they are.
We deliberately don't hand you branded frameworks or acronyms to memorize — the kind of vocabulary that gets forgotten the moment training ends. What we teach is built to actually stick.
The program itself is paced on purpose: two-hour sessions spread across roughly six weeks, with a week between each one. After every session, we send a short recap and a set of practical exercises to work on before the next one, so each skill has time to become real behavior, not just something you heard about once. Delivered virtually or in person.
25%
Lower staff turnover — teams with high psychological safety stay longer.
Gallup
18%
Faster project completion for organizations that prioritize communication.
PMI
50%
Reduction in conflict costs with structured conflict training.
NIH
Additional programs
Rules of Engagement
Single half-day workshop
Guides teams in defining shared expectations for how they communicate and collaborate. Builds the foundation for durable trust by helping participants establish norms that make discussion, disagreement, and decision-making more productive.
Running Better Meetings
Single 2-hour session
Take meetings from performative to productive. Teams learn how to set clear objectives, clarify roles, and create space for focused discussion and follow-through.
When it's bigger than training
Sometimes a training engagement surfaces something structural underneath — a reporting line that doesn't match how decisions actually get made, a process nobody owns, a bottleneck that no amount of better meetings will fix. When that happens, it's a different, deeper conversation.
That's Operational Transformation — the work we do when the whole system, not just the way a team talks, needs to change.
Learn about Operational TransformationReady to Give Your Team the Tools of Trust?
Employees working in high-trust organizations report 50% higher productivity and 76% more engagement than those at low-trust companies. (Source: HBR)
Free, 30 minutes — no pressure, no pitch.
FAQ
How is this different from other communication or conflict training?
We don't teach frameworks or hand out personality labels. We teach the human skills that make collaboration possible and build them through practice, not theory.
Can this be delivered for our leadership team only?
Yes. The program can be scoped for a leadership cohort, a full team, or a cross-functional group, depending on where the friction is showing up.
Do you offer one-off sessions?
Mastering Workplace Collaboration is designed as three connected sessions because lasting change requires repetition and practice. Single sessions are available for the additional programs.
Can you customize the content for our industry or culture?
Yes. Every program is adapted to reflect your organization's specific dynamics, language, and goals.
Do you have something I can share with my team or leadership?
Yes — download the one-page overview to forward or print.