Curt Steinhorst

Leading through rapid change requires more than simply pushing harder; it demands a deep awareness of how people respond to speed, pressure, and change. Learn how to foster curiosity, leverage feedback for growth, and keep teams aligned during rapid change. Whether mitigating burnout or sustaining high performance, you’ll gain practical insights to turn speed into a competitive advantage by focusing on the human elements that fuel success.

Primary Key Outcomes:

• Understand: Speed isn’t the problem; drag is. Leaders must focus on identifying and eliminating the hidden forces slowing progress.
• Identify: The most costly sources of personal and organizational drag.
• Implement: A game plan to methodically and iteratively eliminate drag across the organization

Extended Outcomes:

• Eliminating Invisible Obstacles: Identify the operational and cultural drags that silently erode productivity.
• Curiosity as a Competitive Edge: Cultivate a culture of curiosity that dismantles resistance and drives innovation.
• Communication that Accelerates: Streamline communication without sacrificing the personal connections that build trust in fast-paced teams.
• Relieve the Burden of Infinite Expertise: Move away from the heroic leadership model by building shared responsibility and reducing decision-making burdens.
• Focus Beyond the Noise: Gain clarity on which expectations, processes, and pressures are worth keeping and which are holding you back.

 

This session is designed for anyone with a boss and people who report to them—those who simultaneously navigate the pressures of leading up and managing down. Translating strategic directives into actionable plans and driving execution with precision, middle managers drive the pace and performance of the entire operation. You’ll explore how to empower your teams to move at speed, create environments of psychological safety (or inadvertently generate anxiety), and protect your team’s capacity (or risk overwhelming them).

Primary Key Outcomes:

• Understand: The unique influence operational leaders have on accelerating your organization.
• Identify: How to lead without creating friction with senior leadership or chaos within your team.
• Implement: The playbook to make surfacing and eliminating drag a team effort.

Extended Outcomes:

• Strategic Influence Upwards: Redefine how to engage senior leadership in a way that aligns organizational objectives without compromising team priorities.
• Maintain Focus Amid Constant Disruption: Help teams cut through the noise and prioritize effectively in environments filled with competing demands.
• Lead with Clarity, Not Control: Balance transparency and autonomy to ensure teams move forward confidently without creating anxiety.
• Replace Short-Term Fixes with Long-Term Acceleration: Empower teams to innovate and make decisions, avoiding quick fixes that cause long-term drag.

Operating at speed is not just a reaction to external pressures but a deliberate, strategic choice. This session reveals how the most successful teams don’t just move faster—they move smarter. We’ll explore the unseen forces that create drag within even the most talented teams, from decision paralysis to misaligned priorities, and how to eliminate them.

Key Outcomes:

• Shared Language: Develop a common language and baseline for effective teamwork.
• Inspiration and Energy: Leave inspired and energized to tackle challenges with clarity.
• Practical Tools: Gain tools and techniques for immediate implementation to improve collaboration.
• Enhanced Dynamics: Strengthen team dynamics with clear communication practices that support rapid progress.

The future is unpredictable and transformation happens at lightning speed. The key to thriving in this environment isn’t about trying to predict the future, but understanding the trends driving change and making informed decisions that position you for long-term success.

Key Outcomes

• Empower leaders to navigate the present while strategically guiding their organizations into the future
• Identify and prioritize the trends that will most impact your organization’s future.
• Implement strategies to effectively manage a diverse, multi-generational workforce.
• Optimize your team’s performance in hybrid and remote work settings.
• Integrate emerging technologies to boost productivity and foster innovation.

Where business moves at hyper speed, the demand to perform at the highest level is relentless. The challenge isn’t speed itself—it’s learning how to manage the drag that slows us down, shedding unnecessary burdens, and harnessing the power of focus to navigate the turbulence without burning out.

Key Outcomes

• Enhanced Focus and Productivity: Shed unnecessary burdens and distractions, enabling focus for  high-impact tasks in fast-paced environments.
• Sustainable High Performance: Gain insights into maintaining peak performance over the long term without succumbing to burnout.
• Pressure and Stress Management: Discover practical techniques for reducing mental and emotional drag.

Shifting variables and information that come at us faster than ever quickly render traditional strategies obsolete. Leaders must adapt their approach to ensure that their teams stay aligned, focused, and capable of executing the organization’s vision, even as the landscape evolves.

• Adapt Strategy in Real-Time: Learn how to adjust your strategic approach as new variables emerge and conditions change.
• Communicate with Impact: Master the art of structuring and delivering messages that resonate across all levels of your organization, ensuring clarity and understanding.
• Bridge the Strategy-Execution Gap: Develop methods to translate strategic vision into actionable employee activities, ensuring that the strategy is not just understood but executed effectively.
• Build Trust Amidst Uncertainty: Create a communication culture that fosters trust and accountability, even in uncertain and rapidly changing environments.