Organizational Solutions

This program is best for:

• leaders who are newly promoted or need support.
• when your company is expanding or promoting a new service or product.
• when your current training initiatives are not having the full impact or ROI you want.
• when leaders are having a hard time leading (and/or people are quitting your leaders)
• when you want to upskill/reskill leaders and expand your organization’s leadership pipeline and capabilities.

Leadership Launch Energy Bundle includes:

• Positive Energy Workplace Pre-Diagnostic 
• Executive Debrief 
• Communications Toolkit & Implementation Guide
• Kick-Off Keynote
• 2-Day IEP Leadership Training (with Leadership + Communication focus)
• PEW-i Platform Access with Company-Branded space
• 30-Day and 60-Day Group Check-in 
• Positive Energy Workplace Post-Diagnostic w/Results Debrief
• “Launch Higher”: Capstone Closing Event + Graduation  
• IEP Leadership Coaching Cohort add-on optional
• Time: 5-7 Months 

This program is best for:

• kicking off a new calendar or fiscal year and want optimal health and performance.
• major reorganization or new business model you want to set a solid container for.
• division that needs optimal performance, collaboration, and well-being. 
• new executive team or executive team reorganization.
• scaling the IEP work throughout the organization.
• creating a complete cultural transformation from the inside-out.
• top performers award trips or incentive programs. 

Best Year Yet Energy Bundle Includes:

• Positive Energy Workplace Pre-Diagnostic + Stakeholder Interviews
• Executive Debrief  
• Executive Retreat 
• Communications Toolkit, Implementation Guide, + ACI Advisor
• Kick-off Keynote
• 2-Day IEP Leadership Training (with Leadership + Culture focus)
• IEP Virtual Fundamentals (for extended Workforce)
• PEW-i Platform Access with Company-Branded space
• One 4-Month Leadership Cohort with 1:1 + Group Coaching
• Positive Energy Workplace Post-Diagnostic w/Results Debrief
• “Better Next”: Capstone Closing Event + Graduation
• IEP-Activator Training Cohort (or T3) add-on optional
• Time: 8-12 Months

A one- to two-day in-person retreat for your executives is offered with the Best Year Yet energy bundle and can be completed in conjunction with the debrief of the PEW-i Diagnostic.

Executives in attendance will learn ACI’s core framework, the IEP Method®, how to integrate it into their everyday lives, and how to encourage and inspire their employees to participate in this work (so it is by invitation, not mandate).

Your executives will walk away from the retreat with new awareness and knowledge to support your workforce’s cultural health, and how ACI will support your organization through innovation and change.

*An Executive Retreat, or an Executive Culture Health & Intentional Strategy Lab (CHISL), may be booked on its own or can be added as a booster to any program or engagement.

This is a 2-day in-person training for up to 50 employees (recommended that you start at the management/leadership levels). This training is included in all three of our energy bundle packages. Employees in attendance will learn specifics for their tracks.

All tracks include the following:

• The IEP Method® and how to integrate it personally and professionally.
• How to lead and participate in clear and efficient meetings and conversations, skipping workplace drama.
• To become strong leaders, create positivity on their teams, and take accountability.
• How to avoid burnout.
• How to give and take productive feedback.
• How to enroll and support others in this work, improving your entire organization’s cultural health.

*The 2-Day IEP Leadership Training can be done over 4 half-days virtually for particular circumstances.

*Our one-day IEP Fundamentals Course (with just the IEP Basics and often done virtually) may be booked as a booster add-on to any programs or tracks. This can be incredibly helpful for the extended workforce or direct reports NOT in the primary training track.

Leadership Cohort’s are virtual and typically include those who attended the 2-Day IEP Leadership Training. Cohort’s are limited to 10 participants each, and include facilitated group meetings and private coaching sessions. We encourage having multiple cohorts within your organization and spread across teams if possible.

Participants in these groups learn how to become (authentically) positive leaders and how to spread this message across your organization. They also learn how to have difficult conversations, apply everything they are learning in real-time, and deepen trust and connection on their teams.

Here is an overview of the cohort journey:

*Cohorts can be added as a bundle booster to any of the tracks where the 2-Day IEP Leadership Training is also included. (Best Year Yet includes one Cohort and can have additional Cohorts added if needed.)

Both! At ACI, we understand the power of in-person sessions — there is nothing like soaking up the energy in the room and solidifying great learning in a group setting while everyone is together, sharing the same experience. But we also understand that sometimes it is just not possible for everyone to be in person, so we also offer virtual trainings based on certain circumstances.

It is very common to have the Kickoff Keynote and 2-Day Training in person (though depending on timing the Keynote can be done weeks before the training virtually) and then to have all additional debriefs, training, and engagements virtually. (Executive Retreats are in person.)

The Capstone Session serves as graduation for executives and cohort participants. Anese Cavanaugh (CEO and founder of ACI, the IEP Method, and PEW-I, as well as author of Contagious Culture and Contagious You), delivers a closing keynote address to wrap up your program. In this keynote, the session will include a metrics-based summary of the program, celebrating impact points and strategic and inspiring recommendations for how everyone can continue to support the IEP work in your organization. 

*This is delivered virtually.

The Positive Energy Workplace Initiative™ (PEW-i) Community Platform is an exclusive offering for clients of Active Choices, Inc. Organizations may receive various member access seats for their employees and leaders based on the program or membership enrollment with ACI.

The platform includes a web-based and mobile app to easily access IEP Method®  tools and resources to help your employees become impactful and productive leaders. Monthly programming includes virtual Learning Labs and Q&A Sessions with IEP Method experts, self-study courses for micro-learning, professional credentialling, access to quarterly IEP Fundamentals (virtual courses), an authentically supportive community so that your organization’s employees remain actively involved and learning, and so much more.

You can enroll as many organizational members as you like, at any level, to the community platform. When you add 50+ employees, your organization will receive its own branded space with company-specific content and support. Membership is by application so that we ensure everyone gets the most out of programming and that your organization is set up to succeed.

Members of PEW-i who fulfill the credentialing and participation requirements can qualify for individual professional credentials as well as organizational certification as a Certified Positive Energy Workplace™. 

Your organization is unique! While our website provides great insight into what might work best for your workforce, we recommend having a live conversation with one of our team members to finalize your needs.

Contact us and we’ll coordinate a short “Quick Connect” 20-minute discussion to get to know each other and ensure it makes sense to explore further. If so, we move into an “Exploration & Alignment” Session with your core stakeholders and members of our team to learn more about what’s happening in your organization and your needs; to determine readiness to change and what level of support will help most; to answer any questions, and ultimately to co-create a plan to move forward.  

Our discovery process ensures that we understand and can meet your organization’s unique culture and objectives. It is a blend of a mini-assessment, heart-to-heart conversations, the PEW-i Diagnostic (if it makes sense to do), and discovery. We also are big on using our intuition that comes with twenty-plus years of doing this work with organizations. (And over 100 years of collective experience as a team.)

We will often do engagements in stages to ensure alignment, agility, process improvement, optimal results, and sustainable impact. While every client is different, we have found 4 anchoring components that are part of our process that we don’t deviate from that have helped us create the results clients count on us for. We’ll discuss these in our initial Exploratory + Alignment Session. 

Let’s get the conversation going! Contact us now to schedule a call. You can also email us at info(at)activechoices.com.

The first step in our process is to have a Quick Connect conversation to better understand the goals of your organization, share our process, and make sure we might do great together.

Our second step is to have an Exploration & Alignment Session where we learn more about your unique situation and provide the various ways in which ACI and the Positive Energy Workplace Initiative can help you meet your goals. 

Lastly, we move into Co-Creation where we craft a plan together to ensure we’re fully aligned so that we optimize everyone’s time, energy, and focus. Once we’re in agreement, we get to work with everyone moving toward the peace, ease, and impact you desire. 

So many many many many reasons here. First, intuitively, doesn’t this make sense? Wouldn’t you rather have a positive-energy workplace than a negative energy workplace? People like to feel good and connected. So there’s that…

It’s important to point out that this is about authentic positivity, not toxic positivity.  Over the last twenty(+) years of working with leaders and organizations, we have found that when we give full permission for authentic emotion, support, conflict, things not being awesome all the time, etc. and we learn how to navigate these things together honestly and responsibly — that is when we create authentic positivity and the best solutions together.

The IEP work is ALL about authenticity and making sure we take care of ourselves and leave plenty of space for the real. It’s also about ensuring we’re responsible for our impact, getting the support we need, and being incredibly aware of our intentions, energy, presence, and actions. When this happens collectively, we create useful leadership and a positive energy workplace. When this happens, the following can occur:

1. Psychological safety increases because people can tell truth, take risks, ask for help, say they don’t know, feel safe… this means more honest communication, projects get stopped before they go off a cliff (because someone didn’t feel safe to speak up), greater creativity, and more. All of that leads to better collaboration, products, innovations, relationships, and people STAYING at your company because they feel safe, seen, and inspired.
2. Manager/leader behaviors improve and they become more effective at leading people, coaching people, and being leaders people want to follow vs. have to follow. This also means your people stay and are inspired. (Did you know? Fifty percent of the people who quit their jobs, leave because of their relationship with their manager. Additionally, the relationship with the manager has a greater impact on a person’s mental health than their doctor or therapist and 80% of employees would rather have a job that’s good for their mental health over more pay.) It’s worth training your leaders and managers to know how to show up well for your people. When you do this, organizational health improves.
3. Personal resilience and well-being increases meaning people don’t get knocked out by other people’s negative or toxic energy, burnout and sick/lost time decreases, vitality increases, and people have more energy to focus on the right things (ie. making great things and delivering great service and treating people well!)!
4. Improved ROI on other training initiatives and skills. If you’re doing a bunch of skills training but people are showing up badly doing it (unclear or negative intentions, exhausted, abrasive, or judgmental energy, and distracted and “busy”) — not only are you not getting your full ROI or impact on that other training or skill, you are likely doing more harm than good with that training. (We’ve seen it 100 times.)
5. Better communication and collaboration because people are more intentional about their impact, their comms, the results they want, how they want people to feel, and how they want to show up. With this comes less time in meetings, less repeating ourselves because people are actually present to hear, and less wasted energy (and money lost) that comes with people focusing on the wrong things and not having good IEP.
6. Retention! People stay and work with you because they want to vs. have to. They stay because they feel energized, seen, cared about, inspired, and because they’re growing.
7. Attraction! People — talent, customers, collaborators, partners, etc. — are attracted to you because you feel great to be around and your organization feels GOOD.

Those are 7 reasons, we could go on. Perhaps the more important question here is WHY do you think it’s important to create an authentically positive energy workplace and solid leadership? 

After years of distilling this work to its most essential components, and after testing different programs over the last 3 years of the pandemic and as we “return to the office”, we’ve created three pathways for engaging in this work. 

1. Leadership Training Tracks: Our three specific tracks (Reset + Rise, Leadership Launch, and Best Year Yet) are designed to be fully holistic, comprehensive, and effective for your workforce. You’ll get on the track that most serves your current situation so that you can work towards total cultural health with a strong foundation. (These tracks hold 50 people per training cohort. An organization can run multiple tracks depending on needs.) 
2. Positive Energy Workplace Initiative Membership: Our membership is special (really!) and includes access to live training (virtual), on-demand training, learning labs, all ACI/IEP tools, forums, professional credentialing, micro-learning, an app, and more. It also includes an option for company-branded private circles inside the platform. We have two types of membership (Experiential & IEP-Activator) with 4 levels: Individual (company sponsored only), Team (for <11), Group (for <25), and Enterprise (100+). 
3.  Bundle Boosters + Impact Accelerators: Want to enter programming in an ala carte manner or add some extra magic to your PEW-i Membership or Training Track? We’ve got you!  The following are available independently or blended into programming: Executive Cultural Health & Intentional Strategy Lab (CHISL), Experiential Keynote, IEP Leadership Cohort, IEP Fundamentals Training, Executive Coaching, PEW-i Diagnostic.  

We’ll work with you to determine what is most appropriate based upon your needs, your budget, your hunger, your bandwidth, and your timeline. We look forward to talking with you soon. 

Our Executive Cultural Health & Intentional Strategy Lab (CHISL) is a great way to get started if you’re not sure where to begin or how you’re doing. This is also a great place to start if you need your leadership team to 1) get into alignment about the current health and needs of your team and organization, 2) to build the vision and plan for the culture you want to create, and/or, 3) to simply to do a reset as a team and create a strong foundation and agreements to lead from. This offering is designed for your executive/leadership team as a diagnostic, educational, and strategic offering and consists of the following components:

• Kick-off meeting to set intentions, create agreements and a high-level plan, and to map out next steps (this can be done virtually).  
• Communication Toolkit to send out to the workforce for assessment takers so we can find out how things are going and where you can optimize, nourish, and heal.
• PEW-i Data compilation and Executive Debrief of findings
• 1-Day Strategy Lab (in-person) for deeper exploration, education, strategy, and co-creation of the cultural optimization plan
• Two Strategic Advisory Sessions with the executive team over the next 30 days 
• Next steps (either with ACI or on your own)

Timeline: This can generally be completed in 5-8 weeks depending on client schedules and bandwidth. We will co-design the most helpful components and the timeline in our co-creation session.

Note that the Best Year Yet includes a version of this as one of the primary components. 

We hear you! We do! And the soft stuff the most important stuff — we believe is titanium and actually much harder to learn than the “hard” or “solid” skills. Anybody can learn how to do a feedback model or a skill, but doing it in a way that makes people feel seen, cared about, inspired, and invited is where the art (and the true leadership) is. In fact, often we are called in because a company has just run some skills training or a communication training program and they’re not seeing the results they hoped for. In many cases, they report that it feels like people are “doing the skills” to each other (sometimes even using them as a “weapon”) vs. truly embodying the skills and using them in service of. This is where the IEP work comes in…

Our intentions, energy, and presence affect every single thing we do; how we show up, how we make people feel, how clear we are in our leadership and communication, how we use our skills, how exhausted we make ourselves, etc. Our IEP affects customer service, leadership, sales, parenting, everything… And it is all within our control, but it takes care and practice and attention.

Have you ever had the experience of having someone say and do something “right”, but the way they showed up doing it, or the way it made you feel, felt icky? Perhaps it was even excellent feedback or communication, but the way it was delivered left you feeling small or resistant. That’s IEP. Or perhaps you’ve had the experience of walking away from a conversation or meeting feeling exhausted. You may have felt great before, but something about that person’s energy, or the energy in the room, knocked you off-kilter? That’s IEP. (We call that the “lowest vibration in the room winning.”)

IEP is lifework, it’s never done. We are always either strengthening our IEP or depleting it. And it’s contagious; the intentions, energy, and presence I bring to the table are contagious. When you have people actively owning their IEP (in positive ways) in an organization together, you start to create a healthy, positively contagious culture.

It’s important to build our IEP up so that we 1) lead others with care and intentionality and an effective presence, and 2) so that we are able to protect ourselves in leadership from being impacted by the “lowest vibration” in the room. The IEP Methodology is a combination of teaching these skills as well as integrating additional leadership skills so that you are leading from the inside out, creating impact, and feeling good.