signature training
Leadership development for teams and organisations — built for creating individual agency, team-wide trust, and scalable systems.
coaching skills for leadership teams.
Half a day that changes how your leaders talk to their people, plus the integration sessions that make it survive contact with a real week.
the premise
Most organisations ask people to develop others without ever teaching them how, then wonder why the one-to-ones go badly. It shows up first in the leadership team, because that is the group everyone else is watching. When they learn to ask instead of tell, it travels down through the org on its own.
who this is for
Leadership teams who want to lead well and live well while building impactful, high-performing and inclusive teams. That includes leadership groups who would not call themselves managers — founders, partners, and teams running on something like EOS, where accountability is the thing that keeps slipping.
what I run
Engagements are scoped to your situation rather than pulled off a shelf. These are the shapes they usually take.
Coaching skills for leadership teams, in full — the three-hour workshop, what your leads leave with, and the two follow-up sessions that come as standard.
on confidentiality
Individual coaching sessions are confidential under the ICF Code of Ethics, including when your organisation is paying. You receive themes and attendance, never the content of anyone’s sessions. That boundary is what makes the sessions worth having.
The open cohorts have wound down — Manager Foundations and the Design Leader Accelerator both ran on Maven, and the material now lives inside in-house engagements where it can be shaped to one team rather than a room of strangers. See the archived Design Leader Accelerator curriculum on Maven (opens in a new tab)
Most organisations ask people to develop others without ever teaching them how, then wonder why the one-to-ones go badly.Alison Gretz, ACC
Who I train
learn with a trainer trusted by the bestest
Students come from large Fortune 50s, small startups and independent backgrounds.
“Alison’s workshop gave my cohort of senior product designers a practical way to stop jumping to solutions and lead with better questions. It was hands-on, focused and immediately useful. My members rated it an average of 4.8/5, and they were applying the techniques at work within days.”
Founder, Level Up Club · femke.design
“I can say with complete confidence that the insights I have gained from this course transformed my approach to many different work situations.”
Creative Director
questions you may have
How large can a training group be?
Anything from an intimate group to a large room with breakout tables. Above about fifteen leaders I bring in a second coach or facilitator so nobody is left talking to the back of the room. I have run rooms of hundreds, so size is not the constraint — what the group needs to leave with is.
Do you deliver remotely?
Yes. Sessions run on Zoom, Teams or Meet, and are built for remote rather than retrofitted to it. In-person works too, travelling from Minneapolis.
What does a training engagement include?
It is built around your goals, so it starts with a conversation rather than a package. The one thing I always include is integration sessions: structured time after the workshop to put the skills to work and talk about what happened. Training that ends when the webinar ends does not stick, and I would rather not sell you that.
Can managers be coached individually alongside the training?
Yes, and it is usually where the change sticks. The workshop gives people the language; the individual sessions are where they use it on the conversation they are actually dreading.
what’s going on with your leadership team?
Who is in the room, what prompted this, roughly when. Share more about the puzzle to be solved and we’ll shape something around your humans. If training is not the answer, I’ll say so, and point you at what is.
Form not loading? Email alison@designbydesign.co and we’ll pick it up there.