Workforce Innovators
Individual Empowerment, Sustainability and Grassroots Leadership in Workforce Development
Welcome to Workforce Innovators, a team-based training program offered at no cost to help mid-size companies integrate best practices for workforce development.
Workforce Innovators is supported by a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. Read announcements from Kansas Leadership Center and the Charles Koch Foundation.
Have questions or would like more information about the program? Submit the contact form below.
Drive innovation while supporting employees to bring their best to work.
Find more opportunities for employees to grow, use talents and improve performance.
Apply new tools and innovative approaches to benefit employees and create value for your company.
Who is this program for?
Now through February 28, 2025, applications are being accepted from mid-sized private sector employers in any for profit industry, located in South Central Kansas who can commit three to five employees to attend the program. Team members who attend should be well-placed to drive culture change in their company. Up to 15 companies will be selected to participate.
What is the cost to participate?
There is no charge for tuition, coaching or books to your company. Total value of leadership development and capacity building is $3,200 per person.
Application deadline:
February 28, 2025
Where?
Program activities take place at Kansas Leadership Center headquarters in downtown Wichita and online using Zoom.
Program Dates and Topics
Program Dates and Topics
9 a.m. to 3 p.m., April 15, 2025
9 a.m. to 5 p.m., April 16 – 17, 2025
5 p.m. to 7 p.m., April 16, 2025
Kick-off reception
May – July 2025
Three individualized leadership coaching sessions (45-60 minutes each) at dates and times to accommodate participant schedules.
9 a.m. to 4 p.m., August 5 – 7, 2025
Lead for Change for Workforce Innovators with celebratory reception at the end of day two.
September and October, 2025
Using the Empowering Practices Toolkit: Virtual sessions to promote application leadership skills, new tools and innovative approaches to benefit employees and create value for their company.
Program activities take place at Kansas Leadership Center headquarters in downtown Wichita and online using Zoom.
Your employees and company will benefit from participating in Workforce Innovators by:
Adopting best practices for organizational and business success
- Discover tools and processes to empower employees to innovate and drive the success of your business
- Develop skills to lead change in your company.
- Identify where and how the company can create the most long-term value for customers and society.
- Support employees to contribute more to the long-term success of your company.
Advancing culture change and organizational outcomes
- By including 3-5 leaders/employees from your organization, you will drive deeper learning around shared challenges, enable greater collaboration, and encourage cultural change from the initiative’s start.
- Experiment to make progress on identified adaptive organizational challenges impeding culture change.
- Drive meaningful culture change within your organization to enable the adoption of new employee development models.
- Shift culture to empower individual advancement and support individualized development pathways.
- Better leverage individual talent for improved performance.
Building relationships and collaborating with regional business leaders on a shared focus
- Join cultural champions from key private sector employers across South Central Kansas in a cohort-based community of practice model. Employers will represent mid-size businesses from a variety of industries.
- In addition to the time spent together during the leadership programs, the experience will include receptions and meals to allow the cohort to build relationships, along with post-program virtual gatherings to share cohort learnings.
Enhancing your team’s capabilities with comprehensive leadership training Total value: $3,200/person
Participants will complete the three-step KLC Path programming and benefit from individual coaching sessions.
- When Everyone Leads Program |One-day program: Designed to inspire transformation in how people define and practice leadership and ignite the spark for collective leadership.
- Your Leadership Edge |Two-day program: Designed to help individuals shift the way they manage themselves and mobilize others, sharpen their interpersonal skills, self-awareness and confidence with colleagues, support new ways to communicate, solve problems and lead more effectively back in their context.
- Lead for Change | Three-day immersive program: Helps teams apply KLC leadership principles and competencies to a shared adaptive challenge. Teams will articulate a company challenge impeding culture change and work through a facilitated process to design interventions to make progress.
- Individual Coaching | All participants will receive three individual 60-minute coaching sessions from a KLC-certified coach. Individual coaching provides an environment where participants can apply their learning to address dilemmas and assist in transferring learning into results for the company.
- Access to the new Empowering Practice Toolkit and group coaching | All participants will participate in post-program virtual session to support application of innovative workforce development best practices in your setting.
Leveraging customized materials, proven concepts and national resources
- Supported by the Charles Koch Foundation and its network of resources, you will have access to proven concepts, applicable data and research, and exposure to national models and resources relevant to your specific organizational culture challenges to advance your work.
- Utilize the Empowering Practices Toolkit resources to support innovation and empower teams and individuals with the necessary tools for success when addressing workforce development issues.
- Learn with case studies and methods that are relevant to the context of private sector employers pursuing culture change.
- Be introduced to customizable interventions drawn from the Foundation’s Future of Work portfolio and potentially incentivized to implement the models in your organization.
Learning from a respected institution: The Kansas Leadership Center
- For nearly 20 years, the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC) has built a strong and respected institution designed to deliver adaptive leadership training and culture change at an unparalleled scale. KLC is the go-to expert on building healthy, productive, well-positioned cultures to make measurable progress on daunting challenges and emergent opportunities.
- Organizations and businesses across the United States (44 states) and around the world (64 countries across 6 continents) look to KLC to provide resources, training and consultation to support mission-driven leadership education.
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