A Very Different Learning Approach to Learning

Your team is stuck. Traditional training hasn’t helped.

Why? People lack communication skills and the courage to speak up. They're unsure how to express creative ideas or give feedback. There’s a lack of trust, which leads to disengagement. They simply lack the skills of collaboration necessary for success.


No simulations. No role-plays. No hypothetical case studies.

Role-plays, case studies, and lectures are typical of traditional training programs. Sustained learning falls away because the learning is not tethered to reality.  Because the stakes are low, the learning is forgotten.


What if your team could solve real business challenges while transforming how they work together?

Introducing The Crucible Leadership Experience™:  a bold alternative to traditional team performance training. Business Strategy Consulting services help small businesses develop a roadmap for growth. We work with you to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and create a tailored plan to achieve your business goals.

Welcome to The Crucible Leadership Experience

Real Teams

Real Business Challenges

Real Business Challenges

  We work with intact, cross-functional, and newly formed teams to increase the level of trust, candor, listening, creativity, collaboration, and commitment to achieve your organization's business strategies.

Real Business Challenges

Real Business Challenges

Real Business Challenges

Essential to The Crucible Leadership Experience™ is the use of current, real-world business challenges in the workshop. These "hot topics" are used to increase the intensity of the learning experience and forge commitment and accountability for deploying the solutions.

 


Real Learning

Real Business Challenges

Real Learning

Transformation occurs with impactful, relevant integration. We create sustainable learning using “The Heat Index™: a repeatable, sustainable, proprietary method to accelerate team engagement and ensure behavioral change.

Training and Consulting Services for your Business

The Crucible Leadership Group: Your Partner in Business Success

We started The Crucible Leadership Group to enable teams to function with increased civility, self-reflection, and candor. The crucible is a metaphor for team integration, collaboration, and performance.


 We're committed to helping your teams perform at the highest level.  We provide workshops, team-building sessions, and individual coaching, all using the elements of The Crucible Experience™ to drive team performance. 


Whether you're a startup, a non-profit, or an established business, we have the expertise, experience, and pricing models to take your operations to the next level. 

A Learning experience like no other

Business Relevancy

 Current organizational “Hot Topics” provided by company executives are used in the workshop to address real business challenges.   

Leverage Team Tension and Conflict

Conflict and tension are embraced and leveraged through candor, trust-building, and psychological safety.

Critical Skills for Team Engagement

 Trusting, listening, questioning, exploring, innovating, collaborating, and rapidly deploying solutions are the critical skills covered in the workshop. 

Sustained Team Performance

 The Heat Index™ is used throughout the workshop as a accountability tool, a self/team progress check, and a tool for post-workshop team assignments.

Measurable Results

 The Team Collaboration pre/post workshop assessments are used to measure team effectiveness and problem-solving capability before and after the workshop.

Our Consulting Team

Jackie Kellso

Jackie is focused on mindset and skillset. She is a certified brain-based coach who applies neuroscience techniques to help leaders ‘get out of their own way.’ This work improves self-awareness, critical thinking and emotions management. Jackie is also a communications and leadership trainer, helping leaders make positive impact upon others.

Shaun McKenzie

  Shaun's expertise is targeted to improving the performance of individuals and teams. An expert in emotional intelligence, and team performance, he practices his craft using practical tools to improve team collaboration, engagement and commitment.

Our Clients

Let's Talk

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Our Story

I met Shaun in 2021 for an assignment to co-facilitate a multi-team leadership program for The Bose Corporation. The work spanned over a year, so we had a lot of time to learn about each other’s facilitation styles and philosophies.


The chemistry was evident, and it also revealed the ingredients for a solid business partnership: Shaun embraced and encouraged my direct, and assertive, native “New Yorker-ness,” and my transparent way of communicating concerns, observations, ideas, etc. – which is the only way I roll. 


From my point of view, embracing Jackie’s native “New Yorker-ness” was a learning opportunity.  I spent the first part of my life in Buffalo, NY. The folks from Buffalo are "nice people". Perhaps a little too nice and deferential, sometimes surrendering their needs and point of view to manifest harmony.  After moving to the New York City area, I quickly realized that my challenge was to be more direct, assertive, and clear in my communications. 


There is a natural tension that forms when we’re making decisions about our company. Tension is a main ingredient of a successful partnership. This partnership works because we can disagree and not get stuck on being right. Instead, we listen, clarify the other’s thoughts, and share our own ideas without threat. We keep each other psychologically safe. We build on our differences and work in tandem towards our unified goals. We know that radical candor is an active process and a necessary catalyst for managing tension and conflict.


This is why we are confident that the Accelerating Team Performance™ learning experience, along with our proprietary Heat Index™ methodology, will support clients’ teams to move beyond their conflicts and tensions, towards consensus and high performance.

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