The Power of Pressure: Read the First Chapter
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Bring the Summer Learning Series to your team • Request a call • Send this page to your manager or HR team
Energize your team as we move out of the pandemic with a series of three, one-hour virtual learning events. The months ahead will present new challenges as business needs change, blended working environments begin to take shape, and leaders are once again forced to adjust to rapid change and uncertainty. Help ready your people to lead and perform through the next phase with a series of virtual learning events.
TWO TRACKS TO CHOOSE FROM
Develop your people in the areas that will benefit them most. Choose our leadership track to build your team’s coaching and collaboration capabilities, or choose our resilience track to build your team’s ability to perform under pressure.LEADERSHIP TRACK Develop high performing leaders.
3×4 Coaching
Drawing on a wealth of experience from our 30+ years of working with the world’s top coaches, 3×4 Coaching introduces the 3 Plays and 4 Skills great coaches use to build commitment and get results.Building High-Performing Teams
Basketball coach Roy Rana has built high performing teams at every level from high school to the NBA. Drawing on years of experience, he will share what he has learned about how to create an environment in which a team is more than the sum of its parts.Working With People You Don’t Understand
Introduce participants to the relationship between their mindsets, behaviours and results, and take them on an interactive tour of how adopting new mindsets of curiosity and generosity can make those behaviours automatic.
RESILIENCE TRACK Enhance performance under pressure.
Building Resilience
High performance is not possible without pressure. The Building Resilience keynote introduces a personal resilience toolkit used by elite athletes to develop a relationship with stress and pressure that puts them in the driver’s seat.Maintaining Team Motivation Through the Troughs
When teams face challenging times, leaders have four allies to preserve motivation and fight the tide of disillusionment. This session brings these allies to life with stories from people who have used them under incredible pressure.The Power of Pressure
Drawing insights from his book, The Power of Pressure: Why Pressure isn’t the Problem, it’s the Solution, Dane Jensen’s new keynote address introduces three powerful strategies for using pressure as an advantage.
DELIVERED BY A WORLD-CLASS FACULTY
Our speakers teach at top business schools, have coached Olympic and professional athletes, been Olympic athletes, consulted at the highest level of business, and practiced law. Their strong personalities and unique personal experience draw audiences in and keep learners engaged.LEARN MORE
Want to learn more about bringing our Summer Learning Series to your organization? Leave your contact information below and we’ll get in touch.
The relationship is the engine; emotion is the fuel
Every engine needs fuel, and in the coaching relationship there is no stronger fuel than emotion. Much of the time in business we’re taught to keep emotions in check – especially negative emotions like anger, frustration and disappointment. Since it’s rare to see these kinds of emotions expressed, it can be triggering when our people show their dissatisfaction. It can feel like an attack, and the default response can be to mirror the emotion – meet anger with anger – or become defensive.Every engine needs fuel, and in the coaching relationship there is no stronger fuel than emotion.Falling into this trap, however, robs you of the opportunity to direct the energy in that emotion in a productive direction. When a team member expresses negative emotion, it means they care. When leaders make an effort to notice and acknowledge the emotion, they can deepen the relationship and build trust. And by exploring the emotion, they can help their people see what’s possible and use their feelings as motivation to take a step in the right direction. In these situations, the relationship is what allows the coach to lean into the emotion and explore it. In our 3×4 Coaching program, we give participants challenges to apply key learnings back on the job. In one of these challenges, a participant committed to asking their people simple questions like, “What’s new from the weekend?” much more frequently than they had before. Asking more, personal questions helped this leader build rapport with their people. And it provided the leader with new insight into their people’s emotions. In the course of these conversations, this leader noticed that the emotion in the person’s response provided a deeper view to valuable information. By leaning into those emotions and exploring them further, the leader was able to learn more about how they were interpreting their experiences. Noticing what made them frustrated, anxious, fearful, or even happy and excited, improved the leader’s ability to identify and address their team’s issues and challenges. With stronger relationships in place, and positive results beginning to emerge, it wasn’t long before the leader began asking more direct questions to gain a deeper understanding of their people’s feelings. Equipped with better information, the leader was able to give more and more targeted support and feedback to enable their team’s success. As a leader and a coach, the relationship you have with your people is what allows you to help them be at their best. When leaders give their relationships the care they need and lean into emotions, they can drive higher levels of performance, and ultimately results.
Make the most of your investment
Investing time in building relationships pays dividends. And yet, all the other pressures don’t go away just because you’ve decided to put your time into this endeavour. To optimize the benefits of relationship building given the reality of time constraints, smart coaches create a strategy for how they’re going to build and maintain their relationships every day. What this comes down to is showing people that you care. That means making time for them, offering them support when they’re struggling, and doing both with unwavering consistency. But every person is different, and what works for one person might not work for another. When you’re working to build relationships with the people you lead, make a point of understanding:- What are their strengths?
- What motivates them, specifically?
- What is the best way to communicate with them?
Putting it all together
Productivity is the direct result of an effective team. When everyone is engaged and making a strong personal contribution, efficiency follows. And the greatest influence on performance and engagement is the team’s leader; their coach. But which leader garners the higher level of engagement and commitment: the leader who focuses first on task execution? Or the leader who works to build relationships and earn permission to coach their people to a higher level of performance? In your next round of one-on-one meetings, take the time to consider your relationship with the person you’re leading. You might just find that when you move your focus from the to-do list to the person, productivity follows. We are very excited that Dane Jensen’s book, The Power of Pressure: Why Pressure isn’t the Problem, It’s the Solution, is coming out this summer! HarperCollins is releasing the book on August 31st, but you can get a sneak peek and read the first chapter today! Enter your details below to get your exclusive access now. 🧹 People who think highly of themselves might brush off the piece of corrective feedback, giving more weight to the positive news surrounding it.
😟 But those who are self-critical might dwell on the bad news and miss out on the good.
🐍 And the lack of direct communication makes people feel like they’re victims of a sneak attack.
Instead, Peggy offers simple advice for leaders who need to give feedback: Describe the behaviour you want to reinforce or correct, explain the impact of the behaviour, and outline what you want them to do. Click here to read the article on hbr.org. The plans for the Tokyo Games have been in the news a lot lately. In this video, our founder, Peter Jensen, shares his perspective on the preparations taking place within Team Canada. Rather read than watch? Here is the full text of Peter’s update: Greetings! Well, it’s certainly been a while. And a few things have happened this past year, to put it mildly. I thought I’d give you an update from my perspective on the Tokyo Olympics. I believe unless something else dramatic changes, and that’s certainly a possibility, that the Olympics will proceed, but they certainly will not resemble, for the participants at least, a normal Olympics. As a spectator watching on television, you’ll see a lot of what you would normally see with the exception of loud crowds and loud noises. In the latest installment, they’re hoping to have people in the stands but get this, they’re not allowed to cheer. And that’s obviously for COVID reasons. Quite frankly, the COC is doing its best to encourage parents, family, and friends not to attend the Olympics in person because they won’t have access to the athletes and their children. Likely, it will be like the World Junior Hockey Championships, where gatherings will be held afterward online – so you might as well stay at home. What do we know from the athlete’s perspective? We know that they’re only allowed in the village five days before their event and they must leave when the event is over. Obviously each country will have their own bubble. It will not be a normal Games in terms of the athlete’s experience.“The athletes need to be able to prepare for something very different than they’ve imagined their entire life”The opening and closing ceremonies are still up in the air. Mid February, the IOC will publish a playbook outlining their plan. Now from a psychological perspective, the athletes need to be able to prepare for something very different than they’ve imagined their entire life. I’m sure you’ve had the experience, especially early on in the pandemic, of going to do something you normally do and then realizing, “Oh I’m not driving anywhere. I simply have to go on my computer and go online.” Those images of how we used to do things stay very strong for a long period of time. But once we start doing things differently, those things become the inner images. The athletes don’t have the advantage of that because we still don’t know enough detail to paint a clear picture of what it’s going to look like to be in Tokyo. It will get clearer over the coming months. And it will definitely not be a level playing field. Some of the countries will prioritize the athletes in terms of vaccinations, others will not. Some countries have been allowing their athletes to train in groups, others, including Canada, have not. One of the biggest things is that test events that normally are held in the Olympic venues to help athletes prepare for the Olympics, will not be held. It’s been ages since any of our athletes have had the opportunity to compete. And so, as I’ve said, A lot of changes and a lot of variables. There’s no doubt you’ll hear a lot about this in the coming months. But the Olympics are usually about overcoming hardship and hope, and my goodness, we could all use a little of that. In our 3×4 Coaching virtual learning journey, participants are given challenges to apply what they’ve learned on the job. In this video, our Chief Learning Officer, Peggy Baumgartner, showcases how one program participant used a challenge activity to make a lasting difference in his organization. When it comes to coaching, it’s not about what you know; it’s what you do that ultimately matters. That’s why we make challenge activities a part of our online learning journeys. Participants are given a challenge and encouraged to make note of what works for them and what impact it had. One participant, taking the 3×4 Coaching program through Queen’s Executive Education, really took his challenge on recognition to heart. Following the challenge, Dave Cooper shared that he had written a letter to his team to recognize their contributions through the pandemic. As the manager of retail leadership development for Sport Chek, a major retailer with approximately 250 stores, his team had been hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. “Our training team got very disconnected from the stores, which was really difficult for me personally and difficult for our team,” Dave told us. “After going through eight months of this constant stress, I wanted to see if I could write something to recognize what they’d accomplished how long they had endured. And maybe give them a little nudge that they have more in them.” Dave’s letter to his team was particularly effective because it took all the key concepts from the recognition module and used them in a very powerful way:
- Make it relevant. Dave’s first success was in his timing. Rather than waiting until everything had settled down, he took the time to recognize his people in the moment and let them know they were seen.
- Focus on the behavior, not results. In the letter, Dave recognized his people not for the results, but for their efforts. “You and your team have persevered well over 200 days,” the letter reads. “This is an incredible achievement!”
- Make it a habit. Dave told us that he didn’t want it to be a one-time thing. Rather than writing a letter to his team and calling it job done, he set reminders in his calendar for future times he know would be busy to remind himself to recognize his team.
- Extend influence & ownership to others. The impact of Dave’s letter didn’t stop at his direct reports. He challenged them to pay it forward: “thank your management teams, your full-timers, your part-timers and anyone else who has contributed to your store’s success,” he wrote. “Everyone plays a role!”
In this article
Explore our virtual leadership development options to meet your current needs.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Depending on your goals for virtual learning, different approaches are required. We’ve taken a ‘small / medium / large’ approach to our product development to meet the needs of a variety of scenarios:Large Group Experiences
Webinars or a-synchronous content to spark ideas and motivation for groups of any size.
Targeted Group Programs
Learning journeys that integrate video, synchronous learning, 1:1 coaching and application to build mastery for up to 49 people.
In-depth Cohort Programs
Half-day interactive instructor-led sessions for up to 18 people to build core skills.
Get the catalog
Download a full summary of our leadership development programs.
Timeless skills + the right tools for right now
Of course, we have a range of virtual options in our core competencies: coaching skills for managers, resilience skills for all, and self-awareness skills to enable more productive collaboration. And, we are continuously launching virtual programs that give learners the skills they need to be successful right now. Note that we are continuously developing new offers (and adapting our in-person programs to virtual delivery) so this list will be updated as new programs come online.Coaching skills for managers
The 3×4 Coaching model explores the 3 plays and 4 skills consistently executed by world-leading coaches.
We have a full range of options for bringing our industry-leading 3×4 Coaching model to life virtually – with a specific eye to how to coach in a virtual environment.In-depth Cohort Programs
3×4 Coaching Virtual Learning Journey
Coaches are leaders who do all they can to help people improve and succeed. It is a way of thinking and interacting with people that communicates high expectations, respect and caring. In this 4 – 6 week (depending on your desired pace) virtual program, individuals learn the concepts and skills of a coaching style of management that builds commitment, drives employee engagement, gets results, and integrates this learning into the flow of their work.
Get a feel for the learning experience in this 3-minute video overview of the program.
Targeted Group Programs
Coaching Remotely 1/2-day Virtual Program
Coaches are leaders who do all they can to help people improve and succeed. It is a way of thinking and interacting with people that communicates high expectations, respect and caring. In this 4 – 6 week (depending on your desired pace) virtual program, individuals learn the concepts and skills of a coaching style of management that builds commitment, drives employee engagement, gets results, and integrates this learning into the flow of their work.
Having Challenging Conversations from a Distance 1/2-day Virtual Program
Our practical, 4-step map for challenging conversations is rooted in our 25 years of experience helping elite athletes manage emotions under intense pressure. Participants explore methods of preparing to confront, learn an effective format for an opening statement, practice managing reactivity and discuss how to close the conversation with accountability built-in.
Large Group Experiences
3×4 Coaching Overview Webinar
Learning coaching skills is the best way to dramatically increase your people’s commitment level and performance. This interactive 1-hour online session starts your powerful coaching journey.
3×4 Coaching Asynchronous Video Program
The 3×4 Coaching Video Program is a self-paced, asynchronous learning journey that unpacks the 3 plays and 4 skills of exceptional coaches. It provides learners with a powerful, easy-to-understand model for coaching people to higher levels of results and engagement.
Watch a brief sample of the 3×4 Coaching video program
Resilience skills for all
Building Resilience is aimed at giving participants a toolkit of inner skills to navigate their high pressure realities.
Rarely has resilience been as relevant as it is right now. We take our 30+ years of experience in resilience, and bring it to life in a way that gives people the insight and skills needed right now.In-depth Cohort Programs
Building Resilience Virtual Learning Journey
The virtual Building Resilience program synthesizes 30 years of science-backed and performance-proven strategies into a practical toolkit that participants can use to stay healthy under pressure and recover when they are thrown off balance. Our approach to resilience draws on work in elite sport, teaching and research in academia, and work with thousands of people in organizations of all sizes. Building Resilience is a transformative experience that allows participants to learn in the flow of work while changing the way they relate to pressure.
Targeted Group Programs
Building Resilience 1/2-day Virtual Program
A leader’s ability to stay resilient through setbacks and be predictable under pressure is the #1 indicator of how their team will weather the storm. Learn practical techniques for staying even-keeled when it matters most in this 1/2-day online workshop.
Large Group Experiences
Building Resilience Overview Webinar
This online session equips participants with an understanding of how uncertainty and pressure impact their performance and health, an awareness of the choices they have to enhance their resilience under pressure, and a guided, applied exercise that will specifically tackle how they are framing and taking direct action on the areas that will most impact their performance and resilience.
Topical skills leaders need right now
Our Maintaining Team Motivation Through The Troughs program teaches leaders four allies for fighting disillusionment.
A collection of fit-for-purpose programs that address hot button issues like motivation through prolonged periods of uncertainty, challenging conversations from a distance, and the imperative for agility and personal ownership over re-skilling.Targeted Group Programs
Maintaining Team Motivation Through the Troughs 1/2-day Virtual Program
As the pandemic drags on, maintaining motivation and engagement will become a primary challenge for leaders. Learn practical techniques to keep people energized, resilient and motivated, inspired by Olympic coaches and athletes, in this 1/2-day online workshop.
Large Group Experiences
The Meta-Skilled Organization
Meta-skills are the connective tissue that allow people and organizations to let go of the skills that have anchored their successful past and master and embrace new ways of working – in other words, to evolve. Packed with ideas on both how to foster the development of meta-skills for yourself, and how to build meta-skilled organizations as stewards of talent, this keynote lays out a framework for six key meta-skills that allow individuals and organizations to see clearly, move quickly, and stay the course.
Self-awareness & collaboration
The “player’s card” is one of our favourite tools for helping learners translate self-awareness to communication and action.
Targeted Group Programs
The Self-Aware Leader Virtual Program
The Self-Aware Leader program combines the TAIS assessment, three one-on-one coaching sessions, the creation of a personal action plan to address a real business challenge, an ability to chart your progress and adjust your approach through the guidance of a coach. It will help leaders understand and leverage their strengths under pressure and identify what changes if made, would matter the most.
Large Group Experiences
TAIS Assessment + 1:1 Coaching
Whether you want to build self-awareness for a few executives or all of your people managers, the TAIS can help them identify environments and performance situations in which they will thrive and excel, when and how they are most likely to make mistakes and what they can do to ensure you will perform well under pressure. Participants receive an individual report detailing 18 personal styles as they relate to attention, information, leadership, social and communication and have the opportunity to build further clarity with a 1:1 coaching call.
Let’s talk!
If you’re interested in any the above – or anything that you don’t see here – let’s chat! You can get in touch at hello@thirdfactor.com.Download the catalog.
Get a complete overview of our coaching, collaboration and resilience programs.
“Let me give you some feedback on that.”“Then use a verbal yellow highlighter,” I responded. “Whenever I have to give anybody feedback, and I want to to make sure it’s been heard and recognized as feedback, I always use the word feedback and emphasize it… as in ‘let me give you some feedback on that.’” On the next day of the program she walked up to me and said “Oh my gosh that was so simple, and it will make a big difference. In thinking back to my conversations with my employees I realized that very often when I was actually giving them some feedback I rarely used the word feedback, so they didn’t recognize it as such when they were asked.” It will definitely help the employees’ performance and, secondarily the results on her 360 feedback.