How SessionLab helps Cultivating Leadership streamline their workflow

A simple, effective design tool 

Busy agencies and consultancies need effective tools to help streamline their processes and deliver value to their clients. 

At Cultivating Leadership, they found the tools they were using to design their sessions were creating additional work and overhead. Since switching to SessionLab, they’ve been able to optimize their design process and work more efficiently.

“Prior to Sessionlab we tended to use mainly Word documents or Google docs. Sessionlab gives us a repeatable structure for session plans/runsheets that is easily shared and takes away some of the messiness – like calculating timing, filing and searching.” 

When designing workshops for clients, it’s common to go back and forth on the session design to find a perfect flow. The team at Cultivating Leadership has found the Session Planner especially helpful at this stage of the process.

“The hardest thing for us is often what to leave out – in Sessionlab we can easily see the flow of a session as well as the timing and can play with this in a dynamic way without losing data or creating extra work.”

Moving from ideation to a completed design can be a dance of finding great activities and testing different flows. With SessionLab, it’s easy for Jim and Joy to simply drag, drop and reorder blocks to quickly try different flows.

As their team makes changes to their workshop design, the session timing automatically recalculates, saving them time and effort they can instead spend on the hundred other things they need to do.

“When colleagues see the flexibility of moving blocks around, the automatic timing adjustments, and the ability to make facilitator notes separate/side by side with the design notes, it makes it hard to go back.”

Creating value for clients 

Cultivating Leadership seeks to create continuing value for the organizations they work with. This means the interventions, sessions and processes they develop for clients are varied and bespoke in nature.

“Much of our work is tailored to specific client needs so we need a way to be constantly session planning and re-planning while also preserving and building on what we know. With more of what we do housed in SessionLab, it is easier to do that.”

To enable this kind of organizational change and deliver value for their clients, the team at Cultivating Leadership collect their existing knowledge and designs in SessionLab and use them to inform the work they do. And when it comes to long term programs, they’ve found SessionLab to be a useful way to stay organized and create impact.

“One way I’ve seen SessionLab shine is by tracking multiple sessions over a year. So, when we are planning an arc of a program, we can have all the session designs in one place and refer back and forward, and keep notes of what was planned, and what actually happened.” 

Collaborating with external stakeholders is a vital part of an consultancy’s workflow. In SessionLab you can collaborate with your clients in a way that works for you. 

Invite your partners directly to your session to co-create and edit in real-time. Working across timezones? Leave comments and notes to your agenda to iterate asynchronously. Prefer to share a simple overview? Export a PDF to share over email or bring to a client meeting. 

“We can easily collaborate with clients or partners without compromising the data security of our wider dataset.”

Secure and efficient collaborations are important to the team at Cultivating Leadership. However you and your client choose to work together, SessionLab helps you collaborate effectively and with confidence.  

Efficient collaboration across time zones 

Cultivating Leadership has team members working from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, USA and more. With a truly global team, they needed a tool that allowed them to stay organized and in-sync when working with clients.

Using Word Documents and emailing agenda designs back and forth can result in an inefficient workflow or cause things to be lost in the process. But thankfully, there’s a better way.

Colleagues who use SessionLab talk about what a time saver it is vs. using Word docs.

With SessionLab, Joy and Jim have been able to collaborate effectively and deliver meaningful results to clients, wherever they’re located. 

“Day to day we use SessionLab as a tool in our design process. It allows us to easily work remotely across time zones and has great features that enables design to be completed from the high-level through to detailed. It allows multiple people to work both asynchronously and synchronously.”

Every session your agency designs and runs is a valuable resource for learning and re-use. At Cultivating Leadership, they’ve found that collecting all of their session design work in one place has helped improve productivity and efficiency. They can go to SessionLab to get ideas, find the right session quickly and save time and energy while designing too!

“Benefits that have evolved have been the ease of access, consistent standards of format and a library of tools and ideas. We are no longer wasting as much time and energy on different styles of presentation or searching the wider filing system.” 

The tools your team needs to succeed 

Cultivating Leadership enjoys working with organizations that seek to do-good in the world and invest in their people. They also walk the talk, creating a culture of compassion and generosity that allows their team to bring their whole selves to work and find happiness in what they do.

“Having the tools to do our work is identified as a driver of satisfaction and SessionLab is one of those tools. Colleagues ask to use SessionLab.”

SessionLab has had a small part to play in helping the team at Cultivating Leadership find satisfaction and efficiency in the work they do as well as making it easier to share their ideas generously amongst the team.

“The structure of the tool helps my thought processes, my interactions with colleagues and supports me to document only what is needed. A bonus is the growing database of reference material from other colleagues.”

Enabling your team with the right tools not only improves productivity and efficiency, but it can also drive satisfaction and collaboration. With SessionLab, Cultivating Leadership is able to free-up time in their design process, collaborate thoughtfully and deliver value to their clients.