High Stakes Leader Workshop

A leadership tabletop exercise.

Real pressure. No wreckage.

One day, on site. Your leadership team runs one escalating scenario and practices the calls, the conversations, and the handoffs the job actually requires.

The hard calls land on your leaders. Most were never trained for them.

Nobody teaches the decisions and conversations the job actually requires.

  • So the gap shows up sideways. 
  • Decisions stall for weeks.
  • Hard conversations get dodged until they turn into a crisis.
  • Standards slip when no one is watching.
  • And the best work bottlenecks at the top, because your strongest people cannot let go of it. 

That gap is expensive, and it stays invisible until it costs you a deal, a hire, or a key person walking out the door.

What the day is

A working day, not a seminar.

  • Your team runs one escalating scenario, all day. 
  • The situation develops as the day goes.
  • New information lands.
  • An assumption fails.
  • Someone pushes back.
  • Your leaders have to decide, confront, hold the line, and hand work off, on the clock, in front of each other.
  • Then they debrief what they did and why. 

It is the same method used to train emergency operations centers and command staff, aimed at the decisions your leaders actually face.

The four disciplines

Everything runs on the four disciplines from High Stakes. Your team works all four against the same scenario, under pressure, with the clock running.

  • DECIDE.  A repeatable method for making the call under pressure and capturing the reasoning so it survives the day someone asks you to defend it. Your team runs it live and produces a decision brief.
  • CONFRONT.  Most decisions require a hard conversation to land. Your team learns the four ways people avoid or fumble those conversations, finds their own pattern, and rehearses the opener and the pushback out loud.
  • UPHOLD.  The standard a leader holds when no one is watching is the standard that governs the team when the leader is not in the room. Your team practices naming a slipped standard and building the trigger that keeps the next one.
  • DEVELOP.  The fastest way to cap a team is to become its bottleneck. Your team works the six developer roles and builds a handoff that transfers authority, not just tasks.

What each leader walks out with

Reps, not a binder.

  • The method, practiced under pressure, not watched on a slide
  • A decision brief they built themselves during the day
  • A conversation opener and a pushback response, rehearsed out loud
  • Their own read on which of the four disciplines is weakest for them
  • One move for Monday, written in their notebook, shared with no one

What you see

You are in the room.

You spend a full day watching your own leadership team decide under pressure, argue, get stuck, and recover. You will learn more about your bench in about seven hours than in a year of one-on-ones.

No report to read afterward. You were there.

Why it is different

Most leadership training sells inspiration and hands out frameworks that live on a coffee mug.

This is a method built and tested where the stakes were real, practiced against a scenario hard enough to expose habits, and measured by what people can do at the end of the day.

They practice the skills. They don't just hear about them.

Who it is for

Leadership teams carrying decisions only they can make and conversations no one trained them for. It works best with an intact team in the room together.

Who leads it

Mike McKenna, founder of TEAM Solutions and author of High Stakes: Four Field-Tested Disciplines That Define Real Leadership. More than 25 years leading and coaching through high-stakes work, where reading people and organizations under pressure was mission critical.

Format

Full day or half day, delivered on-site to your leadership team.

Book a conversation

The next step is an email or a short call to see if the day fits the decisions your team is actually facing. 

High Stakes Leader
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