Take a class solo, or with others from your team. They’re hands-on, fun and practical.
Team Health trainings are high-impact and hands-on, where you learn by doing and come away with something genuinely useful at the end. Trainings are available…
1. Online
Register any time. All are welcome! New classes monthly.
2. In-person
I teach classes at Civic Hall Toronto and other places.
3. At your office or staff retreat. Have me facilitate a workshop with your team.
Curious about whether these trainings are a good fit for you or your team? Get in touch
Training Programs
- Find Your Why: Uncovering your team’s higher purpose through storytelling
Strategic Goal-setting: Help your team focus with OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)
Team Retrospectives: How to run powerful team retrospectives for continuous improvement
Agile for Humans: agile teamwork and project management secrets for non-techies
How to stop juggling and start crushing: agile time management and mindfulness techniques
Value Proposition Design: how to quickly surface and act on customer insights
Psychological Safety 101: how to bring your brain to work
Matt’s approach to teamwork and organization design is infectious, human and simple.
–Gabe Sawhney, Executive Director, Code for Canada
1) Find Your Why
Discover your team’s higher purpose together through storytelling
This module is based on a curriculum developed by Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why and creator of the most-watched TED talk ever. It works for individuals, teams, or whole organizations.
The reason it’s so powerful (and refreshingly grounded and human) is that it works entirely based on telling real-world in small groups — which teams naturally love. People tell stories to each other about moments where they felt pride at work, and then uncover shared connections and patterns that run across their stories. Out of that work, the facilitator helps draw out a “golden thread” that runs through everyone’s stories. This reveals the group’s “Why,” it’s higher purpose or shared meaning.Matt’s ‘Find Your Why’ program took our team retreat to a higher level.
Greg Sacks, Co-Founder, Trufflepig
This gives the team a powerful human foundation to build on. And the process is as rewarding / valuable as the end result, boosting team members’ sense of overall purpose, culture and belonging — and giving them a clearer north star they can use in their work together going forward.
This program is available for organizations, teams, or individuals.
‘Finding My Why’ with Matt Thompson as my facilitator was one of the best things I’ve ever done. He guided me on a journey to the deepest expressions of who I am. It was life-changing.
Sam Dyson, Chicago Learning Exchange
2) Strategic goal-setting
Helping your team focus with OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)
Great teams need clear goals. Today that increasingly means helping your team focus on a smaller number of priorities — to “put more wood behind fewer arrows,” as Larry Page puts it.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a proven tool for doing that, and have increasingly become the industry standard for how savvy individuals, teams and organizations set goals. In this hands-on workshop, the team learns by doing, producing a draft set of real quarterly OKRs together through a process that’s fun, human and collaborative.
Matt designed an OKR process for us that’s become integral to how we work. It’s helped make us more focused, accountable and sane
Lia Milito, Managing Director, Code for Canada
The workshop is designed to help groups align quickly around a shared passions and purpose, and then capture those as a crisp set of clear objectives and measurable key results.
The art is in creating a strong sense of psychological ownership from the team. The workshop applies insights from group psychology and emotional safety to help teams not just set goals, but meaningfully align around them.
Adopting OKRs for any organization is a big lift — shifting process and culture, and setting shared priorities. Matt was our coach and advisor at every step, helping leadership and all staff. He was essential to the success of our work.
Ryan Merkley, CEO, Creative Commons
3) Reflective Practice 101
How to run powerful team retrospectives that can change your life
Almost 70 percent of white collar workers now say they have no time for “strategic or creative thinking” on the job. Despite our culture’s growing emphasis on “innovation,” we’re rapidly becoming a generation of knowledge workers that are too busy to think.
This workshop introduces a simple and proven technique teams can use together as an antidote, making regular time to step back, sharpen the axe, and surface small improvements quickly.
Matt is thoughtful, research-informed, and a natural leader. Working with him is like receiving a master class in agile team management.
Emily Goligoski, Research Director, NYU
The secret is “reflective practice,” a simple technique now employed by everyone from Navy SEAL teams to agile software developers to reflect on recent work as a way to boost future performance. In this workshop, participants learn by doing, running their first “team retrospective” together and immediately generating a small set of actionable ideas for strengthening how they work together.
They’ll also learn how to facilitate their own team retrospectives going forward –so that in as little as an hour or two each month they can generate big boosts in team health, engagement and problem-solving.
4) Agile for Humans
Agile teamwork & project management techniques for non-techies
Agile teamwork practices like Scrum, with their promise of “twice the work in half the time,” really do work. But the problem is: they’re often too difficult to apply in the real world, especially for non-technical teams or for busy leaders who just want a handful of techniques that work — not full-on agile project manager certification.
Working with Matt was a game-changer for The Leap. These techniques have completely transformed the way we work
— Bianca Mugyenyi, Co-Executive Director, The Leap
This workshop and coaching program bridges that gap, simplifying and humanizing agile practices down to three core techniques anyone can learn quickly to help their team prioritize, execute, and continuously improve. It includes basics like how to design a “sprint cycle” for your team, how to streamline team meetings to make them more effective, how to scope and prioritize tasks more strategically, and how to continually surface good ideas for improvement.
The emphasis is on achieving more impact with less work, and “hacking the hamster wheel” of chronic juggling and multi-tasking that’s bad for our brains and bad for the work.
This was a hugely informative training session. We learned a great deal and all of it was supremely applicable to the work we do and the challenges we face in accomplishing it.
Civic Hall Toronto, “Agile for Humans” participant
5) How to stop juggling and start crushing
Agile time management and mindfulness techniques for the Age of Crazy
Too. Many. Tabs. In a world of perpetual distraction, the ability to focus and prioritize our attention — both as individuals and in our teams — is a master skill for becoming happier and more effective at work.
This workshop borrows from agile time management practices like kanban (tracking priorities on a simple visual board), pomodoro (working in focused 25-minute bursts), bullet journaling (starting and ending each day with focused prioritizing & reflection), and the Happiness Index (tracking happiness to boost performance) to help individual staff manage their time more effectively.
Instead of carrots and sticks, the emphasis is on mindful practices that can be learned quickly, feel good, and boost mental health at work.
6) Value Proposition Design
How to boost team empathy and make things real people love
Who are your people? Who is your team most trying to help or create value for? What are your customers or stakeholders or end users trying to get done in the world? What pains are they encountering along the way? What pain relievers or gain creators can you offer them?
In this hands-on workshop, teams use the Value Proposition Canvas framework to step into the shoes of their customers, identify pain points, and then use those to generate strategic ideas for improvements in their product or service.
Unlike many design personas or human-centered design tools, the emphasis is on practicality and action — directly tying customer needs to realistic ideas quickly.
7) Psychological Safety 101
How to take your brain to work (in development)
This training will combine insights from Google’s Aristotle project on team effectiveness, the Rockwood Institute’s Art of Leadership Program on “courageous conversations” / having difficult conversations in the workplace, and emotional safety frameworks like SCARF to help teams feel safer and become more collectively intelligent at work. It looks at techniques for building a healthy organizational culture, explains why smart individuals often end up doing dumb things at work (The Stupidity Paradox), and examines how unconscious norms like “belonging cues,” “status triggers” and “impression management” impact our brains at work.
Interested in learning more about these or other trainings? Let’s talk.