Leadership & Management

Inspire Your Leaders.

Known across the journalism industry for signature leadership programs, Poynter offers a number of trainings to help executives, managers and rising leaders successfully approach challenges and opportunities. We help leaders at every level set priorities, handle difficult conversations and bring out the best in their teams to build stronger, more vibrant workplaces.

What We Offer

Poynter’s leadership workshops and programs are centered around growing foundational leadership skills in self-awareness, team-building, conflict management, effective communication and coaching. Our resources include personalized assessments; tools for handling conflict and improving recruitment and retention; and consulting services to strengthen culture, manage change and deliver on organizational strategy. Examples include:

Personalized Leadership Assessments

Poynter’s experts are certified to offer a variety of one-on-one assessment tools to help you identify your values, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, such as:

  • ViewPoynts (360-degree feedback from supervisors, direct reports and colleagues)
  • Myers-Briggs® testing and analysis 
  • Conflict Dynamics Profile®

Fundamentals of Leadership Workshops

Poynter offers a number of workshops to help you explore distinctive leadership practices and identify values and behaviors to effectively lead, including:

  • Leadership Foundations: Understand the building blocks of becoming a strong leader.
  • Managing Yourself: Build skills in decision-making, time management and prioritization.
  • Giving and Receiving Feedback: Learn how to provide effective feedback.
  • Owning the Change: Define and own your role as a leader in change.
  • Leading with DEIB: Learn to make DEIB an inextricable part of your organization.
  • Leading an Ethical Newsroom: Inspire staff to live up to their highest journalistic aspirations across platforms.

Managing Performance and Conflict Workshops

Poynter can help you learn how to manage employee performance, communicate with your supervisors, have difficult conversations, and give and receive feedback through various workshops, including:

  • Lead High-Performing Teams: Manage employee performance.
  • Managing Up: Communicate better with your boss or bosses.
  • Manager as a Coach: Prioritize coaching over fixing.
  • The Secret of Difficult Conversations: Create a strategy to address problems confidently and effectively.
  • Negotiating Conflict: Minimize conflict’s harmful effects and maximize its most useful ones instead of avoiding it.

Leadership Coaching and Consulting

To help you build an organizational culture where strategies and people flourish, Poynter offers leadership consulting services to determine gaps and opportunities and create a plan to address them. Poynter can work with your team to create a six- to 12-month leadership program for the organization, deliver a series of workshops and offer ongoing coaching to help your leaders improve their skills and elicit positive change. 

“The most important thing I learned is how to build a better me, and therefore a better newsroom.” – Poynter Leadership Participant