When Training Gets Tricky: Ethics for Real-World TD

Les Lauber

When training gets tricky, we don’t need more theory—we need practical ways to spot ethical problems early, while they’re still small. In this interactive workshop, learn to recognize common ethical issues in everyday TD work, including access, learner data, stakeholder pressure, evaluation, and fairness in designing and delivering interventions. Connect simple, practical tools and questions to real dilemmas through hands-on activities and peer discussion, testing how they work in your context. Finally, begin to transform how you respond to TD ethics challenges by clarifying your own principles, asking better questions when situations feel off, and identifying specific shifts you can make to improve outcomes for your learners and stakeholders. This is not a theoretical ethics talk; it’s a hands-on session that gives TD professionals at any career stage tools they can apply immediately in design, delivery, stakeholder conversations, and evaluation.

CLICK: The Missing First Step in Leadership, Coaching & Teamwork

Janice Perkins

Participants will learn how to intentionally create the relational conditions that accelerate collaboration, coaching, and leadership effectiveness—without waiting for trust or buy-in to develop over time. This highly interactive session begins with an experiential activity that demonstrates chemistry in action before introducing the Six Gates of Chemistry, a research-based framework from doctoral research in executive coaching. Through discussion, reflection, music, and practical application, participants will learn to diagnose the behaviors that build or disrupt momentum and apply the framework to executive development, coaching, team formation, and organizational change. As organizations ask leaders to navigate increasing complexity with less time to build relationships, talent development professionals need practical tools that create connection faster, improve learning transfer, and strengthen leadership at every level.

Canva Confidential: Beyond the Basics for Instructional Designers

Dawn Monroe

After this session, attendees will be able to build a shared brand kit, use Magic Design to transform graphics in seconds, and streamline collaboration with SMEs and co-facilitators, all inside Canva.

This fast-paced, one-hour practitioner session skips tutorials you've already seen and goes straight to the features that change the game for instructional designers, facilitators, and content developers. We'll cover brand kits for consistent-looking materials, Magic Design's AI-powered graphic editing, and collaboration workflows that keep review cycles chaos-free.

With learning teams under constant pressure to produce more content, faster, KC talent development professionals need tools that cut production time without cutting quality. This session delivers practical, immediately usable techniques for building job aids, course materials, and facilitator guides more efficiently, so you can spend less time positioning and more time designing learning that works.

11:15 - 12:15

Beyond Content: Designing AI Agents as Training Supplements

Caroline Gorenc & Sydney Rutherford

AI is moving beyond content creation. Forward-thinking L&D teams are using it to create interactive, personalized learning supplements that drive behavior change and performance.

After this session, you'll be able to design and conceptualize custom AI agents and skills to extend your training's reach and impact beyond the classroom.

We'll explore how emerging AI tools (Copilot agents and Claude skills) are reshaping L&D by creating supplemental learning resources that reinforce training transfer in real-world contexts. Through live examples, including a Situational Leadership diagnostic tool and an interview question generator powered by job descriptions, you'll see how to build practical agents that solve specific business challenges.

Do Your Leaders Have An SOP for Conflict?

Nathan Regier

Conflict has become a daily operational reality in modern organizations, yet most leaders still improvise their way through consequential interactions with costly consequences. Next Element’s 2025 Trust & Conflict Study revealed that most organizations do not have a conflict problem; they have a conflict capability gap.

Learn why traditional conflict training fails and why leaders need an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for conflict. Explore a framework for evaluating conflict training programs and building an SOP for conflict that strengthens trust while improving accountability and performance.

Attendees will leave with actionable insights, practical tools, conversation structures, and reinforcement strategies they can immediately integrate into leadership development programs, coaching conversations, and manager training initiatives.

From Corner Office to Cardboard Box: Reinventing a Career at 46

Liz Benditt

Six-time cancer survivor. Twenty years building a career from Marketing Manager at Hallmark Cards to VP Marketing at TreviPay — with executive roles at Lyric Opera of Kansas City and Arrow Manufacturing along the way. Then, at 46, Liz Benditt walked away from it all to found The Balm Box, a company built entirely from what her corporate career had (and hadn't) prepared her to do.

In this session, Liz shares the real story of reinventing a career at midlife: which corporate skills transferred directly, which ones she had to unlearn, and the doubt that came with trading a title and paycheck for founder uncertainty. She'll speak candidly about what nobody tells you about reinvention — the identity shift, the financial risk, and how 20 years of ""traditional"" experience became her biggest asset as a founder.

Attendees leave with a practical framework for evaluating their own reinvention, and a candid look at what it costs — and returns — to bet on yourself later in your career."

1:15 - 2:15

Contact With the Front Line: Designing Training That Sticks

Jenna Deyle

After this session, attendees will be able to apply four core design principles that make training transfer to real behavior change, rather than fading after the workshop ends.

Drawing on 15 years inside a major industrial distributor and four years leading talent development for nearly 900 employees, Jenna Deyle breaks down why most training fails to survive contact with the front line, and what to build instead. This session covers why discomfort drives skill retention, how to structure realistic practice that mirrors the actual job, why self-assessment produces more durable change than feedback alone, and how to build coaching infrastructure that outlasts the training event.

Format includes a short framework overview, real field examples, and time to apply the principles to attendees' own current programs.

For KC TD professionals building programs that need to prove ROI beyond a Smile Sheet, this session offers a practical, field-tested alternative to information-dump training.

From Expectations to Alignment: Communicating Performance for Results

Jordan Atkinson & Alex Terwilliger

Performance problems do not always begin with a lack of skill or motivation. They often emerge when organizational goals, job expectations, resources, feedback, and employee understanding are misaligned. This interactive session brings together the Human and Organizational Performance Effectiveness (HOPE) model and organizational communication to help talent development professionals identify and address those gaps before they become formal performance issues.

Working through a realistic case in which an employee’s performance concerns progress from unclear expectations to difficult feedback and a performance improvement plan (PIP), participants will apply a diagnostic framework examining goals, expectations, communication, and employee response. The presenters will explore how employees process performance messages, how identity and face concerns shape reactions, and how feedback orientation and sensitivity influence whether employees engage, become defensive, or withdraw. Participants will also consider what employees want and need from a PIP, including clarity, evidence, voice, support, achievable next steps, and a connection between individual expectations and broader organizational goals.

Rather than treating performance management as a single high-stakes conversation, this session frames it as an ongoing process built through clear expectations, recurring one-on-one conversations, active listening, candid feedback, and consistent follow-through. Attendees will leave with a practical tool for diagnosing performance misalignment and communication strategies that promote accountability, development, and improved performance.