This is a series of six workshops. Only 35 attendees will be accepted.

This six-workshop series is designed for CEOs and upper-level management to deepen their understanding of the critical role direct care employees play in healthcare, disability services, and long-term care. These frontline workers provide essential services that directly impact patient and client outcomes, yet they often face challenging working conditions, high turnover rates, and systemic barriers to job satisfaction and career advancement.

Through interactive sessions, expert-led discussions, and real-world case studies, participants will:

• Explore the Workforce Landscape: Gain insights into the demographics, working conditions, and economic challenges faced by direct care employees.

• Understand Organizational Impact: Learn how turnover, burnout, and workforce instability affect service quality, operational costs, and organizational reputation.

• Foster Inclusive Leadership: Examine how leadership approaches can create a culture of respect, equity, and opportunity for direct care workers.

• Develop Retention Strategies: Identify policies and practices that improve job satisfaction, enhance worker well-being, and reduce turnover.

• Implement Sustainable Solutions: Build actionable plans to improve workforce stability and elevate the quality of care provided.

By the end of the series, executives will have a clear understanding of how investing in direct care employees strengthens their organization’s resilience, service quality, and financial performance. This series is essential for leaders committed to creating a more sustainable and effective care workforce.

• 1. Power Dynamics

  with Jen Cohen & Anne Parmeter

  Recognize how one’s own lived experiences influence their perspectives, assumptions, and expectations—and how those perspectives, assumptions, and expectations powerfully shape policies and workers’ experiences

• 2. Building a Culture of Respect

  with Jen Cohen & Robert Budd

  Respect is a leadership practice with direct impacts on morale, burnout, and employee retention. It is a strategic, organizational, and ethical foundation for workforce stability

• 3. Connecting Across a Changing Workforce Landscape

  with Jen Cohen & Anne Parmeter

  While the structural landscape of DSP work has shifted dramatically, the lived experiences of today’s workforce have changed even more. Participants learn practical strategies for validating workforce realities, reducing defensiveness, communicating with humility and clarity, and connecting across changes in ways that strengthen trust, alignment, and belonging

• 4. Self-Aware Leadership: Insight From Positive Psychology

  with Robert Budd

  The series includes the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment and an in-depth discussion on how self-awareness plays a key role in effective leadership

• 5. How to Right the Ship: Leading for sustainability

  with Robert Budd & Marco Damiani

  Building on previous sessions, which examined lived experience, respect, and connection across change, this session turns to the structural and cultural levers that allow organizations to stabilize the workforce over time. Leaders explore the role of mission, vision, values, and culture (MVVC) as practical tools – not abstract statements – for strengthening belonging, alignment, and trust, and for ensuring that DSPs see themselves reflected in the organization’s identity

• 6. Empathy: The not-so-secret key to transformation

  with Jen Cohen, Tibi Guzman & Robert Budd

  Empathy is a crucial competency for transformation, workforce stability, and cultural well-being