6:30 PM - 9:00 PM                

Meet in the Seattle Sheraton Grand Hotel Lobby

RSVP: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/sc26-trainers

Use code: EARLYSPARK

6:30 PM - 8:00PM

Location: TBD

Time: 7:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Room: Atrium Lobby (4th Floor)

Time: 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM

Room: Ballroom (6th Floor)

Time: 9:15 AM - 9:45 AM

Room: Lobby (6th Floor)

Don’t Let Your Talent Go Unnoticed - Communicate Your Value Early in Your Career

Time: 9:45 AM – 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Leo Cheung

Target Audience / Career Band: Early Career (0–3 years)

Session Format: Practical 2-Hour Workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: LY.1.5 Self-awareness, Interpersonal Communication, and Establishing Trust

Session Overview

You’ve landed the job and proven your technical ability, so why does it still feel like your contributions go unnoticed? 

Many early-career professionals work hard, deliver results, and support their teams, yet struggle to gain visibility, recognition, and new opportunities. Strong performance matters, but early career growth also requires self-awareness, clear communication, and intentional career ownership. 

In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn how to identify the strengths, values, and work habits shaping their professional reputation. Through reflection, workplace scenarios, and practical exercises, you will develop the tools to make your value visible—without feeling like you are bragging or self-promoting.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Early Career band, these competencies focus on building a strong professional foundation:

- Self-Awareness: Recognizing how strengths, communication habits, and everyday behaviors shape how others experience your work.

- Interpersonal Communication & Establishing Trust: Communicating value clearly, connecting daily contributions to broader team goals, and building trust through reliability and clarity rather than waiting to be noticed.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Identify personal strengths, values, and work habits that drive workplace perception.

- Recognize hidden habits that unintentionally limit visibility, trust, or career opportunities.

- Describe how daily work contributes to team goals, project outcomes, and broader organizational priorities.

- Translate technical contributions into clear, meaningful impact statements for managers, peers, and stakeholders.

- Communicate accomplishments, ideas, and development needs with confidence.

- Build credibility and visibility authentically without self-promotion discomfort.

- Create a practical career ownership action plan focused on feedback, visibility, and next-step opportunities.

Participant Takeaways

Attendees will leave with clearer language for communicating their value, a deeper understanding of professional perception, and a step-by-step action plan to become more visible, trusted, and intentional in their career growth.

Know Yourself to Lead Your Impact: Build Credibility, Communicate with Influence, and Lead Without Authority

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Christine Lee, Helen Chung

Target Audience / Career Band: Individual Contributor (4+)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.2.3 Credibility), Lead People (LP.2.5 Influencing Others), and Lead Organizations (LO.1.5 Collaboration)

Session Overview

Many high-performing individual contributors in STEM-based workplaces are trusted for their technical skill, execution, and problem-solving ability. But as their careers grow, they often face a new leadership challenge: how to influence decisions, contribute across teams, communicate complex ideas, and move work forward without formal authority.

The current reality for many individual contributors is that good work does not always speak for itself. You may have strong ideas but struggle to gain buy-in. You may be dependable but not as visible as you need to be. You may want to challenge a direction, manage up, influence a peer, or contribute across teams, but hesitate because you do not have the title, authority, or confidence to do so effectively.

This interactive workshop helps participants create a new reality: one where they understand how their strengths, communication patterns, and primary leadership voice affect their credibility, influence, and collaboration. Using practical tools such as the 70/30 Principle, Support/Challenge Matrix, Know Yourself to Lead Yourself reflection, CORE Process, and 5 Voices framework, participants will identify how they currently show up, where their strengths may be overused, and what behavior they may need to elevate to lead their impact more effectively.

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how to build trust, communicate with influence, collaborate across teams, and lead from their current seat without waiting for a title. Through reflection, peer processing, and a final CORE SMART goal, participants will connect practical leadership tools to the Individual Contributor competencies of Lead Yourself, Lead People, and Lead Organizations.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Individual Contributor career band, these competencies focus on expanding impact beyond individual execution:

- Lead Yourself (Credibility) - Building credibility through consistent behavior, reliability, self-awareness, and clear communication.

- Lead People (Influencing Others) - Influencing others by communicating ideas with intention, adapting to different working styles, and gaining buy-in without relying on formal authority.

- Lead Organizations (Collaboration) - Working effectively across teams, functions, and stakeholders to move shared priorities forward.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize how their natural strengths, communication patterns, and primary leadership voice shape the way others experience their credibility and impact.

- Identify where strong performance alone may not be enough, especially when they need to influence peers, manage up, contribute across teams, or gain buy-in without formal authority.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to identify where strengths may be overused in ways that create resistance, confusion, hesitation, or missed collaboration.

- Practice using their primary voice with greater intention so they can communicate ideas more clearly, build trust, and increase influence across different working styles.

- Apply the CORE process to one real workplace challenge and create a SMART goal that helps them build credibility, strengthen influence, or collaborate more effectively.

- Identify one practical next step for leading their impact from their current role, rather than waiting for a title, promotion, or formal authority.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how they currently show up, how their strengths can support or limit their impact, and how to lead more effectively from an individual contributor role. They will also leave with a CORE SMART goal connected to building credibility, communicating with influence, and collaborating across teams.

Know Yourself to Lead Others: Balance support and challenge to coach people, strengthen trust, and improve team performance (Part 1 of 3)

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Aaron Lee, Jeff Lovell, Becky Rivest

Target Audience / Career Band: Manager (has direct reports)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.1.5 Self-awareness), Lead People (LP.3.4 Coaching), and Lead Organizations (LO.3.1 Psychological Safety)

Session Overview

Note: This is the first part for certification. Participants who attend the full session series and submit the completed worksheet will receive a certificate of participation recognizing awareness of the Manager competencies covered.

You were the one who could solve it: the hardest problem on the board, the failure no one else could trace, the deadline everyone missed. So they promoted you. Solving the problem was never the hard part. Leading people, especially in a role no one fully trained you for, is.

Many new and developing managers discover that the instincts that made them excellent individual contributors can start working against them once they are responsible for leading others. You solve the problem before your team can, and they stop bringing you their thinking. You push without enough support, and the room goes quiet. You protect people from hard feedback, and their growth stalls. You let a small issue sit until it becomes a trust problem.

None of that makes you a bad leader. It makes you a growing one. The way forward starts with seeing yourself clearly and understanding what it is like to be on the other side of your leadership. Using the 5 Voices framework, the 70/30 Principle, the Support/Challenge Matrix, and peer feedback, this session helps managers recognize how their leadership style, strengths, and habits affect trust, ownership, accountability, and team performance.

Participants will practice balancing support and challenge so they can coach people toward ownership rather than solving everything themselves, avoiding hard conversations, or gripping outcomes too tightly. They will leave with practical tools for building trust, strengthening psychological safety, and helping their teams perform with greater clarity, confidence, and accountability.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Manager career band, these competencies focus on making the shift from being responsible for your own output to being responsible for the growth, trust, and performance of a team:

- Lead Yourself (Self-awareness) - Examining how leadership style, primary Voice, triggers, and overused strengths may unintentionally create pressure, silence, dependence, or confusion.

- Lead People (Coaching) - Practicing coaching behaviors that help direct reports think, grow, and take ownership.

- Lead Organizations (Psychological Safety) - Exploring how everyday manager behaviors shape team culture, including whether people feel safe to speak up, take appropriate risks, share concerns, and learn from mistakes.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Name the strengths that made them strong individual contributors and identify where those same strengths may need to shift now that their role is developing other people.

- Use the Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool and 5 Voices framework to recognize how their leadership style may affect trust, communication, ownership, and team performance.

- Identify where their leadership habits may unintentionally create pressure, silence, dependence, or hesitation on their team.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to recognize whether they are protecting, dominating, abdicating, or liberating the people they lead.

- Practice balancing support and challenge so they can coach people toward ownership rather than solving problems for them, avoiding hard conversations, or controlling outcomes too tightly.

- Connect their day-to-day leadership behaviors to what shows up on the team, including trust, psychological safety, accountability, and performance.

- Apply the CORE Process to one real leadership challenge and create a SMART goal for coaching more effectively, building trust, and improving team performance.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how they show up as managers, how their strengths can either support or limit team growth, and how to balance support and challenge in ways that build trust, increase ownership, and improve team performance.

Know Your System to Lead the Organization: Align Teams, Shape Culture, and Lead Strategic Change Across the Organization (Part 1 of 3)

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Hope Yin

Target Audience / Career Band: Director (manages managers)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.3.4 Sense of Purpose), Lead People (LP.3.4 Coaching), and Lead Organizations (LO.3.3 Navigating Uncertainty)

Session Overview

Note: This is the first part for certification. Participants who attend the full session series and submit the completed worksheet will receive a certificate of participation recognizing awareness of the Director-level competencies covered.

Directors and senior leaders in STEM-based workplaces are often responsible for leading beyond one team. They must align managers, influence across departments, translate strategy into action, shape culture, and guide people through complexity, ambiguity, and change.

The current reality for many directors is that what worked when leading one team does not always work when leading through managers and across systems. You may be pulled into too many escalations. You may find that different teams interpret the strategy differently. You may give direction that feels clear to you but creates confusion for others. You may overuse your strongest leadership voice and unintentionally create dependency, resistance, misalignment, or change fatigue across the system.

This session helps participants create a new reality: one where they can better see the system they are shaping and lead it with clearer purpose. Using the 70/30 Principle, Support/Challenge Matrix, Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool, CORE Process, and 5 Voices framework, participants will identify where their strengths may be overused and where their growth areas need to be elevated to lead with greater clarity, alignment, and adaptability.

Participants will leave with practical insight into how to coach managers instead of solving for them, communicate purpose more clearly, align stakeholders, and lead through uncertainty without pretending to have all the answers. Through reflection, peer processing, and a final CORE SMART goal, participants will connect practical leadership tools to Director-level competencies in Lead Yourself, Lead People, and Lead Organizations.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Director career band, these competencies focus on expanding leadership impact across teams, managers, stakeholders, and organizational systems:

- Lead Yourself (Sense of Purpose) - Defining and communicating a clear sense of purpose for a domain so managers and teams understand not only what needs to be done, but why it matters.

- Lead People (Coaching) - Shifting from solving and directing to coaching managers, clarifying purpose, and creating conditions where teams can take greater ownership.

- Lead Organizations (Navigating Uncertainty) - Exploring how to lead through ambiguity and change while maintaining alignment, adaptability, and trust across the system they influence.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize how the leadership habits that worked when leading one team may create new challenges when leading through managers, across teams, and across organizational systems.

- Identify where their primary Voice or overused strengths may be creating dependency, misalignment, resistance, change fatigue, or lack of ownership across the system they lead.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to assess how they are balancing clarity, support, challenge, and empowerment with managers and stakeholders.

- Practice shifting from solving and directing to coaching managers, aligning stakeholders, and creating conditions where teams can lead with greater ownership.

- Clarify and communicate a stronger sense of purpose so managers and teams understand how their work connects to strategy, culture, and organizational vision.

- Connect their leadership behaviors to strategic alignment, culture-shaping, team dynamics, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.

- Apply the CORE Process to one real Director-level leadership challenge and create a SMART goal that helps them clarify purpose, align teams, and lead through complexity and change.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of the system they are shaping as directors, how purpose can strengthen alignment and ownership, and how to coach managers, guide teams, and lead through complexity with greater clarity and adaptability.

Ingredients of Influence: Building Relational Capital

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Leonna Luc, Yon Na

Target Audience / Career Band: Manager or Director (Mixed Manager Bands)

Session Format: 120-minute live workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: LP.2.5 Influencing Others

Session Overview

Influence begins with trust, accessibility, and connection.

Senior managers and directors are often responsible for outcomes that depend on people they do not directly manage. Whether coordinating work across functions, building support for initiatives, navigating competing priorities, or leading peer groups, success depends on relationships that create credibility, access, and trust.

When these relational foundations are weak, collaboration slows, information surfaces too late, and stakeholder support becomes harder to secure. Strong influence is not only about presenting a good idea or making a persuasive case. It is also about building the relational capital that allows people to listen, engage, collaborate, and move work forward together.

In this workshop, participants will examine how trust, approachability, and network reach contribute to influence across organizational boundaries. They will assess where their current relationships may be strengthening or limiting collaboration, identify sources of personal power beyond formal authority, and prioritize practical actions to strengthen the relationship foundations that enable influence.

What This Workshop Is Not

This workshop is not a stakeholder management workshop, a persuasion or negotiation skills session, or individual coaching on a specific organizational challenge. It focuses on building the relational capital that enables influence before persuasion, negotiation, or stakeholder strategy is needed.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Manager and Director career bands, influencing others is about moving work forward through relationships, credibility, and collaboration—not simply relying on authority:

- Influencing Others (LP.2.5) - Exploring how trust, approachability, and network reach affect the ability to lead across teams, functions, and stakeholder groups, identifying relational gaps, and building the relationships needed to support shared outcomes.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Evaluate how trust, approachability, and network reach contribute to influence across teams, functions, and organizational boundaries.

- Recognize sources of power beyond formal authority and identify forms of personal power they can use when leading across peers, stakeholders, or cross-functional groups.

- Assess the strength of key stakeholder relationships and organizational connections that affect collaboration, alignment, and influence.

- Identify where gaps in trust, accessibility, or network reach may be limiting their ability to move work forward.

- Prioritize one relationship-building action that strengthens a key relationship, expands network reach, or increases organizational visibility.

- Create a targeted plan to build the relational capital necessary for greater influence across organizational boundaries.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of the relationship foundations that make influence possible and a targeted action plan to strengthen trust, approachability, network reach, and collaboration across their leadership context.

What Do You Do with Rage? Turning Frustration into Clarity, Communication, and Influence

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Sarita Vasa

Target Audience / Career Band: Early Career or Individual Contributor

Session Format: Interactive workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Emotional Intelligence (LY.2.7), Managing Conflict, and Influencing Others

Session Overview

Frustration is a normal part of professional growth, but when it is not understood or managed well, it can quietly limit a person’s career. Many early-career professionals and individual contributors experience moments where they feel dismissed, misunderstood, blocked, excluded, overextended, or responsible for outcomes they do not fully control. When those moments are ignored, frustration can turn into resentment, disengagement, passive communication, avoidance, emotional reactivity, or missed opportunities to advocate for themselves effectively.

This is especially relevant for professionals whose college, internship, or early-career years were shaped by COVID-era disruption. Many entered the workforce with fewer normal opportunities to practice in-person collaboration, informal feedback, difficult conversations, conflict repair, networking, and workplace communication. As a result, moments of tension at work can feel more personal, more confusing, and harder to navigate. Without the right tools, frustration may show up as silence, withdrawal, over-explaining, defensiveness, burnout, or communication that unintentionally damages trust and credibility.

This interactive workshop helps participants understand anger and frustration not as problems to suppress, but as signals that can reveal unmet expectations, crossed boundaries, unclear communication, misalignment, or values that matter deeply. Participants will learn how to pause, identify what is underneath their emotional reactions, and translate those reactions into clearer self-awareness, professional communication, and constructive action.

For early-career professionals and individual contributors, this skill is a career multiplier. Those who do not learn how to process frustration may unintentionally lose influence, avoid important conversations, damage relationships, or be perceived as reactive, resistant, disengaged, or difficult to work with. Those who learn how to work with frustration can communicate with greater maturity, manage conflict more effectively, collaborate across differences, advocate for their needs, and influence peers, managers, and stakeholders without relying on formal authority.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Early Career and Individual Contributor levels, these competencies focus on recognizing emotional reactions, self-regulating under pressure, and advocating for ideas without formal authority:

- Emotional Intelligence - Recognizing emotional reactions, beginning to self-regulate under pressure, and using frustration as information to pause, name what is happening, and choose constructive responses.

- Managing Conflict - Navigating peer tension, managing disagreements directly, and translating emotional reactions into clear concerns, clarifying questions, and respectful boundaries.

- Influencing Others - Communicating concerns respectfully, converting frustration into productive advocacy, and influencing peers, managers, and stakeholders without relying on formal authority.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize frustration, anger, and resentment as signals that may reveal unmet expectations, crossed boundaries, unclear communication, misalignment, or deeply held values.

- Apply emotional intelligence by pausing, naming the emotion, identifying the trigger underneath it, and choosing a response that supports professional maturity and career growth.

- Identify how unmanaged frustration can weaken trust, credibility, collaboration, and influence, especially when working without formal authority.

- Practice tools for managing conflict by translating emotional reactions into clear concerns, clarifying questions, respectful boundaries, and constructive next steps.

- Demonstrate influence without authority by converting frustration into productive advocacy, clearer asks, stronger collaboration, and ownership of their next best action.

- Create a personal strategy for navigating one current or future workplace frustration with greater clarity, composure, and professionalism.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with practical tools for understanding their frustration, communicating more clearly under pressure, and turning difficult workplace emotions into mature action, stronger relationships, and greater career influence.

Breaking Your Ceiling: Unlocking Meta Performance for Executive Impact (Part 1 of 2)

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Lawrence Huey, Amy Tucker

Target Audience / Career Band: Executive

Session Format: Interactive workshop with strategic reflection, peer dialogue, and practical planning

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Strategic Planning (LO.1.1), Self-awareness (LY.1.5), and Accountability (LP.3.5)

Session Overview

Note: This is the first part for certification. Participants who attend the full session series and submit the completed worksheet will receive a certificate of participation recognizing awareness of the Executive competencies covered.

At the executive level, the next breakthrough rarely comes from working harder. It comes from seeing the system more clearly, evolving the leadership patterns that shaped past success, and aligning decisions with the future the organization needs to create.

For STEM executives, past success can become an invisible ceiling. The habits, assumptions, and decision-making approaches that helped leaders advance may not be the same ones required to lead through complexity, influence across systems, and drive enterprise-level results. Sustained executive impact requires the ability to step back, examine how leadership choices shape strategy and culture, and create stronger accountability for translating vision into measurable progress.

This session introduces meta performance as an executive leadership capability: the ability to intentionally examine how you think, decide, influence, learn, and create value. Through strategic reflection, peer dialogue, and practical planning, participants will identify the leadership ceilings that may be limiting their next level of impact and clarify the shifts needed to lead with greater strategic focus, self-awareness, and accountability.

Executives will leave with a sharper understanding of where their leadership must evolve, how to strengthen alignment around key priorities, and what actions will create greater enterprise value over the next 30–60 days.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Executive career band, these competencies are about more than personal improvement or day-to-day execution. They involve seeing how individual leadership patterns shape enterprise strategy, organizational culture, stakeholder alignment, and measurable business outcomes:

- Strategic Planning (LO.1.1) - Clarifying where leadership must evolve to support long-term organizational priorities and enterprise-level results.

- Self-awareness (LY.1.5) - Examining the habits, success patterns, and assumptions that may be creating a ceiling on future executive impact.

- Accountability (LP.3.5) - Identifying actions that create stronger ownership, follow-through, and enterprise value around strategic priorities.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Identify the success patterns, assumptions, and leadership habits that may be creating a ceiling on future executive impact.

- Apply a strategic planning lens to clarify where their leadership must evolve to support long-term organizational priorities.

- Examine how their leadership style and decision-making patterns influence enterprise alignment, culture, and performance.

- Identify opportunities to strengthen accountability by clarifying ownership, expectations, and follow-through around strategic priorities.

- Use peer dialogue and reflective practice to surface new perspectives on current leadership challenges and growth opportunities.

- Develop a focused executive action plan that connects self-awareness, strategic direction, and accountability to measurable enterprise impact.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of the leadership patterns that may be limiting their next level of executive impact and a focused 30–60 day action plan for strengthening strategic focus, self-awareness, accountability, and enterprise value.

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Room: Ballroom (6th Floor)

Open Doors at Work: Build the Communication Habits That Invite Collaboration

Time: 2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Dottie Li

Target Audience / Career Band: Early Career (0-3)

Session Format: Interactive workplace communication workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Approachability (LP.2.2), Nonverbal Communication, and Collaboration

Session Overview

Being easy to reach is not the same as being easy to approach.

Early-career STEM professionals are often learning not only the technical expectations of their role, but also how to communicate in ways that help others feel comfortable asking questions, sharing ideas, offering feedback, and collaborating. In fast-moving workplaces, small communication habits can shape how coworkers, managers, teammates, and stakeholders experience a person’s openness, curiosity, and willingness to connect.

This interactive workshop helps participants build awareness of how their verbal and nonverbal communication may be received by others. Participants will examine how tone, facial expression, posture, eye contact, listening cues, response style, and willingness to ask questions can either invite or discourage collaboration. They will also explore how communication expectations may vary across teams, roles, work settings, and professional environments.

Rather than asking participants to change who they are, this session helps early-career professionals become more intentional about how they show up. Through reflection, examples, and practice, participants will learn practical ways to signal openness, respect, curiosity, and approachability in everyday workplace interactions.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Early Career band, these competencies focus on building the communication habits that make it easier to work with, learn from, and build trust with others:

- Approachability (LP.2.2) - Using behaviors such as open body language, attentive listening, clear tone, proactive questions, and receptive responses to make it easier for colleagues to connect.

- Nonverbal Communication - Recognizing how tone, facial expression, posture, eye contact, listening cues, and engaged presence influence everyday interactions.

- Collaboration - Reducing unintentional communication barriers to strengthen teamwork with peers, managers, teammates, and stakeholders.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Explain how approachability affects early-career success, workplace learning, collaboration, trust, and professional relationships.

- Identify verbal and nonverbal communication habits that may unintentionally make them seem unavailable, uninterested, or difficult to approach.

- Recognize how tone, facial expression, posture, eye contact, listening cues, and response style shape how others experience their communication.

- Describe how communication expectations can differ across teams, roles, work settings, cultures, and professional environments.

- Practice verbal behaviors that signal openness, including asking follow-up questions, inviting input, acknowledging others’ ideas, and responding with curiosity.

- Practice nonverbal behaviors that support approachability, including open body language, attentive listening, appropriate eye contact, and engaged presence.

- Apply approachability strategies in everyday workplace situations, including team meetings, one-on-one conversations, virtual calls, cross-functional projects, and informal workplace interactions.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with greater awareness of how they show up to others and practical communication strategies they can use to become easier to approach, collaborate with, and learn from in their early career.

Know Yourself to Lead Your Impact: Build Credibility, Communicate with Influence, and Lead Without Authority (Part 2 of 3)

Time: 2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Christine Lee, Helen Chung

Target Audience / Career Band: Individual Contributor (4+)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.2.3 Credibility), Lead People (LP.2.5 Influencing Others), and Lead Organizations (LO.1.5 Collaboration)

Session Overview

Note: This is the second part of a comprehensive 3-session workshop series. Participants are encouraged to attend all parts for the full curriculum.

Many high-performing individual contributors in STEM-based workplaces are trusted for their technical skill, execution, and problem-solving ability. But as their careers grow, they often face a new leadership challenge: how to influence decisions, contribute across teams, communicate complex ideas, and move work forward without formal authority.

The current reality for many individual contributors is that good work does not always speak for itself. You may have strong ideas but struggle to gain buy-in. You may be dependable but not as visible as you need to be. You may want to challenge a direction, manage up, influence a peer, or contribute across teams, but hesitate because you do not have the title, authority, or confidence to do so effectively.

This interactive workshop helps participants create a new reality: one where they understand how their strengths, communication patterns, and primary leadership voice affect their credibility, influence, and collaboration. Using practical tools such as the 70/30 Principle, Support/Challenge Matrix, Know Yourself to Lead Yourself reflection, CORE Process, and 5 Voices framework, participants will identify how they currently show up, where their strengths may be overused, and what behavior they may need to elevate to lead their impact more effectively.

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how to build trust, communicate with influence, collaborate across teams, and lead from their current seat without waiting for a title. Through reflection, peer processing, and a final CORE SMART goal, participants will connect practical leadership tools to the Individual Contributor competencies of Lead Yourself, Lead People, and Lead Organizations.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Individual Contributor career band, these competencies focus on expanding impact beyond individual execution:

- Lead Yourself (Credibility) - Building credibility through consistent behavior, reliability, self-awareness, and clear communication.

- Lead People (Influencing Others) - Influencing others by communicating ideas with intention, adapting to different working styles, and gaining buy-in without relying on formal authority.

- Lead Organizations (Collaboration) - Working effectively across teams, functions, and stakeholders to move shared priorities forward.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize how their natural strengths, communication patterns, and primary leadership voice shape the way others experience their credibility and impact.

- Identify where strong performance alone may not be enough, especially when they need to influence peers, manage up, contribute across teams, or gain buy-in without formal authority.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to identify where strengths may be overused in ways that create resistance, confusion, hesitation, or missed collaboration.

- Practice using their primary voice with greater intention so they can communicate ideas more clearly, build trust, and increase influence across different working styles.

- Apply the CORE process to one real workplace challenge and create a SMART goal that helps them build credibility, strengthen influence, or collaborate more effectively.

- Identify one practical next step for leading their impact from their current role, rather than waiting for a title, promotion, or formal authority.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how they currently show up, how their strengths can support or limit their impact, and how to lead more effectively from an individual contributor role. They will also leave with a CORE SMART goal connected to building credibility, communicating with influence, and collaborating across teams.

Know Yourself to Lead Others: Balance support and challenge to coach people, strengthen trust, and improve team performance (Part 2 of 3)

Time: 2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Aaron Lee, Jeff Lovell, Becky Rivest

Target Audience / Career Band: Manager (has direct reports)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.1.5 Self-awareness), Lead People (LP.3.4 Coaching), and Lead Organizations (LO.3.1 Psychological Safety)

Session Overview

Note: This is the second part for certification. Participants who attend the full session series and submit the completed worksheet will receive a certificate of participation recognizing awareness of the Manager competencies covered.

You were the one who could solve it: the hardest problem on the board, the failure no one else could trace, the deadline everyone missed. So they promoted you. Solving the problem was never the hard part. Leading people, especially in a role no one fully trained you for, is.

Many new and developing managers discover that the instincts that made them excellent individual contributors can start working against them once they are responsible for leading others. You solve the problem before your team can, and they stop bringing you their thinking. You push without enough support, and the room goes quiet. You protect people from hard feedback, and their growth stalls. You let a small issue sit until it becomes a trust problem.

None of that makes you a bad leader. It makes you a growing one. The way forward starts with seeing yourself clearly and understanding what it is like to be on the other side of your leadership. Using the 5 Voices framework, the 70/30 Principle, the Support/Challenge Matrix, and peer feedback, this session helps managers recognize how their leadership style, strengths, and habits affect trust, ownership, accountability, and team performance.

Participants will practice balancing support and challenge so they can coach people toward ownership rather than solving everything themselves, avoiding hard conversations, or gripping outcomes too tightly. They will leave with practical tools for building trust, strengthening psychological safety, and helping their teams perform with greater clarity, confidence, and accountability.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Manager career band, these competencies focus on making the shift from being responsible for your own output to being responsible for the growth, trust, and performance of a team:

- Lead Yourself (Self-awareness) - Examining how leadership style, primary Voice, triggers, and overused strengths may unintentionally create pressure, silence, dependence, or confusion.

- Lead People (Coaching) - Practicing coaching behaviors that help direct reports think, grow, and take ownership.

- Lead Organizations (Psychological Safety) - Exploring how everyday manager behaviors shape team culture, including whether people feel safe to speak up, take appropriate risks, share concerns, and learn from mistakes.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Name the strengths that made them strong individual contributors and identify where those same strengths may need to shift now that their role is developing other people.

- Use the Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool and 5 Voices framework to recognize how their leadership style may affect trust, communication, ownership, and team performance.

- Identify where their leadership habits may unintentionally create pressure, silence, dependence, or hesitation on their team.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to recognize whether they are protecting, dominating, abdicating, or liberating the people they lead.

- Practice balancing support and challenge so they can coach people toward ownership rather than solving problems for them, avoiding hard conversations, or controlling outcomes too tightly.

- Connect their day-to-day leadership behaviors to what shows up on the team, including trust, psychological safety, accountability, and performance.

- Apply the CORE Process to one real leadership challenge and create a SMART goal for coaching more effectively, building trust, and improving team performance.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how they show up as managers, how their strengths can either support or limit team growth, and how to balance support and challenge in ways that build trust, increase ownership, and improve team performance.

Know Your System to Lead the Organization: Align Teams, Shape Culture, and Lead Strategic Change Across the Organization (Part 2 of 3)

Time: 2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Hope Yin

Target Audience / Career Band: Director (manages managers)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.3.4 Sense of Purpose), Lead People (LP.3.4 Coaching), and Lead Organizations (LO.3.3 Navigating Uncertainty)

Session Overview

Note: This is the second part for certification. Participants who attend the full session series and submit the completed worksheet will receive a certificate of participation recognizing awareness of the Director-level competencies covered.

Directors and senior leaders in STEM-based workplaces are often responsible for leading beyond one team. They must align managers, influence across departments, translate strategy into action, shape culture, and guide people through complexity, ambiguity, and change.

The current reality for many directors is that what worked when leading one team does not always work when leading through managers and across systems. You may be pulled into too many escalations. You may find that different teams interpret the strategy differently. You may give direction that feels clear to you but creates confusion for others. You may overuse your strongest leadership voice and unintentionally create dependency, resistance, misalignment, or change fatigue across the system.

This session helps participants create a new reality: one where they can better see the system they are shaping and lead it with clearer purpose. Using the 70/30 Principle, Support/Challenge Matrix, Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool, CORE Process, and 5 Voices framework, participants will identify where their strengths may be overused and where their growth areas need to be elevated to lead with greater clarity, alignment, and adaptability.

Participants will leave with practical insight into how to coach managers instead of solving for them, communicate purpose more clearly, align stakeholders, and lead through uncertainty without pretending to have all the answers. Through reflection, peer processing, and a final CORE SMART goal, participants will connect practical leadership tools to Director-level competencies in Lead Yourself, Lead People, and Lead Organizations.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Director career band, these competencies focus on expanding leadership impact across teams, managers, stakeholders, and organizational systems:

- Lead Yourself (Sense of Purpose) - Defining and communicating a clear sense of purpose for a domain so managers and teams understand not only what needs to be done, but why it matters.

- Lead People (Coaching) - Shifting from solving and directing to coaching managers, clarifying purpose, and creating conditions where teams can take greater ownership.

- Lead Organizations (Navigating Uncertainty) - Exploring how to lead through ambiguity and change while maintaining alignment, adaptability, and trust across the system they influence.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize how the leadership habits that worked when leading one team may create new challenges when leading through managers, across teams, and across organizational systems.

- Identify where their primary Voice or overused strengths may be creating dependency, misalignment, resistance, change fatigue, or lack of ownership across the system they lead.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to assess how they are balancing clarity, support, challenge, and empowerment with managers and stakeholders.

- Practice shifting from solving and directing to coaching managers, aligning stakeholders, and creating conditions where teams can lead with greater ownership.

- Clarify and communicate a stronger sense of purpose so managers and teams understand how their work connects to strategy, culture, and organizational vision.

- Connect their leadership behaviors to strategic alignment, culture-shaping, team dynamics, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.

- Apply the CORE Process to one real Director-level leadership challenge and create a SMART goal that helps them clarify purpose, align teams, and lead through complexity and change.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of the system they are shaping as directors, how purpose can strengthen alignment and ownership, and how to coach managers, guide teams, and lead through complexity with greater clarity and adaptability.

Leading in the Learning Zone: Build Psychological Safety When Work Gets Messy

Time: 2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Sarita Vasa

Target Audience / Career Band: Manager or Director

Session Format: One-hour interactive workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Psychological Safety (LO.3.1)

Session Overview

Nothing goes right all the time. Goals shift. Communication breaks down. Skill gaps surface. Tensions rise. Mistakes happen. For managers, the question is not whether friction will occur. It is whether the team has enough trust to learn, speak honestly, and move forward when it does.

Psychological safety is the leadership condition that helps teams stay in the learning zone when work gets difficult. It allows people to ask questions, raise concerns, admit mistakes, challenge ideas, and name what is not working without fear of being judged, punished, or pushed aside. When managers create this environment, teams are better able to grow through pressure instead of shutting down, hiding issues, or pretending everything is fine.

This workshop helps STEM managers understand psychological safety as a practical tool for leading through imperfect execution, interpersonal tension, unclear communication, and constant change. Participants will examine the difference between psychological safety and “playing nice,” explore how manager behaviors can either build or erode trust, and practice ways to create challenge and accountability without creating fear.

Participants will leave with practical language, reflection tools, and one clear action they can use to strengthen psychological safety on their team so people can speak up earlier, learn faster, navigate friction more constructively, and perform with greater confidence and trust.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Manager career band, Psychological Safety is about creating an environment where direct reports feel safe to speak up, ask questions, raise concerns, offer feedback, take appropriate risks, and learn from mistakes:

- Psychological Safety (LO.3.1) - Examining how everyday leadership behaviors build trust or unintentionally create silence, and practicing the conditions for honest communication, constructive challenge, accountability, and team learning when work gets messy.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Explain why psychological safety is essential when teams face mistakes, friction, uncertainty, or change.

- Distinguish psychological safety from comfort, conflict avoidance, or “playing nice.”

- Recognize manager behaviors that build or erode trust, openness, and honest communication.

- Identify moments when unclear expectations, interpersonal tension, or skill gaps may push a team out of the learning zone.

- Practice leadership language that invites questions, concerns, feedback, and constructive challenge.

- Commit to one practical action that strengthens psychological safety and supports team learning, trust, and performance.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with practical language and one clear action they can use to create greater trust, openness, and learning on their team when pressure, mistakes, tension, or uncertainty arise.

The Perfect Introduction: Five Ways to Introduce, Market, and Promote Yourself in 20 Words or Less

Time: 2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Rebecca Okamoto

Target Audience / Career Band: Early Career or Individual Contributors

Session Format: Interactive Workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Networking (LP.2.3)

Session Overview

First impressions matter.

A great introduction can be a powerful door opener to new relationships, career opportunities, business conversations, and professional visibility. Yet in today’s fast-moving workplace, you may only have a few seconds to answer a question that sounds simple but can feel surprisingly difficult: “What do you do?”

Many professionals dread introducing themselves, struggle to explain their work clearly, or miss opportunities to make a memorable impression in networking settings. Whether you are early in your career, an experienced individual contributor, a manager, a director, or an executive, the ability to introduce yourself with confidence and clarity is a practical leadership skill.

In this workshop, participants will learn how to create a concise personal brand introduction that communicates who they are, what they do, and why their work matters. Using five adaptable templates, participants will practice introducing, marketing, and promoting themselves or their business in 20 words or less, alongside a 15-second pitch for professional introductions and meetings.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

Across career levels, Networking is about more than attending events or collecting contacts. It is about building meaningful professional connections that support collaboration, knowledge sharing, visibility, and future opportunities:

- Networking (LP.2.3) - Utilizing clear personal brand language and concise self-introductions to make networking feel more natural, purposeful, and effective in opening conversations and building relationships.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Explain why a clear and memorable introduction is an important foundation for effective networking and professional visibility.

- Identify the key elements of a strong personal brand introduction, including who they are, what they do, who they serve, and the value they create.

- Create a concise introduction that communicates their professional value in 20 words or less.

- Practice using five introduction templates that can be adapted for different audiences, roles, career levels, and networking situations.

- Develop a 15-second pitch for use in networking events, meetings, conferences, and professional introductions.

- Choose one networking situation where they will use their updated introduction to open a stronger conversation or create a new opportunity.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with five practical introduction templates, a polished 20-word introduction, and a 15-second pitch they can use to network more effectively, communicate their value, and make a lasting first impression.

Time: 3:30 PM - 4:00 PM

Room: Lobby (6th Floor)

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Target Audience: Early Career / Individual Contributor

Speaker/Trainer: Aaron Lee

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Target Audience: Manager / Director

Speaker/Trainer: Hope Yin

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Target Audience: Mixed Bands / Executive

Speaker/Trainer: Leonna Luc / Sarita Vasa

Time: 5:00 PM - 5:40 PM

Room: 6th Floor

Time: 5:30 PM - 6:10 PM

Room: TBD

Time: 8:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Time: 7:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Session: Registration Open

Room: Atrium Lobby (4th Floor)

Time: 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM

Room: Ballroom (6th Floor)

Time: 9:00 AM - 9:30 AM

Stop Working Alone: Build the Network That Helps You Get Work Done

Time: 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Dottie Li

Target Audience / Career Band: Early Career (0-3) / Individual Contributor

Session Format: Practical workplace networking workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Networking (LP.2.3), Interpersonal Communication, and Collaboration

Session Overview

Great work rarely happens alone.

For many STEM individual contributors, a common career trap is relying only on technical skill, working harder in isolation, or waiting until they need something before building relationships. While strong execution matters, long-term success also depends on knowing who to learn from, who to collaborate with, who can offer perspective, and how to build relationships before the moment of need.

This practical workshop helps participants reframe networking as a core workplace competency, not just a way to “meet people.” Participants will explore how strong professional networks support better problem-solving, clearer communication, stronger collaboration, greater visibility, and future career momentum. They will examine the career pain points that can emerge when networking is underdeveloped, including isolation, missed collaboration, limited access to advice, and slower progress on important work.

Designed for STEM individual contributors, this session introduces practical networking habits for today’s workplace, including virtual, hybrid, and in-person environments. Participants will practice introducing themselves, creating a clear and memorable elevator pitch, building peer and cross-functional relationships, and identifying the people who can help them understand how work really gets done.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Individual Contributor career band, these competencies focus on building relationships that help work move forward:

- Networking (LP.2.3) - Moving beyond working in isolation by intentionally connecting with peers, stakeholders, mentors, sponsors, and allies to exchange knowledge and create future opportunities.

- Interpersonal Communication - Practicing communication habits that make introductions, follow-ups, and collaboration feel more natural, professional, and useful.

- Collaboration - Using relationships to solve problems, support team goals, and move work forward effectively rather than treating networking as self-promotion.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this practical workshop, participants will be able to:

- Explain why networking is an essential workplace competency for individual contributors, especially for collaboration, visibility, advice, and career momentum.

- Recognize common career pain points that emerge when professionals try to do great work alone, including isolation, missed opportunities, limited support, and slower problem-solving.

- Identify peers, stakeholders, mentors, sponsors, allies, and cross-functional partners who can support current work and future growth.

- Create a clear and memorable elevator pitch that helps others understand who they are, what they do, and how they contribute.

- Practice professional greetings, introductions, and first impressions that feel natural, confident, and appropriate across workplace settings.

- Apply practical networking strategies in virtual, hybrid, and in-person environments.

- Strengthen sideways networking by building relationships with peers and cross-functional colleagues, not only leaders or senior stakeholders.

- Use networking as a practical tool to exchange advice, improve collaboration, advance team goals, and create future career opportunities.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a practical networking map, a clearer elevator pitch, and specific next steps for building workplace relationships that help them collaborate more effectively, stay visible, access useful advice, and create momentum in their role and career.

Know Yourself to Lead Your Impact: Build Credibility, Communicate with Influence, and Lead Without Authority (Part 3 of 3)

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Christine Lee, Helen Chung

Target Audience / Career Band: Individual Contributor (4+)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.2.3 Credibility), Lead People (LP.2.5 Influencing Others), and Lead Organizations (LO.1.5 Collaboration)

Session Overview

Note: This is the last part of a comprehensive 3-session workshop series. Participants are encouraged to attend all parts for certification.

Many high-performing individual contributors in STEM-based workplaces are trusted for their technical skill, execution, and problem-solving ability. But as their careers grow, they often face a new leadership challenge: how to influence decisions, contribute across teams, communicate complex ideas, and move work forward without formal authority.

The current reality for many individual contributors is that good work does not always speak for itself. You may have strong ideas but struggle to gain buy-in. You may be dependable but not as visible as you need to be. You may want to challenge a direction, manage up, influence a peer, or contribute across teams, but hesitate because you do not have the title, authority, or confidence to do so effectively.

This interactive workshop helps participants create a new reality: one where they understand how their strengths, communication patterns, and primary leadership voice affect their credibility, influence, and collaboration. Using practical tools such as the 70/30 Principle, Support/Challenge Matrix, Know Yourself to Lead Yourself reflection, CORE Process, and 5 Voices framework, participants will identify how they currently show up, where their strengths may be overused, and what behavior they may need to elevate to lead their impact more effectively.

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how to build trust, communicate with influence, collaborate across teams, and lead from their current seat without waiting for a title. Through reflection, peer processing, and a final CORE SMART goal, participants will connect practical leadership tools to the Individual Contributor competencies of Lead Yourself, Lead People, and Lead Organizations.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Individual Contributor career band, these competencies focus on expanding impact beyond individual execution:

- Lead Yourself (Credibility) - Building credibility through consistent behavior, reliability, self-awareness, and clear communication.

- Lead People (Influencing Others) - Influencing others by communicating ideas with intention, adapting to different working styles, and gaining buy-in without relying on formal authority.

- Lead Organizations (Collaboration) - Working effectively across teams, functions, and stakeholders to move shared priorities forward.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize how their natural strengths, communication patterns, and primary leadership voice shape the way others experience their credibility and impact.

- Identify where strong performance alone may not be enough, especially when they need to influence peers, manage up, contribute across teams, or gain buy-in without formal authority.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to identify where strengths may be overused in ways that create resistance, confusion, hesitation, or missed collaboration.

- Practice using their primary voice with greater intention so they can communicate ideas more clearly, build trust, and increase influence across different working styles.

- Apply the CORE process to one real workplace challenge and create a SMART goal that helps them build credibility, strengthen influence, or collaborate more effectively.

- Identify one practical next step for leading their impact from their current role, rather than waiting for a title, promotion, or formal authority.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how they currently show up, how their strengths can support or limit their impact, and how to lead more effectively from an individual contributor role. They will also leave with a CORE SMART goal connected to building credibility, communicating with influence, and collaborating across teams.

Know Yourself to Lead Others: Balance support and challenge to coach people, strengthen trust, and improve team performance (Part 3 of 3)

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Aaron Lee, Jeff Lovell, Becky Rivest

Target Audience / Career Band: Manager (has direct reports)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.1.5 Self-awareness), Lead People (LP.3.4 Coaching), and Lead Organizations (LO.3.1 Psychological Safety)

Session Overview

Note: This is the last part for certification. Participants who attend the full session series and submit the completed worksheet will receive a certificate of participation recognizing awareness of the Manager competencies covered.

You were the one who could solve it: the hardest problem on the board, the failure no one else could trace, the deadline everyone missed. So they promoted you. Solving the problem was never the hard part. Leading people, especially in a role no one fully trained you for, is.

Many new and developing managers discover that the instincts that made them excellent individual contributors can start working against them once they are responsible for leading others. You solve the problem before your team can, and they stop bringing you their thinking. You push without enough support, and the room goes quiet. You protect people from hard feedback, and their growth stalls. You let a small issue sit until it becomes a trust problem.

None of that makes you a bad leader. It makes you a growing one. The way forward starts with seeing yourself clearly and understanding what it is like to be on the other side of your leadership. Using the 5 Voices framework, the 70/30 Principle, the Support/Challenge Matrix, and peer feedback, this session helps managers recognize how their leadership style, strengths, and habits affect trust, ownership, accountability, and team performance.

Participants will practice balancing support and challenge so they can coach people toward ownership rather than solving everything themselves, avoiding hard conversations, or gripping outcomes too tightly. They will leave with practical tools for building trust, strengthening psychological safety, and helping their teams perform with greater clarity, confidence, and accountability.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Manager career band, these competencies focus on making the shift from being responsible for your own output to being responsible for the growth, trust, and performance of a team:

- Lead Yourself (Self-awareness) - Examining how leadership style, primary Voice, triggers, and overused strengths may unintentionally create pressure, silence, dependence, or confusion.

- Lead People (Coaching) - Practicing coaching behaviors that help direct reports think, grow, and take ownership.

- Lead Organizations (Psychological Safety) - Exploring how everyday manager behaviors shape team culture, including whether people feel safe to speak up, take appropriate risks, share concerns, and learn from mistakes.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Name the strengths that made them strong individual contributors and identify where those same strengths may need to shift now that their role is developing other people.

- Use the Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool and 5 Voices framework to recognize how their leadership style may affect trust, communication, ownership, and team performance.

- Identify where their leadership habits may unintentionally create pressure, silence, dependence, or hesitation on their team.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to recognize whether they are protecting, dominating, abdicating, or liberating the people they lead.

- Practice balancing support and challenge so they can coach people toward ownership rather than solving problems for them, avoiding hard conversations, or controlling outcomes too tightly.

- Connect their day-to-day leadership behaviors to what shows up on the team, including trust, psychological safety, accountability, and performance.

- Apply the CORE Process to one real leadership challenge and create a SMART goal for coaching more effectively, building trust, and improving team performance.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how they show up as managers, how their strengths can either support or limit team growth, and how to balance support and challenge in ways that build trust, increase ownership, and improve team performance.

Know Your System to Lead the Organization: Align Teams, Shape Culture, and Lead Strategic Change Across the Organization (Part 3 of 3)

Time: 9:45 AM - 12:15 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Hope Yin

Target Audience / Career Band: Director (manages managers)

Session Format: Interactive leadership development workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Lead Yourself (LY.3.4 Sense of Purpose), Lead People (LP.3.4 Coaching), and Lead Organizations (LO.3.3 Navigating Uncertainty)

Session Overview

Note: This is the last part for certification. Participants who attend the full session series and submit the completed worksheet will receive a certificate of participation recognizing awareness of the Director-level competencies covered.

Directors and senior leaders in STEM-based workplaces are often responsible for leading beyond one team. They must align managers, influence across departments, translate strategy into action, shape culture, and guide people through complexity, ambiguity, and change.

The current reality for many directors is that what worked when leading one team does not always work when leading through managers and across systems. You may be pulled into too many escalations. You may find that different teams interpret the strategy differently. You may give direction that feels clear to you but creates confusion for others. You may overuse your strongest leadership voice and unintentionally create dependency, resistance, misalignment, or change fatigue across the system.

This session helps participants create a new reality: one where they can better see the system they are shaping and lead it with clearer purpose. Using the 70/30 Principle, Support/Challenge Matrix, Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool, CORE Process, and 5 Voices framework, participants will identify where their strengths may be overused and where their growth areas need to be elevated to lead with greater clarity, alignment, and adaptability.

Participants will leave with practical insight into how to coach managers instead of solving for them, communicate purpose more clearly, align stakeholders, and lead through uncertainty without pretending to have all the answers. Through reflection, peer processing, and a final CORE SMART goal, participants will connect practical leadership tools to Director-level competencies in Lead Yourself, Lead People, and Lead Organizations.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Director career band, these competencies focus on expanding leadership impact across teams, managers, stakeholders, and organizational systems:

- Lead Yourself (Sense of Purpose) - Defining and communicating a clear sense of purpose for a domain so managers and teams understand not only what needs to be done, but why it matters.

- Lead People (Coaching) - Shifting from solving and directing to coaching managers, clarifying purpose, and creating conditions where teams can take greater ownership.

- Lead Organizations (Navigating Uncertainty) - Exploring how to lead through ambiguity and change while maintaining alignment, adaptability, and trust across the system they influence.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize how the leadership habits that worked when leading one team may create new challenges when leading through managers, across teams, and across organizational systems.

- Identify where their primary Voice or overused strengths may be creating dependency, misalignment, resistance, change fatigue, or lack of ownership across the system they lead.

- Use the 70/30 Principle and Support/Challenge Matrix to assess how they are balancing clarity, support, challenge, and empowerment with managers and stakeholders.

- Practice shifting from solving and directing to coaching managers, aligning stakeholders, and creating conditions where teams can lead with greater ownership.

- Clarify and communicate a stronger sense of purpose so managers and teams understand how their work connects to strategy, culture, and organizational vision.

- Connect their leadership behaviors to strategic alignment, culture-shaping, team dynamics, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.

- Apply the CORE Process to one real Director-level leadership challenge and create a SMART goal that helps them clarify purpose, align teams, and lead through complexity and change.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of the system they are shaping as directors, how purpose can strengthen alignment and ownership, and how to coach managers, guide teams, and lead through complexity with greater clarity and adaptability.

Ingredients of Influence: Creating Commitment Without Authority

Time: 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Leonna Luc, Yon Na

Target Audience / Career Band: Manager or Director (Mixed Manager Bands)

Session Format: 120-minute live workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Influencing Others (LP.2.5)

Session Overview

Influence succeeds when leaders align motivations, relationships, and organizational priorities.

Senior managers are often accountable for outcomes that require cooperation from peers, partners, and stakeholders outside their reporting structure. Yet authority alone rarely creates commitment, especially when priorities compete, resources are constrained, or stakeholders see the risks differently.

This workshop helps participants move beyond compliance-based approaches to influence strategies that build genuine buy-in. Participants will examine what motivates stakeholder commitment, diagnose the barriers that create resistance, and identify how personal power, relationships, and stakeholder interests can be used to build alignment around shared priorities.

In this workshop, participants will apply influence strategies to a current cross-functional initiative, decision, or organizational priority. They will leave with a practical influence plan and increased clarity about how to influence outcomes they do not formally control.

What This Workshop Is Not

This workshop is not a session on manipulation or persuasion tactics, a conflict resolution course, or individual consulting on a specific stakeholder issue. It focuses on creating genuine commitment by aligning stakeholder motivations, relationships, and organizational priorities.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Manager career band, influencing others is about creating commitment across peers, partners, stakeholders, and cross-functional groups, not simply relying on title or authority:

- Influencing Others (LP.2.5) - Understanding stakeholder motivations, recognizing competing priorities and perceived risks, and using credibility, relationships, and organizational awareness to build alignment and move strategic work forward.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Distinguish compliance-based approaches from influence strategies that build genuine commitment and buy-in.

- Assess stakeholder motivations and identify what may drive support, hesitation, or resistance.

- Diagnose barriers to influence, including competing priorities, perceived risks, constrained resources, and organizational dynamics.

- Apply influence strategies that leverage personal power, relationships, stakeholder interests, and shared organizational priorities.

- Identify where relational capital can be converted into stronger alignment, clearer decisions, and more effective collaboration.

- Develop a practical influence plan for advancing a current cross-functional initiative, decision, or organizational priority.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a practical influence plan they can use to build commitment, strengthen alignment, and move forward on an outcome they do not formally control.

Beyond Your Limits: Creating the Visibility, Influence, and Opportunities You Want

Time: 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Lawrence Huey, Amy Tucker

Target Audience / Career Band: Early Career or Individual Contributor

Session Format: Interactive workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Influencing Others (LP.2.5)

Session Overview

Many high-performing STEM professionals are not limited by their talent or potential. They are limited by what they believe is possible.

Despite strong performance and technical expertise, professionals often find themselves asking: Why am I not being recognized for my contributions? Why do I hesitate to speak up or advocate for my ideas? Why do others seem to advance more quickly? Why do I feel stuck, despite working harder than ever? What is holding me back from having greater impact?

The answer is not always found in our circumstances. Often, it lies in how we interpret and respond to them. The most significant barriers to performance are frequently invisible. They show up as assumptions, narratives, and interpretations that shape how opportunities, challenges, and even our own capabilities occur to us. When leadership opportunities feel like risks, we hesitate. When visibility feels like self-promotion, we remain unseen. When setbacks feel like evidence that we do not belong, we stop pursuing what is possible.

In this workshop, participants will explore the first two Laws of Performance and examine how their perspectives and conversations shape their results. Through guided reflection, practical exercises, and collaborative discussion, participants will uncover the hidden narratives that influence their professional experiences and learn how to create new possibilities for contribution, influence, and growth.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Individual Contributor career band, Influencing Others is about building support, communicating ideas clearly, advocating for resources, and creating momentum without relying on formal authority:

- Influencing Others (LP.2.5) - Examining how assumptions, internal narratives, conversations, and presence shape how others perceive value and potential, and practicing reframing challenges to increase visibility and strengthen influence.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Identify the hidden assumptions and internal narratives that keep them feeling stuck, overlooked, or hesitant to pursue opportunities.

- Reframe workplace challenges so they can see new options for visibility, influence, and growth.

- Recognize how their conversations, language, and presence shape how others perceive their value and potential.

- Practice communicating ideas, contributions, and career goals with greater confidence and intention.

- Apply a practical reframing tool to one current challenge where they want more recognition, influence, or opportunity.

- Commit to one intentional action that increases their visibility, impact, or career momentum without waiting for permission, title, or perfect circumstances.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with greater awareness of the assumptions that may be limiting their influence, practical tools for reframing challenges, and one intentional action they can take to increase visibility, communicate their value, and create new opportunities for impact from their current role.

Beyond AI Adoption: Reimagining What’s Possible for Leadership, Teams, and Organizations

Time: 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Nozomi Morgan, Keith Nishida

Target Audience / Career Band: Executive

Session Format: Executive Roundtable with Wisdom Circles and peer dialogue

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Navigating Uncertainty (LO.3.3), Strategic Planning (LO.1.1), and Change Management (LP.3.8)

Session Overview

AI is creating more than new efficiencies. It is giving executive leaders an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how organizations are designed, how teams work, how decisions are made, and what high performance looks like.

This Executive Roundtable moves beyond AI tools and adoption to explore a more strategic question: What becomes possible when we rethink leadership, teams, and organizations through an AI-native lens? An AI-native leader is not simply someone who uses AI effectively, but someone who recognizes that AI is changing what is possible and is willing to challenge long-held assumptions about how work gets done, where value is created, and how organizations operate.

Through facilitated Wisdom Circles and peer dialogue, executives will exchange perspectives, surface emerging practices, and learn from one another. Together, participants will explore how leadership needs to evolve in an AI-enabled world, how people and AI can each contribute where they create the greatest value, which assumptions AI gives leaders permission to rethink, what should be intentionally preserved as organizations evolve, and what will distinguish truly high-performing organizations when access to AI becomes ubiquitous.

This session is designed as a strategic space for senior leaders to step back from implementation, think with peers, challenge assumptions, and expand what they believe is possible for the future of their organizations.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Executive career band, these competencies involve guiding the entire organization through complexity, interpreting major industry shifts, defining long-term direction, making high-level decisions, and leading large-scale transformation with clarity and confidence:

- Navigating Uncertainty (LO.3.3) - Guiding organizations through complexity and industry shifts while maintaining agility and resilience.

- Strategic Planning (LO.1.1) - Connecting emerging technology shifts to long-term organizational vision, enterprise-level decisions, and future value creation.

- Change Management (LP.3.8) - Leading people and organizations through AI-driven transformation while building clarity, trust, commitment, and resilience.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this Executive Roundtable, participants will be able to:

- Identify long-held assumptions about leadership, work design, team structures, decision-making, or value creation that may need to be reexamined in an AI-enabled future.

- Describe how AI may shift where value is created across people, teams, systems, and organizations.

- Explore how executive leaders can connect emerging technology shifts to long-term organizational vision, strategic priorities, and enterprise-level decisions.

- Examine how leaders can guide people and organizations through AI-driven transformation while building clarity, trust, commitment, and resilience.

- Reflect on what should be intentionally preserved as organizations evolve, including human judgment, trust, culture, relationships, and purpose.

- Articulate one strategic question or leadership commitment they will take back to their organization to advance future-focused thinking about AI, leadership, teams, or organizational design.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how AI-native leadership can expand what is possible for their organizations and with one executive-level commitment to help guide strategic thinking, change leadership, or organizational transformation.

BlackFrame Photos

Time: TBD

Room: 604

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Room: Ballroom (6th Floor)

Avoid Career Drift: Take Control of Your Career Path Before Getting Stuck

Time: 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Leo Cheung

Target Audience / Career Band: Early Career (0-3)

Session Format: Interactive 60-minute workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Professional Learning (LY.1.6), Self-awareness, and Growth Mindset

Session Overview

Five years from now, where do you want your career to be, and what are you actively doing to grow toward it?

Career drift rarely happens all at once. It often happens when early-career professionals stay busy delivering work but do not pause to intentionally build the skills, experiences, relationships, and learning habits needed for their next step. Without a clear development plan, it can become easy to say yes to whatever comes next, miss growth opportunities, or feel uncertain about how to move forward.

In this workshop, participants will shift from passively hoping for career growth to actively planning for it. Using strengths, growth areas, values, and sense of purpose as guideposts, participants will identify where they want to go next and what they need to learn to get there. They will explore how feedback, stretch assignments, mentoring, professional development, and everyday work experiences can become part of a focused career growth roadmap.

Participants will leave with a clearer picture of their next development priorities, practical strategies for continuing their professional learning, and a simple action plan for moving their career forward with greater intention, confidence, and ownership.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Early Career band, these competencies are about taking ownership of growth before career drift sets in:

- Professional Learning (LY.1.6) - Building practical roadmaps for continued learning, identifying strengths, values, and learning needs, and making intentional development decisions.

- Self-awareness - Recognizing current skills, growth areas, and learning needs connected to desired next career steps.

- Growth Mindset - Approaching feedback, stretch opportunities, and new skills with confidence, recognizing how effort, reflection, and practice support skill-building.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Explain how professional learning supports career growth, adaptability, and long-term advancement.

- Identify current skills, strengths, growth areas, and learning needs connected to their desired next career step.

- Use strengths, values, and sense of purpose as guideposts for choosing meaningful development priorities.

- Recognize opportunities for growth through feedback, stretch assignments, mentoring, training, and daily work experiences.

- Apply a growth mindset to career development by identifying how effort, reflection, and practice can support continued skill-building.

- Create a practical professional learning roadmap with short-term actions, development resources, and next-step career goals.

- Commit to one specific action they can take after the workshop to move their growth plan forward.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer sense of where they want to grow next, a practical professional learning roadmap, and one immediate action they can take to move their career forward with greater intention and ownership.

When Pressure Turns Personal: Using EQ to Navigate Workplace Tension

Time: 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Christine Lee

Target Audience / Career Band: Individual Contributor (4+)

Session Format: Interactive workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Emotional Intelligence (LY.2.7), Managing Conflict, and Team Dynamics

Session Overview

Pressure is inevitable. How you respond to it can shape not only your performance, but also the quality of your relationships.

Whether you are navigating a tense team conversation, collaborating with peers who communicate differently, receiving feedback, presenting ideas, or working through conflict, your ability to stay calm, curious, and emotionally aware can determine how much trust and influence you build. For individual contributors, emotional intelligence is a critical skill for working well across teams, understanding others’ perspectives, and responding constructively when workplace pressure rises.

This interactive workshop helps high-performing professionals recognize the stress responses, assumptions, and communication habits that can unintentionally create tension or misunderstanding. Blending mindfulness, neuroscience, and practical leadership strategies, participants will learn simple, evidence-informed practices to regulate their emotions, listen more effectively, and respond with greater empathy and clarity in challenging workplace interactions.

Rather than trying to eliminate stress or avoid conflict, participants will learn how to pause, read the room, consider different communication styles, and choose responses that strengthen trust. They will leave with practical tools for navigating peer relationships, conflict, and team dynamics with greater self-awareness, emotional agility, and intentional presence.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Individual Contributor career band, these competencies are about working effectively with others under pressure:

- Emotional Intelligence (LY.2.7) - Recognizing emotional triggers, regulating responses, and practicing mindfulness techniques that support emotional regulation, active listening, and thoughtful responses.

- Managing Conflict - Navigating peer tension, reducing misunderstandings, and applying emotional intelligence strategies to handle difficult conversations with empathy, clarity, and composure.

- Team Dynamics - Understanding how individual communication patterns influence broader team dynamics, building psychological safety, and supporting collaboration during moments of pressure.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this interactive workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize personal stress responses and emotional triggers that can affect communication, trust, and collaboration.

- Practice mindfulness techniques that support emotional regulation, active listening, and thoughtful responses in high-pressure team interactions.

- Identify how different communication styles can contribute to misunderstanding, tension, or conflict among peers.

- Apply emotional intelligence strategies to navigate difficult conversations and workplace conflict with greater empathy, clarity, and composure.

- Choose intentional responses that help build stronger working relationships, psychological safety, and trust across the team.

- Examine how individual communication patterns can influence broader team dynamics, especially during moments of pressure or disagreement.

- Create a personalized strategy for using mindfulness and emotional intelligence practices in an upcoming peer, team, or conflict-related situation.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with practical emotional intelligence tools they can use to stay grounded under pressure, reduce misunderstandings, navigate workplace tension, and strengthen peer relationships and team dynamics from their individual contributor role.

Command the Room: Build the Leadership Brand That Moves Strategy Forward

Time: 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Dottie Li

Target Audience / Career Band: Director (manages managers)

Session Format: Interactive leadership branding and storytelling workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Storytelling (LY.2.4)

Session Overview

As STEM Directors, your technical expertise and track record may get you in the room, but your leadership brand determines how far your strategy goes. In a competitive workplace filled with talented engineers, scientists, innovators, and business leaders, a clear and compelling leadership narrative helps others understand not only who you are, but also what your team, department, or business unit contributes to the organization.

Strong leaders and high-performing teams can still be overlooked when the story of their work is unclear. A department may deliver results but struggle to gain visibility, budget, partnership, or executive support. A business unit may be known for fixing problems but not recognized for driving strategy. When leaders do not clearly communicate the value of their work, even strong outcomes can be misunderstood, undervalued, or disconnected from broader organizational priorities.

Positive leadership branding is not about self-promotion. It is about credibility, clarity, and influence. This workshop helps Directors understand how to shape and communicate a compelling leadership narrative that reflects who they are, what they stand for, how they lead, and what outcomes their teams help create. Participants will explore how to translate technical, operational, or departmental work into a strategic value story that connects to business priorities and organizational goals.

Designed for STEM Directors, this session helps participants move from being known primarily for execution to being recognized as strategic leaders who can communicate vision, elevate their team’s value, and build stakeholder support. Participants will leave with practical storytelling techniques and the foundation of a leadership narrative they can use to strengthen credibility, increase visibility, and move strategy forward.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Director career band, Storytelling is about more than presenting information clearly. It is a strategic leadership capability for communicating departmental vision, connecting team contributions to organizational priorities, and helping stakeholders understand why the work matters:

- Storytelling (LY.2.4) - Shaping leadership narratives that strengthen credibility, elevate business-unit value, clarify impact, align others around strategic priorities, and build support across senior stakeholders.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Explain why leadership brand matters at the Director level and how it shapes credibility, visibility, stakeholder support, and strategic influence.

- Recognize the risks of an unclear or underdeveloped leadership narrative, including missed recognition, weak alignment, limited executive support, and undervalued business-unit contributions.

- Clarify the story of their leadership, including who they are, what they stand for, how they lead, and what outcomes they help create.

- Translate their team’s, department’s, or business unit’s work into a compelling value story connected to organizational goals and strategic priorities.

- Apply storytelling techniques to communicate departmental vision, strategic priorities, and business impact with greater clarity and authority.

- Practice communicating their leadership narrative in a way that is authentic, credible, grounded in results, and relevant to senior stakeholders.

- Identify how their leadership narrative can strengthen partnerships, increase influence, and position their business unit for future opportunities.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer leadership narrative that communicates who they are as Directors, what their team or business unit contributes, and why their strategy deserves attention, partnership, and support.

The Leadership Advantage: Building Accountability, Engagement, and High-Performing Teams

Time: 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Lawrence Huey, Amy Tucker

Target Audience / Career Band: Manager or Director

Session Format: One-hour practical workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Accountability (LP.3.5)

Session Overview

Leadership is not simply about having more responsibility. It is about creating the conditions for people and teams to follow through, take ownership, and perform at their best.

Many managers and directors find themselves asking: Why do performance issues persist despite multiple conversations? Why does accountability feel like conflict or micromanagement? Why do talented employees sometimes disengage or wait for direction? Why do difficult conversations feel uncomfortable or fail to create lasting change?

The most effective leaders understand that accountability is shaped by the way expectations, ownership, feedback, and follow-through are communicated. When accountability feels like blame, leaders may avoid the conversations that matter. When feedback feels like criticism, employees may become defensive instead of empowered. When leadership becomes solving everyone else’s problems, managers and directors become overloaded while ownership across the team remains underdeveloped.

In this practical workshop, participants will explore how perspectives, assumptions, language, and leadership conversations influence accountability, engagement, and team performance. Through guided reflection and applied exercises, participants will identify where accountability may be breaking down and practice reframing common challenges into clearer, more productive conversations.

Participants will leave with a practical framework for setting expectations, strengthening ownership, and supporting follow-through in a way that builds trust, improves performance, and reduces repeated leadership friction.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Manager and Director career bands, Accountability focuses on setting clear expectations, building shared commitment, and ensuring that strategic priorities translate into measurable progress:

- Accountability (LP.3.5) - Establishing shared ownership for results, communicating expectations clearly, addressing performance gaps constructively, and building the trust and follow-through needed for high-performing teams across individuals, managers, and cross-functional groups.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Recognize how unclear expectations, avoided conversations, and limiting assumptions weaken accountability, engagement, and team performance.

- Reframe accountability as shared ownership for results rather than blame, conflict, or micromanagement.

- Identify the leadership conversations needed to clarify expectations, ownership, progress, support, and follow-through.

- Practice language for addressing accountability gaps directly, constructively, and supportively.

- Apply an accountability lens to one current leadership challenge involving performance, engagement, delegation, team ownership, or follow-through.

- Identify how accountability must scale from individual follow-through to team, cross-functional, or organizational alignment.

- Commit to one specific action that strengthens accountability and ownership within their team, department, or area of influence.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of why accountability conversations often stall or repeat, a practical way to reframe accountability from blame to shared ownership, and one action plan for strengthening follow-through, engagement, and performance with the people they lead.

Turn Tough Feedback Into Career Momentum: How to Stay Composed, Find the Useful Signal, and Grow Your Impact

Time: 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM

Room: 606-614

Speaker/Trainer: Becky Rivest

Target Audience / Career Band: Early Career or Individual Contributor

Session Format: Interactive workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Seeking Feedback (LY.1.2)

Session Overview

Feedback can be one of the fastest ways for individual contributors to grow, improve their work, and increase their impact. It can also trigger defensiveness, self-doubt, frustration, or withdrawal. When feedback feels unfair, unclear, poorly delivered, or comes from someone we do not fully trust, it can be hard to hear what is useful and even harder to respond in a way that protects relationships, credibility, and professional reputation.

In this workshop, participants will strengthen the SASE Leadership Framework competency of Seeking Feedback by learning how to receive difficult feedback with more composure, curiosity, and confidence. Participants will explore their common internal reactions to feedback, practice a simple pause-and-respond method, and learn how to separate the useful signal from the emotional noise.

Participants will also consider how feedback can help them refine their approach, strengthen credibility, and prepare for greater ownership as individual contributors. Receiving feedback well does not mean agreeing with everything they hear. It means managing the moment with maturity, identifying what may help them improve, and choosing an intentional next step that supports their growth, relationships, and career momentum.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Individual Contributor career band, Seeking Feedback is about using input from others as a tool for growth, improved performance, and greater impact:

- Seeking Feedback (LY.1.2) - Managing discomfort when feedback is difficult, asking clarifying questions, identifying what is useful and actionable, and choosing thoughtful responses to build credibility and relationships.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Identify their typical reactions to difficult feedback and explain how defensiveness, fear, low trust, or frustration can interfere with learning, relationships, and professional growth.

- Use a simple pause-and-respond method to manage discomfort, ask clarifying questions, and respond thoughtfully instead of reacting impulsively.

- Discern what is useful, reliable, and actionable in feedback so they can choose a next step that strengthens performance, credibility, and readiness for greater responsibility.

- Explain how seeking and receiving feedback supports individual contributor growth, career momentum, and increased workplace impact.

- Identify one person, situation, or project where feedback could help them refine their approach and improve results.

- Commit to one intentional next step for using feedback to strengthen their work, relationships, or professional growth.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a practical method for receiving difficult feedback with greater composure, identifying the useful signal within the feedback, and choosing a next step that supports their growth, credibility, and career momentum.

Master Executive Storytelling: How to Convince, Compel, and Shift Mindsets with Strategic Narratives

Time: 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM

Speaker/Trainer: Rebecca Okamoto

Target Audience / Career Band: Executive

Session Format: Interactive workshop

SASE Leadership Competency Focus: Storytelling (LY.2.4) and Influencing Others (LP.2.5)

Session Overview

Storytelling has become a critical leadership capability for executives. Once viewed as a creative skill or a “nice-to-have” communication style, strategic storytelling is now essential for helping senior leaders align stakeholders, challenge conventional thinking, and shape business outcomes.

Executive storytelling is not simply about humanizing leadership or delivering a moving presentation. It is a strategic communication technique that helps leaders clarify complexity, connect ideas to business priorities, and guide others toward a shared conclusion. When used well, a strong narrative can align opposing views, shift mindsets, and create momentum around important decisions.

In this workshop, participants will learn how to create a strategic narrative that influences senior stakeholders and supports executive-level leadership. Participants will explore how to guide others to see from their perspective, draw meaningful conclusions, and move toward action. Using a practical framework, they will learn how to build a strategic storyline that can be delivered in as few as 10 slides or 10 sentences.

Leadership Competencies Strengthened

At the Executive career band, these competencies involve using strategic narratives to communicate direction, shape culture, align senior stakeholders, challenge conventional wisdom, and inspire action across the organization:

- Storytelling (LY.2.4) - Crafting narratives that move beyond information-sharing to create alignment, influence decisions, and advance business outcomes in complex environments.

- Influencing Others (LP.2.5) - Using strategic narratives to guide senior stakeholders, shift mindsets, and create momentum around critical business priorities.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

- Explain why strategic storytelling is an essential executive leadership capability, especially when leaders need to align stakeholders, shift mindsets, or create momentum around a business priority.

- Identify the mindset, assumption, or conventional wisdom that must shift in order to influence a senior stakeholder or leadership audience.

- Apply a practical storytelling framework to organize a strategic narrative in a clear, compelling, and concise way.

- Develop a strategic storyline that helps stakeholders understand the current context, see the business implications, and draw a shared conclusion.

- Practice shaping a narrative that connects audience perspective, business priorities, and desired action.

- Determine how to use strategic storytelling to influence decisions, build alignment, and support executive-level business outcomes.

Participant Takeaways

Participants will leave with a practical framework for building executive narratives and the beginning of a strategic storyline they can use to influence senior stakeholders, shift mindsets, and communicate with greater clarity and impact.

Time: 2:45 PM - 3:15 PM

Room: Lobby (6th Floor)

Time: 2:50 PM - 3:20 PM

Room: Ballroom (6th Floor)

Time: 3:30 PM - 4:45 PM

Session: Joint Closing General Session

Room: Ballroom (6th Floor)

Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Session: Alma Mater Networking

Room: Ballroom (6th Floor)

Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Session: Science Symposium

Room: Atrium Lobby (4th Floor)

Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Session: I got an Internship* Networking

Room: 604* (6th Floor)