About Us

Testimonial: Tenth and Blake Beer Company

“This training was by far one of the best uses of my time – highly engaging! I appreciated our instructor, Richard Smith, and his ability to throw in real-world examples. This training offers real-world use pretty much the day you walk out of there – from getting people more involved in meetings and keeping them actively engaged. As a result of this training, I’ve been able to build higher levels of trust and more value in my client relationships. Additionally, since the training, our team has averaged a score of 8.8 out of 10, and over 70% of participants have rated us as either 9 or 10 in terms of facilitation.”

Jack Farris and his team at Tenth and Blake Beer Company, the craft and import division of MillerCoors, completed a private, custom training in The Effective Facilitator and The Facilitative Consultant.

– Jack Farris, Project Apollo Lead, Tenth and Blake Beer Company

In the beer industry, it’s all about performance. At Tenth and Blake Beer Company, the craft and import division of MillerCoors, the Strategic Projects team is a group of high performers continuously seeking ways to improve their client relationships. One challenge they sought to improve was managing dysfunction better in their meetings through facilitation skills. The team now averages a score of 8.8 out of 10, and over 70% of participants in their workshops rate their team members either 9 or 10 in terms of facilitation, according to Jack Farris, Project Apollo Lead at Tenth and Blake.
Jack and his team took facilitation training with Leadership Strategies’ instructor, Richard Smith, and completed a blended, customized training in The Effective Facilitator and The Facilitative Consultant. They were actively seeking skills to help them better handle dysfunction as well as make sure they were transferring the ownership of their strategic planning meetings in a very authentic way. Consensus building and better engagement were key elements they were missing. Instead, words like “building trust” and “lots of dysfunction” were used to describe the symptoms they experienced when it came to their meetings with their marketing team and distributor group.
“We didn’t have a good framework and a language we could use that would really help us achieve a consistent process in meetings,” Hillary Van Der Zee, Strategic Projects Manager at Tenth and Blake, commented. “We wanted to elevate our game with our clients.” Tenth and Blake needed unique “muscle building” that facilitation training would provide to help build their client relationships with stronger meetings being a key foundation.
The skills they learned from the training gave them more “art and finesse” to their meeting processes with clients, Hillary noted, even though their team was already quite effective in running meetings. “It wasn’t like we were failing or running into major road blocks. We simply strive on continuous improvement in our approach to the business – we wanted to do better. We also had immense dysfunction in the room, and we needed more finesse in getting alignment,” Hillary explained. Through the principles taught in the course, Tenth and Blake learned a facilitation methodology along with consensus-building techniques and other fundamental methods that they could apply right away. Their clients and internal teams immediately noticed following the training. The Strategic Projects team is now recognized for having established a higher standard of meetings at Tenth and Blake since the training.
Jack commented, “This training was by far one of the best uses of my time – highly engaging! I appreciated our instructor, Richard Smith, and his ability to throw in real-world examples. This training offers real-world use pretty much the day you walk out of there – including running more effective meetings and keeping people actively engaged. As a result of this training, I’ve been able to build higher levels of trust and more value in my client relationships.”

Contact Us About Facilitation Training »