The Vermont Principals Association
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Background: Margaret Waddington left Vermont schools a great gift – one that could transform school leadership within a decade. The late Dr. Margaret Waddington was one of the many individuals transformed by CCL’s flagship Leadership Development Program (LDP)®. So much so that the pioneering neurologist and resident of Rutland became a strong financial supporter of CCL and upon her passing in 2015, entrusted the organization with a multimillion dollar estate gift to ensure ongoing access to leadership development for women, men, and the young people of Vermont. You can learn more about all of the leadership cohorts, and connections since 2016 at the Waddington Leadership Initiative: VPA Homepage.


Center for Creative Leadership Workshop Offerings

Overview: Thanks to the Waddington Leadership Initiative, the overall cost of these workshops for VPA member organizations is reduced by more than half. Each of the following workshops is available to members and their faculties and/or their leadership teams. The workshops each come with specific participant materials from the Center for Creative Leadership and will be facilitated by VPA leadership. 


Social Emotional Leadership Bundles


Leading People Through Change 

Too often, employees suffer because leaders fail to understand the stages they go through during a change. This workshop kit focuses on communication, collaboration, and commitment to help ensure that your leaders can align their team, peers, boss, and organization with their change efforts.

Participants will learn how to:

  • Drive progress on a real change they are currently leading
  • Explore and manage their own change preferences
  • Understand and recognize the process of change and transition
  • Leverage the power of CCL’s 3 Cs of change — Communication, Collaboration, and Commitment
  • Identify and collaborate with stakeholders during change
  • Apply key lessons to any organizational change challenge

Fill Out This Short Form to Learn More and/or Schedule this Workshop

Timing for Workshop

  • Each workshop is about 4 hours of collaborative learning
  • This can be done in a half-day workshop or split over several faculty meetings

Venue for Workshop 

  • In-person at your given site or agreed upon location (online version is available if needed

Cost Structure for Workshop 

  • Facilitation by VPA Leadership: $800 per workshop per facilitator. 2 facilitators required for 15 or more participants.
    • Participant Materials: $120 per participant (minimum 10 participants)

Influence: The Business of Getting Things Done 

This workshop focuses on developing the key components of influence.

Participants will learn how to:

  • Understand why influence is important
  • Articulate personal influence strengths and developmental gaps
  • Recognize the components of effective influence
  • Be aware of different sources of need and motivation
  • Apply influence concepts to real-life situations

Fill Out This Short Form to Learn More and/or Schedule this Workshop

Timing for Workshop

  • Each workshop is about 4 hours of collaborative learning
  • This can be done in a half-day workshop or split over several faculty meetings

Venue for Workshop 

  • In-person at your given site or agreed upon location (online version is available if needed

Cost Structure for Workshop 

  • Facilitation by VPA Leadership: $800 per workshop per facilitator. 2 facilitators required for 15 or more participants.
    • Participant Materials: $120 per participant (minimum 10 participants)

Feedback That Works

This workshop teaches our simple, powerful, and effective feedback model, which enables your employees to give and receive focused, productive feedback.

Participants will learn how to:

  • Understand the need for providing feedback in the workplace
  • Provide effective feedback using Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) language
  • Practice delivering and receiving feedback using CCL’s feedback model
  • Review common mistakes in delivering feedback
  • Create a plan of action for more effectively delivering feedback to others

Fill Out This Short Form to Learn More and/or Schedule this Workshop

Timing for Workshop

  • Each workshop is about 4 hours of collaborative learning
  • This can be done in a half-day workshop or split over several faculty meetings

Venue for Workshop 

  • In-person at your given site or agreed upon location (online version is available if needed

Cost Structure for Workshop 

  • Facilitation by VPA Leadership: $800 per workshop per facilitator. 2 facilitators required for 15 or more participants.
    • Participant Materials: $120 per participant (minimum 10 participants)

Step Up to Conflict

The Step Up to Conflict workshop is developed by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) in collaboration with the Eckerd College Leadership Development Institute, a valued partner of CCL for over 30 years. 

We believe that:

  • Conflict is inevitable: When people work together they bring differing perspectives, opinions and motives that can lead to conflict.
  • Conflict is not always bad: Many conflicts — when handled properly — can create an atmosphere of creativity and innovation.
  • Conflict management skills can be learned: While natural ability is helpful, we know these skills can be effectively developed and improved.
  • Mobilizing reframes boundaries to develop community.
  • Weaving interlaces boundaries to advance interdependence.
  • Transforming cross-cuts boundaries to enable reinvention.

Fill Out This Short Form to Learn More and/or Schedule this Workshop

Timing for Workshop

  • Each workshop is about 4 hours of collaborative learning
  • This can be done in a half-day workshop or split over several faculty meetings

Venue for Workshop 

  • In-person at your given site or agreed upon location (online version is available if needed

Cost Structure for Workshop 

  • Facilitation by VPA Leadership: $800 per workshop per facilitator. 2 facilitators required for 15 or more participants.
    • Participant Materials: $120 per participant (minimum 10 participants)

Direction, Alignment, Commitment 

This workshop is based on CCL’s extensive analysis of field work in the areas of leadership, leadership development, and organizational leadership that led to CCL’s proven Direction, Alignment, Commitment (DAC) framework. DAC enables individuals to work together as a cohesive group to produce collective results — results they could never achieve working as individuals.

Participants will learn how to:

  • Better understand leadership as a social process
  • Apply an effective approach to enhance leadership outcomes — Direction, Alignment, Commitment
  • Assess how well leadership is happening in their group
  • Identify actions they can take to improve leadership outcomes
  • Create an action plan for improving leadership effectiveness in a specific group

Fill Out This Short Form to Learn More and/or Schedule this Workshop

Timing for Workshop

  • Each workshop is about 4 hours of collaborative learning
  • This can be done in a half-day workshop or split over several faculty meetings

Venue for Workshop 

  • In-person at your given site or agreed upon location (online version is available if needed

Cost Structure for Workshop 

  • Facilitation by VPA Leadership: $800 per workshop per facilitator. 2 facilitators required for 15 or more participants.
    • Participant Materials: $120 per participant (minimum 10 participants)

Boundary Spanning, Turning Boundaries Into Frontiers

This workshop focuses on 6 boundary spanning practices to provide leaders with the skills to increase collaboration, tear down organizational silos, and mitigate turf wars to increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation. 

Participants will learn how to:

  • Understand the power of Boundary Spanning for leadership success.
  • Identify the types of boundaries that limit potential.
  • Learn and practice the 6 principles of Boundary Spanning Leadership.
  • Recognize their role in spanning boundaries to achieve more than they imagined.

Fill Out This Short Form to Learn More and/or Schedule this Workshop

Timing for Workshop

  • Each workshop is about 4 hours of collaborative learning
  • This can be done in a half-day workshop or split over several faculty meetings

Venue for Workshop 

  • In-person at your given site or agreed upon location (online version is available if needed

Cost Structure for Workshop 

  • Facilitation by VPA Leadership: $800 per workshop per facilitator. 2 facilitators required for 15 or more participants.
    • Participant Materials: $120 per participant (minimum 10 participants)

Learning Agility: Unlock the Lessons of Experience

This workshop provides tools and skills to become more learning agile. Learning and applying the 4 components of CCL’s approach to learning agility will put participants on the path to making the most from experiences and position them to succeed when faced with new, challenging situations.

Participants will learn how to:

  • Leverage the 4 components of learning agility to make the most of experiences
  • Learn more about the particular skill of learning agility and how to apply it to developmental goals
  • Gain insight into approaches to developing learning agility
  • Become more learning agile

Fill Out This Short Form to Learn More and/or Schedule this Workshop

Timing for Workshop

  • Each workshop is about 4 hours of collaborative learning
  • This can be done in a half-day workshop or split over several faculty meetings

Venue for Workshop 

  • In-person at your given site or agreed upon location (online version is available if needed

Cost Structure for Workshop 

  • Facilitation by VPA Leadership: $800 per workshop per facilitator. 2 facilitators required for 15 or more participants.
    • Participant Materials: $120 per participant (minimum 10 participants)