Your Managers Completed Leadership Training. Now What?
Why the next level of Mindful Manager training — customized to your organization — is where real leadership transformation begins.
Nonprofit Solutions, powered by Mission Edge, is a nonprofit leadership training and professional development practice offering workshops, certificates, and customized programs like the Mindful Manager Series. Since 1991, Nonprofit Solutions has provided management assistance and training to nonprofits throughout Southern California, and today draws on Mission Edge's national infrastructure to support nonprofits beyond training. Together, they give your organization one partner for both back-office operations and leadership growth.
You invested in leadership training. Your managers sat through the sessions, completed the activities, maybe even came away energized. And then… they went back to work. Back to the same pressures, the same dynamics, the same challenges that were there before.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Most organizations treat leadership development as an event — a workshop, a one-day retreat, a series of sessions that ends with a certificate. And then they wonder why the needle doesn’t move.
The truth is, foundational leadership training is exactly that: a foundation. It introduces the concepts. It builds awareness. It opens the door. But opening the door is not the same as walking through it — and walking through it takes something more.
That’s what the Mindful Manager Series II is designed to do: take the leaders who have built their foundation and help them go deeper, lead better, and create lasting change — in themselves and in the organizations they serve.
From Foundation to Fluency: Why a Deeper Series Matters
First-level leadership training teaches managers what good leadership looks like. The next level teaches them how to practice it consistently — especially when it’s hard.
The gap between knowing and doing is where most leadership development fails. Managers learn about giving feedback, then avoid the difficult conversation anyway. They understand the value of coaching, then default to telling. They can describe what psychological safety is, but struggle to create it on their own teams.
Nonprofit Solutions’ Mindful Manager Series II is built to close that gap.
It is a ten-week, highly interactive professional development program designed for managers and emerging leaders who are ready to go beyond the basics — deepening their leadership practice not just in what they do, but in how they think, communicate, and show up for their teams every day.
And because no two organizations are the same, the series is fully customized to the specific needs, challenges, and culture of your organization.
An Inside-Out Approach to Leadership
The Mindful Manager Series II takes a deliberate, inside-out approach to leadership development. It begins with the leader themselves — their self-awareness, their identity, their emotional intelligence — and builds progressively outward toward the relational, organizational, and strategic dimensions of effective leadership.
This sequencing is intentional. Leaders who haven’t examined their own patterns — their default communication style, their conflict avoidance, their unconscious biases in how they coach and evaluate — cannot sustainably change how they lead others. The series starts on the inside and works its way out.
Great leadership is not a set of behaviors you perform. It’s a way of being that requires knowing yourself well enough to lead others honestly.
What the Program Covers: Eleven Sessions Built for Real-World Leaders
The Mindful Manager Series II is delivered across eleven 90-minute sessions, each building on the last. Sessions are highly interactive, grounded in practical application, and directly connected to the real challenges your managers face in their day-to-day work.
🌱 Session 1: Foundation & Self-Awareness
Leaders begin by examining the five domains of emotional intelligence and how each shows up in their daily management interactions. A leadership identity reflection surfaces core values and personal philosophy. The cohort co-creates shared learning community agreements — establishing norms of psychological safety, candor, and mutual accountability that will carry through all eleven sessions.
🌱 Session 2: Communication & Trust
Participants examine their default communication style and how it lands differently with different people. The session explores the conditions that build or erode psychological safety, introduces equitable communication practices, and gives managers structured techniques for giving and receiving both reinforcing and redirecting feedback.
🌱 Session 3: Conflict & Difficult Conversations
This session explores conflict styles and helps managers distinguish task-based from relationship-based conflict. Participants practice structured approaches to initiating difficult conversations — including how to name problems others are pretending not to see and how to address a high performer whose behavior is undermining the team.
🌱 Session 4: Coaching Mindset
Managers learn the distinction between directing and coaching, and practice core coaching competencies: active listening, powerful questioning, and holding back the answer to build capacity rather than dependency. A practical coaching model is introduced for use in one-on-ones, along with tools for identifying and addressing coachability bias.
🌱 Session 5: Accountability, Performance Management & Corrective Action
Participants work through the full performance management cycle — from setting clear expectations to navigating the coaching-to-corrective-action continuum and initiating performance improvement plans. Documentation is framed as an ethical practice. Managers leave with practical language and templates for the full range of performance situations.
🌱 Session 6: Delegation, Empowerment & Cross-Functional Collaboration
Leaders learn a delegation framework that matches autonomy to individual competence and commitment, and examine the internal barriers that cause managers to hold on when they should let go. The second half of the session explores cross-functional collaboration: how to build relationships across departments and influence without authority.
🌱 Session 7: Decision-Making & Critical Thinking
Participants explore the cognitive biases that distort judgment and practice frameworks for evaluating options under uncertainty. Special focus is given to the low-visibility decisions — scheduling, access to opportunity, recognition — where favoritism most often lives and least often gets named.
🌱 Session 8: Talent Acquisition
Managers learn to define role requirements, build success profiles, and use structured interviewing and evidence-based selection methods. The session gives direct attention to ethical hiring: recognizing and interrupting affinity bias, halo effect, and confirmation bias. The session closes with employer branding and onboarding strategies designed for long-term retention.
🌱 Session 9: Team Development
Participants examine where their team currently sits in the stages of team development — from forming through performing — and develop strategies for building cohesion, trust, and shared accountability. The session explores how fairness and consistency either accelerate or stall team development.
🌱 Session 10: Growth Mindset
This session explores the science of growth mindset and how fixed-mindset patterns show up in management — particularly around feedback avoidance, fear of failure, and resistance to change. Managers identify personal triggers, practice reframing techniques, and commit to specific strategies for modeling and cultivating a growth-oriented culture on their teams.
🌱 Session 11: Leadership Wisdom & Wrap-Up
The final session invites participants to reflect on the arc of their development — key insights, meaningful shifts, and the moments of discomfort that produced the most growth. Each manager identifies a leadership commitment going forward and shares their Leadership Impact and Integration Plan with the cohort. This isn’t a graduation. It’s a beginning.
The Difference Is in the Customization
Every organization that comes to Nonprofit Solutions with a leadership development need brings something unique: a particular culture, a set of specific challenges, a workforce with its own history and dynamics.
Off-the-shelf training treats every organization the same.
We don’t.
The Mindful Manager Series II is built on a proven curriculum — but it is customized to your organization before it ever walks through your door.
That customization starts with listening. Before the first session, we conduct a baseline self-assessment with every participant to understand where your managers are today: their current skills, their self-identified gaps, and the specific challenges they face in their roles. That data shapes the facilitation, the examples, the discussion questions, and the application exercises throughout the series.
It continues in how the content is delivered. For organizations running multiple cohorts — one for frontline supervisors and managers, another for directors and senior leaders — we adapt the discussion questions and application exercises to reflect the different realities, responsibilities, and expectations of each group. Same core content. Different depth, different context, different application.
And it culminates in the Leadership Impact and Integration Plan: a final deliverable that each participant develops over the course of the program, reflecting their applied learning, the behavior changes they’ve committed to, and the specific ways they intend to lead differently going forward.
Generic training produces generic results. Customized development produces leaders who are equipped to lead this organization, these teams, and these communities.
What Makes This Series Different
There is no shortage of leadership training options in the market. Here is what sets the Mindful Manager Series II apart:
It’s built for the nonprofit context. Leadership in a nonprofit organization is not the same as leadership in a corporation. The resource constraints, the mission pressure, the workforce dynamics, the board relationships — these create a distinct leadership environment. Our facilitators understand that environment from the inside.
It goes beyond awareness to application. Every session is designed to be highly interactive. Participants don’t just learn concepts — they practice them, apply them to real situations from their own work, and leave each session with something concrete they can use the next day.
It creates a learning community, not just a training cohort. From the first session, participants co-create the norms that will govern how they engage with one another throughout the series. This transforms the cohort from a group of people attending training together into a genuine professional learning community.
It measures progress, not just participation. The series begins with a baseline self-assessment and ends with a post-assessment. Results are shared with organizational leadership. The goal is not just to deliver content — it is to demonstrate growth.
It ends with a commitment, not a certificate. The Leadership Impact and Integration Plan is the culminating experience of the series. It asks participants to synthesize their learning, name their shifts, and make specific commitments about how they will lead differently. That’s accountability, not attendance.
Who This Program Is For
The Mindful Manager Series II is designed for organizations that have already made an investment in leadership development — and are ready to go deeper.
It is the right fit if:
Your managers have completed foundational leadership training and need the next level of development to continue growing.
You are facing specific organizational challenges — consistency, accountability, employee relations, performance management, or conflict — that require more than a one-time workshop to address.
You have two distinct levels of leadership — frontline managers and senior leaders — who would benefit from a shared leadership language but need content delivered at the appropriate level for their roles.
You believe that leadership development is an investment in organizational capacity, not just a benefit for individual employees.
You want a partner who will take the time to understand your organization before stepping into the room.
How the Program Is Structured
The Mindful Manager Series II is delivered in person, at your organization’s facilities, over a ten-to-eleven week period. Sessions are 90 minutes each, scheduled bi-weekly to give participants time to apply what they’ve learned between sessions.
For organizations with larger management teams, we recommend separating participants into two cohorts of approximately 25 people each — one for supervisors and managers, one for directors and senior leaders. Smaller cohort sizes allow for deeper discussion, more meaningful application exercises, and the kind of trust-building that makes this program work.
Each session requires a space large enough for small-group breakouts, a projector, and sound system. We handle everything else: facilitation, curriculum, materials, assessments, and the Leadership Impact and Integration Plans.
Ready to Elevate Your Leadership Team?
Your managers are the most direct lever you have on organizational culture, staff retention, program quality, and mission impact. When they lead well, everything works better. When they struggle, everything is harder.
The Mindful Manager Series II is Nonprofit Solutions’ commitment to helping your leaders not just understand what good leadership looks like — but practice it, sustain it, and grow into it over time.
This is not training for training’s sake. It is a deliberate, customized, cohort-based development experience built for the specific realities of your organization and your people.
Your leaders are ready for the next level. Let’s take them there.
Connect with our team to learn more about bringing the Mindful Manager Series II to your organization.
