Leadership training, development, and coaching for school leaders through BTS Spark.

We all want children to succeed at school. Education leaders play a critical role in setting school cultures and empowering teachers to do their best work.

School leaders tell us they find the soft leadership skills hard – engaging their teams, having difficult conversations, leading change and remaining resilient. This is why BTS proactively supports education directors, school principals, headteachers and middle leaders, through our not-for-profit practice, BTS Spark.

BTS Spark’s mission is to provide schools with access to work-class leadership programs at not-for-profit prices – helping school leaders feel confident, resourceful and fully capable, and enabling students, teachers and school communities to benefit from empowered, supportive school leadership.

We don’t believe in ‘one-size-fits-all’ leadership development. Our programs are centered around you.

Your needs

BTS Spark programs are flexible, depending on your goals, your context and your budget. From individual coaching to workshops for 100 school leaders, the BTS Spark team is always happy to help you find the right program for your education setting.

Your mindsets

Mindsets matter. Our research has uncovered 33 leadership mindsets that unlock great leadership practice. BTS Spark draws on our Bitesize Leadership Curriculum to offer practical strategies that help education leaders bring those mindsets into school leadership.

Your coach

As a school leader working with BTS Spark you will be supported by a professional leadership coach who is committed to helping you thrive. Our coaches typically have over ten years’ individual experience of supporting leaders to grow their leadership.

Going from strategy to execution can be challenging and risky. In today’s environment of constant change, organizations must inspire the behavioral mindset shifts required to effectively execute their business and culture strategies.

We also know that change has changed. Traditional change management approaches can’t keep up with the business evolution today.

BTS can help your team understand, adapt, and thrive in new competitive landscapes and cultures and provide you with the business acumen necessary to execute your strategies at scale.

In truth, strategy execution depends on how well the people in your organization are aligned with the strategy, their mindset, and their capability to execute on your specific strategic initiatives.

BTS believes that meaningful results are achieved through a journey of learning, development, and execution. Because we sit at the intersection of consulting and training, we have a front-row seat in this journey.

Culture of Innovation

We believe that openness is key to making innovation a part of your culture. This requires that your company embrace uncertainty, experimentation, and a willingness to challenge the assumptions that made it successful in the first place.

Business Simulations

Simulations enable participants to experience a new strategy personally in a highly realistic environment, allowing them to see its value and experience great execution.

Momenta

Momenta is a helpful digital companion that will guide your employee’s learning experience. Whether they have three hours or just three minutes, Momenta will inspire growth in ways that reward engagement and inspire achievement.

Virtual facilitation

Whether virtual, in-person, or a hybrid approach, BTS constantly innovates with leading technologies and methodologies to elevate our agenda and deliver transformational experiences at every engagement.

Demystify business acumen.

Lack of strategy alignment and business acumen causes many strategies to fail. Leveraging the right financial literacy, functional business savvy, GM thinking, and enterprise value mindset helps leaders make better decisions and increases their readiness to execute a successful strategy.

Corporate leadership teams have an ongoing love affair with strategy formulation, yet the road to strategy implementation is littered with failure.

Dynamically compete to drive shareholder value by optimizing tradeoffs of running your entire value chain into the future.

Test your hypotheses, and solve for specific scenarios to optimize profitability, efficiency, and cash flow.

Reference critical decisions and levers and contrast them against key tradeoffs and challenges to make better decisions, faster.

Explore scenarios and future planning ideas connecting your role to enterprise value creation.

The best leaders don’t just prepare for disruption—they seek it out.

Great leaders create inclusive communities and empower their team to advance to a higher level of motivation, lifting individuals, teams, and organizational results.

To be a great leader today, one must adapt quickly in a rapidly changing world while maintaining the compassion and humility needed to relate to your teams on a human level.

BTS understands leadership coaching and development better than anyone in our market. With our diverse set of tools and methods, we’ll give your leaders the tools they need to succeed.

Creating a coaching culture

Agile, people-centered organizations need their leaders to create a feedback and coaching culture. Based on the book “Four Greatest Coaching Conversations,” our award-winning approach focuses on how to spot and change mindsets in the moments that matter.

The uncommon sense of MESSY leadership

Things aren’t going back to ‘normal.’ Today’s leaders face unpredictable times, fast-changing markets, and a wide variety of new expectations. These range from their businesses’ role in creating inclusive and diverse cultures, to the speed of change, shifting work norms, and changes in how content is consumed. Our team spoke to more than 40 of the world’s top companies to establish the kind of leadership that companies feel will best serve them in tomorrow’s world.

We’ve learned that it’s high time leaders get MESSY.

Developing transformational leaders at every level

Evolve your system for developing your leaders. BTS partners with clients to create practical, strategy-anchored curriculums for all levels of leaders that go beyond behaviors to change mindsets. We leverage digital platforms to create a dynamic and personal learner experience, all in service of helping your people do the best work of their lives.

Defining GREAT for your people

Defining and bringing leadership expectations to life. Leadership is contextual and GREAT leadership is different from one business to another. We’ll help you define this and execute at scale across your organization.

Executive development

Conventional development approaches separate out strategy alignment, talent assessment, and executive development. BTS brings all of these together in one experience in the same experience while leveraging the research and data from Suzanne Bates’ book “Speak like a CEO.”

School leadership

School leaders worldwide can access our award-winning leadership development through our not-for-profit initiative, BTS Spark. Flexible programs allow education leaders to strengthen their practice through workshops, coaching and online learning.

Accelerate your sales cycle. Accelerate your go to market approach.

Your sales, marketing, product, and service teams face accelerating buying cycles, fragmented markets, and demanding buyers. BTS has spent years conducting extensive research and working with the world’s best sales and marketing organizations.

We understand the critical moments in your buyer’s journey and equip your customer-facing teams with the skills and mindsets needed to accelerate results. After working with BTS your team will be able to close sales faster and provide a higher level of service that will keep your clients coming back.

Business and Industry acumen for sales and marketing

By focusing on mindset shifts and practicing critical moments, BTS can help your team produce leaders who can more readily adapt to change and be more connected with their team needs. These leaders have a greater understanding of societal change, which will make them the ace in the hole you need to adapt your strategy for the future.

Build a personal connection through hybrid selling

With unpredictable sales cycles and market disruption becoming the norm, we have experienced a dramatic shift in how salespeople work and how clients expect to interact with them. Establishing a personal connection is now more valuable than ever.

Traditionalist clients who would never have had virtual meetings in the past have now been forced to experiment with virtual communication tools and are more likely to accept some meetings as virtual interactions.

BTS’s robust digital experience can help you build a strategy that leverages your salespeople's strong interpersonal skills to seize this new opportunity and bring your clients along with you.

Coaching the sales coach

There may come a time when you need to launch a transformation or initiative where nothing off the shelf applies.

The BTS team is an expert in building custom solutions for organizations of all sizes. In these cases, we begin by minimizing complexity and zeroing in on what great people in your organization already do. By aligning that with the context of your market and our extensive research and experience, we can create custom sales methods, assessments, and training to build a framework for you going forward.

Speed up your sales cycle and become an Accelerator Seller

We uncovered that today's best organizations help customers understand how their solutions accelerate business results. Sellers, sales managers, and marketeers need to perform at their best in common, critical situations to help customers accelerate their desired business results.

Rather than describing broad skills, our experience tells us that focusing on “what Great looks like” in specific, common situations. Our set of critical sales and marketing modules enables your team across the value chain to be Great when it counts.

Assessments for sales and marketing

Organizations are seeking ways to quickly assess the ability of their sales and marketing talent to meet customers' evolving needs. Talent assessment should be flexible, accessible in the flow of work, cost-effective, easy to deploy, and rooted in a strong point of view.

We work with organizations to provide high-impact assessments for hiring and selection, baseline understanding of capabilities, and create tailored development journeys.

Powerful experiences immerse participants in key elements of the business and leadership challenges of the role.

Real-world experiences drive real-world results.

We believe context matters. Our assessments are about leading your business, not any business, and mirror your business's and culture's dynamics.

We build our assessments with real people in mind and create scientific and practical experiences optimized for engagement that create value at all talent levels and throughout their careers.

We strive beyond the traditional client-vendor relationship to be your total people partner.

Talent analytics

Inform talent planning and decision-making with data-driven insights.

Talent frameworks

Define what great leadership looks like in your organization.

Talent acquisition

Select the best new talent in a way that promotes diversity and accelerates business success.

Talent and leadership development

Accelerate the development of new capabilities and values needed to shape your future.

High potential identification

Identify and develop rising leaders who will have a profound impact on the future.

Succession

Create a leadership bench for strategically important roles.

The discipline of discovering and solving problems in new ways under conditions of uncertainty.

The real question to ask yourself is, “why aren’t we doing this today?”

All companies want to innovate, and some leaders and organizations already have an idea of what they want to be doing, but only a handful are doing it successfully.

We believe there are five key capabilities every organization needs to create a culture of innovation.

Thinking from the future back

Creating clarity in an environment of high uncertainty and change requires looking beyond the noise of today and exploring the possible future states of tomorrow, which will ultimately better inform our decision-making today.

Customer centricity

Simply asking customers what they want does not work, partly because human beings often do not realize what they need until a solution comes along and reveals it. Firms now need the mindset, skillset, and tools of User-centered design and Design thinking—techniques that push beyond talking and listening to customers by digging deep into who they are and what they want.

Divergent thinking & applied creativity

Many leaders downplay ideas when they clash with their beliefs or intuitions about what works. Or they discard ideas entirely because they sound too fantastical ever to find practical use. Divergent Thinking and Applied Creativity is a set of processes and approaches leaders can use to frame and reframe questions to explore multiple possible answers and recognize and then suspend judgment long enough to explore fresh ideas as they emerge thoroughly.

Disciplined experimentation (Agile)

Disciplined Experimentation is a set of principles, processes, and tools that leaders can use to test ideas fast and cheaply while guarding against their downside. When faced with high uncertainty, these processes help leaders and their teams say, “I don’t know,” and move forward.

Applied digital acumen and literacy

Because digital technology is intertwined in everything we do and will continue to become more intertwined in the future, digital literacy has become the new lingua franca that all businesspeople must understand. To be a digitally literate leader doesn’t mean you need to be able to write code; it means that you understand the implications of digital technologies for your current and future business at any moment in time. It means you can answer, “How might technology disrupt our competitive position?” And equally, “How might technology improve our performance and delight our users?”

A changing world requires meeting disruption head-on.

We do something different because we believe something different.

Change has changed. Traditional change management approaches cannot keep up with the pace of business evolution today.

We know your organization's wisdom exists, and we respect your leaders’ intelligence. That’s why we take a different approach, based on transformational experiences that help your leaders find their own reasons to change.

Our core beliefs:

• Creating repeated burning platforms is unsustainable. People must discover their own positive reason for change.
• Every leader is a change leader.
• Authorship is ownership. People involved in the change are more engaged with the change.

Strategy creation & alignment

Co-creation of strategies that last. People keep their commitments after they leave the room.

Transformation

End-to-end partner for your transformation, whether it’s digital, agile, sales, business model or all the above.

Change leadership

Elevation of your leaders to serve as the driving force in large-scale transformation.

Culture assessment and activation

Diagnostic of your current culture and enablement of your leaders to embrace the new.

Connected by design, our strategy and transformation expertise, unmatched mindset research and our digital ecosystem deliver the best coaching for people and your strategy.

More than just coaching. Connected. By design.

We believe coaching should serve your strategy and be connected to your values, leader models, and talent processes. If you want to drive change and ensure that it sticks, you must work with leaders at an individual and collective level. We do both.

Our digital ecosystem is more than a coaching app. We integrate coaching, assessment, simulation, and learning experiences to transform people and the business. Leaders develop more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking by connecting multiple learning modalities.

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How we help

Research has shown that programs are more impactful when you combine sales training with upskilling managers to build their coaching skills. Through integrated journeys of skill building, microlearning, and 1:1 coaching conversations, your sales leaders can quickly learn how to take their leadership to the next level.

Coaching on demand

Get what you need, when you need it. From new moms to new managers, we curate the best of our mindset content to meet your leaders where they are, at any stage of their career. We provide coaching in the moment of need and set your leaders up for success.

Coaching to increase the impact of learning journeys

Improve the impact, efficacy, and longevity of your learning programs. Coaching provides the ultimate personalization when integrated and connected to the content and experiences of your team’s journey.

Coaching to drive your strategy or transformation

True leaders want to make an impact. We look at your business and intentionally connect our coaching, experiences, and content to your strategy. We advise and consult with you to identify the right mindset shifts that helps you reach your strategic aspirations faster.

A global coaching partner

Whether one-on-one, team-based, pod-based, or workshop, BTS can accommodate all levels from C-Suite to scalable coaching for the many. We take pride in delivering the right approach for each audience along with genuine global capacity.

Creating a coaching culture

Building coaching capabilities is what we do. Through our Leader as Coach program, leaders focus on how to better see and hear others while learning how to coach and develop their team. Our easy-to-use tools help leaders build their confidence to have the right kind of feedback conversations in the flow of work. We help you create a culture where leaders feel recognized, appreciated, and perform at higher levels.

Coaching for sales leaders

Research has shown that when you combine sales training with upskilling managers to build their coaching skills, programs are more impactful. Through integrated journeys of skill building, microlearning, and 1:1 coaching conversations, your sales leaders can quickly learn how to take their leadership to the next level.

Boards and shareholders know the risk is high for C-suite leaders and teams to deliver on growth and competitive advantage.

BTS’s Executive and Team Performance solutions guide top executives in the C-Suite, business, and functions to achieve the organization’s aspirations.

We understand what it takes to align people around purpose, manage an array of stakeholders, work with a board, interact with shareholders, manage investors, and develop a brand that makes you a powerful, influential face to the world.

Through our work, executives and their teams become enterprise-focused, agile, decisive, and able to pivot to opportunities. They learn to anticipate and manage crisis, navigate critical moments in the life of the organization, and achieve outstanding results.

Executive Advisory

Accelerate your strategy through the guidance of seasoned, trusted, C-Suite advisors who understand the business and help you achieve extraordinary outcomes.

C-Suite succession, on-boarding, and support

Take the risk out of selecting top leaders through data-driven assessment and a robust ‘on ramp’ to help the CEO or senior leader hit the ground running during that critical first year and beyond.

Executive coaching

Master the art of communicative leadership, and drive business results through one-on-one partnerships to help emerging high potential leaders build influence.

High performing teams

Guide your teams to make faster, better decisions, align, collaborate, and drive the strategy forward through real-time experiences.

Board evaluation

At BTS, we look at the Board’s collective strengths and gaps by looking at team behaviors within context of strategy, goals and challenges. By doing so, we are able to surface any issues or concerns the Board has, clarify common objectives, agree on targeted actions, and ensure a cohesive team moving forward.

The executive presence assessment (ExPI™)

The ExPI™ model is for people-leaders who want a research-based framework for leading and influencing with their authentic brand in today’s global marketplace.

The leadership team performance index assessment (LTPI™)

The LTPI™ Assessment shines a light on a team’s collective strengths and gaps, in real time, with the goal of interpreting that data in context with the team’s mission, goals and challenges.

Leadership & communications programs

Engage leaders in developing their executive presence and communicative leadership skills that enable them to stand out, make an impact, and influence to drive results.

Executive Presence Mastery (EPM)

Speak Like a CEO

Digital capabilities, human touch.

It’s about people, not technology.

Our digitally-enabled programs accelerate learning, spark change, personalize virtual engagements, and improve business results for our clients and their people.

We focus on capabilities that extend workshops and learning journeys to reinforce knowledge and enable practice, expand the reach of learning programs allowing them to be self-paced, and cascade learning and change to the full organization utilizing leader-led modules delivered in the flow of work.

We’re building the digital learning experience of tomorrow.

Since 2001, we’ve been at the forefront of defining what learning can be in the digital world. Our mission is to create experiences that inspire, engage, transform, and most importantly deliver results.

Adding SwissVBS to the BTS team enhanced our ability to be a creative team focused on delivering results. We’re learning experts. We’re storytellers. We’re creative thinkers. We’re problem solvers.

Bite-sized, single-concept learning

BTS’s rapid learning is a robust but focused library, targeting pivotal behaviors in leadership and sales. Novel micro-training concept in which line leaders bring a team together to engage in a module, discuss and practice.

Get Togethers to engage every team in the organization

Ultimately to drive real change, every leader needs to own and drive new ways of working with their teams all the way down to the front lines. Our pre-packaged ‘Get Togethers’ are scalable, flexible, and easy ways to ignite team momentum to learn, align and change.

These pre-designed experiences built to run in the flow of work and be highly interactive, engaging, experiential, and meaningful.

Analytics and reporting are embedded, providing you with deep insights from all teams without burdening the organization with more surveys.

Understanding Project Management increases ability to lead & follow project management processes

The new Understanding Project Management (UPM) by BTS is a Web-based learning resource that helps experienced and aspiring project managers understand the five process groups of best practice project management.

The self-paced 4-hour program can be taken as pre-work to help users prepare for more advanced workshops or as a standalone project management primer to better understand fundamental project management. It can also be used as an ongoing reference tool to reinforce concepts and prior learning.

Winning in Business Simulation

Winning in Business is an industry-leading digital simulation that will provide your people with the skills they need to perform at a higher level and help your organization to gain a competitive edge.

These multi-round, team-based, or self-paced learning experiences are built to help participants practice making business decisions via real-life business situations.

Know-the-business

Our Know the Business (KTB) suite drives business acumen by allowing your people to practice using basic financial statements and key ratios to assess company performance.

The multi-language KTB is a mobile-ready, self-paced experience that allows participants to learn, study, and test their financial acumen knowledge. Combining video-based learning bursts, interactive tools, quizzes, and a simulation, the KTB enables all learners to make sound business decisions that drive bottom-line results.

iLead Challenges

iLead Challenges help companies accelerate the development of great leaders.

The simulation provides a series of scenario-based video challenges featuring important leadership moments to deliver a learning experience that reinforces the critical skills necessary for effective leadership. Participants will engage in cinematic storylines to address key leadership topics and develop their leadership skills – essential for optimal execution and delivering long-term business results. Each iLead is a 20- to 30-minute interactive, multi-media experience and is available in many languages.

We believe in the business of caring about people so that they are able to thrive and do meaningful work together. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is an investment that is worthy of making so that people have a safe place to belong. DEI is not about me or you, it’s about us. What impacts one of us impacts all of us.

Our approach to DEI is individual, team, and organizational. We believe that each individual is responsible for their part in making teams and the whole organization a more inclusive and equitable place for all.

We believe in the business of caring about people so that they are able to thrive and do meaningful work together. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is an investment that is worthy of making so that people have a safe place to belong. DEI is not about me or you, it’s about us. What impacts one of us impacts all of us.

Our approach to DEI is individual, team, and organizational. We believe that each individual is responsible for their part in making teams and the whole organization a more inclusive and equitable place for all.

Inclusion is for everyone

The real work of inclusion begins when you have to include those that you disagree with, don’t trust and align with, and potentially share other differences that are uncomfortable. Being keenly aware of our biases, stereotypes, prejudices, and any “isms” that are present for us is required work if we are going to create workplaces that are welcoming and psychologically safe.

Exclusion has a high cost

We close the gap between the business and moral case for DEI by making inclusion personal and providing experiences for participants to see the impact that exclusion and inequity have on all employees, from the C-suite to those on the front line.

Inclusion is relational

Everything that we do in organizations is impacted by the quality of our relationships and conversations with one another. Making equitable decisions and being an ally will not work if leaders do not try to get to know and understand those that are working with them. Rarely do we feel seen, heard, and valued when someone is not able to be empathetic to our experience.

Inclusive Leadership Workshop

Our Inclusive Leadership Workshop was designed as a starting point for leaders that are still exploring how they feel about the importance of DEI. It is based on three essential ideas that create a solid foundation for leaders to begin their journey on becoming more inclusive and equitable.

The G.I.V.E. Model

The G.I.V.E. Model was designed to help leaders transition from a zero sum mindset (either/or) to a mindset that is inclusive (both, and). This is a simple approach that addresses complex DEI challenges organizations are currently facing. Leaders will walk away with practical steps that can be taken immediately to improve the quality of their relationships and conversations. Taking these steps results in a more inclusive culture that produces equitable outcomes.