Work Doesn’t Have to Feel This Hard

The missing manual for working with other people

Build everyday skills that help your team create more trust, collaboration, and care.

Workplaces expect us to navigate conflict, give feedback, set boundaries, prevent burnout, build trust, and repair relationships – often without teaching us how.

Everyday Skills is an on-demand learning experience designed to help people build the practical, human skills that make work better.

Tangible skills for communicating with care, navigating tension, and building workplaces people want to be a part of.

Better work starts with how we work together.

The Work Isn’t the Problem, How We Work Together Is

Too many priorities and not enough time. Exhausted leaders and low trust. Tension that lingers longer than it should and values that look good but aren’t lived into.
This isn’t because people don’t care.
It’s because most workplaces were never built to teach people how to work well together inside this much complexity.
Most professional development focuses on performance, but very little teaches people how to be with each other at work by:
  • Communicating clearly
  • Navigating tension
  • Providing feedback that builds trust
  • Slowing down enough to make better decisions
  • Creating accountability without shame
These are not soft skills. They are the skills that make everything else possible.
This is what many team leads, project managers, and culture advocates have been asking for: a practical guide for closing the gap between a Culture of Nice and a Culture of Care.

A Practical Learning Journey for the People Who Shape How Work Happens

Everyday Skills is a self-paced online course built for the people carrying culture every day: managers, team leads, project owners, people leaders, and the folks everyone quietly relies on to hold things together. It will help you build a culture where trust is deepened and communication is clearer. Where people have the skills to stay in relationship, even when things get hard.

At the center of the course are three core practices:

It’s individual learning, designed for collective implementation.

Using industry-leading software, our multimedia content is interactive, accessible across devices, and designed for real-world application, not passive consumption.Culture doesn’t change through intention alone. It changes through practice.

Ways Teams Are Applying These Skills

Organizations use Everyday Skills when something feels stuck and they need a practical way forward. Sometimes it looks like tension, burnout, or low trust. Or it might look like a team that says all the right things but still just doesn’t feel good. It might be pervasive management challenges. This work helps people name what’s happening and build better ways of working together.

Supporting a team navigating friction

When collaboration breaks down or priorities compete, teams need more than another meeting.They need shared language for conflict, feedback, and decision-making.

Strengthening management skills

Support first-time and experienced managers in navigating feedback, accountability, performance conversations, and leading through change. Managing people requires more than good intentions!

Developing informal leaders

ERG leads, project owners, culture carriers, and the people doing invisible leadership often hold enormous responsibility without real support. This program gives them tools for deepening relationships and building trust.

When teams move fast, communication gets reactive, trust gets fragile, and values can disappear under pressure. This program helps teams build consistency, accountability, and stronger working relationships.

What Participants Learn to Do Differently

Unlike courses full of long lectures, outdated scenarios, and frameworks people never use again, Everyday Skills is designed for real application. This isn’t twelve frameworks they’ll forget or leadership theory disconnected from real life. These are skills they can put to use on Monday morning!

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN AND PRACTICE HOW TO:

Navigate conflict and tension before it disrupts team performance

Move beyond avoidance or escalation by learning how to stay in conversation through disagreement and address issues directly.

Strengthen alignment in fast-moving, high-pressure environments

Stay grounded in values and relationships even when demands are competing and timelines are tight.

Give and receive feedback in ways that strengthen trust and accountability

Develop a more grounded approach to informal feedback that reduces defensiveness and supports stronger relationships.

Practice how to apologize and create accountability in everyday working relationships

Develop the skills to take responsibility, address harm, and rebuild trust when breakdowns happen.

Create shared language for communication and collaboration

Establish more consistency across teams so conversations are clearer, rooted in values, and decisions move forward more efficiently.

Shape culture from wherever they sit

Understand how small, consistent choices in communication and collaboration shape team culture over time, regardless of title.
This is not a course people passively consume. It’s a learning laboratory. Participants leave with language, tools, and practical ways to experiment with how they work, immediately.

Designed for Real Work Practice, Not Just Insight

Participants will move through five chapters that begin with the larger systems shaping how we work, move through the interpersonal realities of communication and conflict, and end with individual action and practice.
Each chapter includes 5–7 lessons with high-quality videos, interactive activities, real-world workplace scenarios, reflection prompts, and milestone assignments designed to support both individual learning and group implementation.
Participants explore how values, patterns, communication, and pace shape not only their relationships with colleagues but also their relationship to work itself. Sustainable culture change does not happen through inspiration alone. It happens when people have the language, tools, and permission to practice something different. Everyday Skills makes that possible.

What Changes When These Skills Are Put Into Practice

When people have the skills to navigate tension, communicate clearly, and take responsibility for how they show up, the impact is both immediate and cumulative.
Small shifts in everyday interactions create larger shifts in trust, accountability, and how work feels over time.

For Individuals

Participants leave with greater clarity, confidence, and consistency in how they show up at work.
They build:
  • More confidence navigating difficult conversations
  • Stronger communication that builds trust
  • Greater ability to stay steady under pressure and competing demands
  • The capacity to apologize, repair, and move forward after breakdowns

For Teams and Organizations

As these skills become shared practices, teams experience stronger alignment, momentum, collaboration, and more resilience:
  • Stronger collaboration across roles and teams
  • Healthier team dynamics and increased trust
  • More consistent leadership at every level
  • Reduced friction that impacts performance and retention
  • A stronger connection between stated values and daily practice

Built by People Who Have Spent Decades Helping Teams Work Better

Together, Desiree Adaway and Jessica Fish bring more than 50 years of experience in coaching, training, research, facilitation, and organizational change. They are two of the nation’s leading consultants in the areas of leadership, workplace culture, and racial equity.In more than a decade of partnership, they’ve trained over 70,000 people and worked alongside organizations of every size: from small nonprofits and associations to major philanthropies, global tech companies, and finance institutions.

Their work starts from one belief:

Work can be joyful.

That may sound ambitious at this moment, but they have seen it firsthand.
When teams have the right skills, the right language, and real space, people exhale. Conflict creates deeper connection. Exhaustion makes room for possibility and work starts to feel meaningful again.
They teach people how to stay grounded in uncertainty, lead with discernment, and build cultures of care where accountability, trust, and humanity are centered.

They teach people how to be together at work.

Desiree Adaway

Desiree is the founder and principal of The Adaway Group. With more than 30 years of experience, she has created, led, and managed multicultural teams across 40 countries, guiding organizations through complex transformation with clarity and care. Known for her sharp analysis and deeply engaging facilitation style, Desiree brings a rare blend of strategic insight and compassion. Clients come to her for her ability to say the thing that needs to be said, while helping people stay in the work together.
Her work helps leaders build cultures rooted in accountability, discernment, and care, where people can navigate complexity without losing connection to themselves or each other.

Jessica Fish

Jessica Fish is a facilitator, educator, and researcher. She has spent her career helping teams learn how to navigate conflict, build meaningful relationships, and lead with both empathy and accountability.
Her work sits at the intersection of organizational strategy and human behavior: helping teams understand not just what needs to change, but how people change together. Over the past two decades, she has helped launch early diversity and inclusion initiatives at institutions like Harvard University, led equity audits for more than 30 organizations, and trained tens of thousands of people across sectors. Her work is shaped by community organizing, scholarship in race, gender, and comparative religion, managing chronic illness, and being a devoted auntie to four remarkable little humans.

What Participants and Organizations are Saying

“I think managers struggle with how to have certain conversations because it can feel uncomfortable intimate … but personal is professional especially when it comes to seeing how your direct reports are affected by matters of race, gender, sexual orientation etc. in the workplace.The Adaway Group taught me how to start open, but structured conversations with colleagues to address these topics with authenticity.”

-Tanuja Gupta

“This content allowed me to hold p a mirror, and then gave me the skills and information I need to accelerate conversation to action. I can’t think of a better partner for improving an organization’s ability to create an equitable, inclusive and just organization.”

- Laurie Stradley

“Desiree Adaway and her team do an incredible job creating a safe space and helping build the vocabulary, empathy and plans needed to actually make notable change within [the] organization. I can really see the transformative impact they had on our team at Google. This ends up being a competitive advantage both in the market as well as internally, where we became known as a highly inclusive team making a difference and attracting the best people.”

- Bred B.

Ready to Get Started?

When people have the skills to navigate tension, communicate clearly, and take responsibility for how they show up, the impact is both immediate and cumulative.
Small shifts in everyday interactions create larger shifts in trust, accountability, and how work feels over time.

Bring this to your team

Many organizations begin by enrolling a group, managers, team leads, a task force, or individuals who shape how work happens day to day and expand from there as the impact grows.When you're ready, you can select the number of seats that fit your team and get started right away.

$349

PER SEAT

For purchases of 25+ seats, reach out to us for bulk discount

Joining on your own

If you're navigating real conversations, relationships, and tensions in your day-to-day work, these skills are immediately applicable, no matter your title!

$349

One -time payment

Looking for live facilitation or customized training? We do that too! 

We design workshops, leadership programs, and consulting engagements that meet the real challenges your people are navigating.