Work Doesn’t Have to Feel This Hard

The missing manual for working with other people

Ditch the Culture of Nice. Build the every day skills that turn nice into care and tension into trust, for you and the people you work with.

Imagine More Joy at Work

A team that tells the truth and still has each other's backs.

Hard conversations that don't keep you up at night.

Mistakes that get repaired, not buried. Promises people keep.

Days that end with meaning, not exhaustion.

It won’t happen by luck or waiting for the perfect boss. It takes skills.

Everyday skills you can learn.

Your job description left out the hardest part.

Most professional development focuses on performance, but very little teaches you how to:
  • Say what you mean, including no.
  • Disagree in the meeting, not in the group chat after.
  • Give honest feedback instead of quietly fixing it.
  • Handle other people's emotions without stuffing your own.
  • Slowing down when everything is "urgent."
They are missing skills and they make the difference between working hard and work just being hard.

Built For the People Everyone Depends On

Everyday Skills is a self-paced online course for managers, team leads, project owners, people leaders, and the folks who hold everything together without the title.

We’re not giving you frameworks you'll forget by Friday. We teach real workplace scenarios and practical skills you'll start using immediately. You'll learn how to tell the truth, build trust, and stay in it together when things get hard. That's how a Culture of Nice becomes a Culture of Care. And it starts with you!

At the center of the course are three core practices:

You learn it. Your team feels it. Imagine what happens when they learn it too.

It's not a pile of videos you half-watch while answering email. It's interactive, works on any device, and gets you practicing with real situations from day one. Good intentions don't change you or your team. Practice does.

How Teams Are Using It

Teams come to Everyday Skills when something feels stuck. Maybe it's tension, burnout, or low trust. Maybe it's managers in over their heads. Or maybe it's a team that says all the right things and still doesn't feel good. This work helps you name what's going on and do something about it, together.

Teams that can't get out of the friction

You can feel it when you walk into the meeting. The same disagreement from last month is back, and everyone's pretending it isn't. You leave tired and nothing's decided. Another meeting won't fix this. Your team needs a way to say the hard stuff out loud, disagree without it getting personal, and make a call everyone can live with.

Managers are in over their heads

They were great at the job, so they got promoted. Now they're putting off the feedback conversation for the third week in a row. They don't know how to hold someone accountable without feeling like a villain. Good intentions aren't enough. Your managers need skills for feedback, accountability, performance conversations, and leading through change, whether it's their first year or their fifteenth.

Informal leaders are carrying too much

You know who they are. The ERG lead planning events on their lunch break. The project owner keeping five teams on track with zero authority. The person everyone goes to when something feels off. They're holding up your culture, and nobody gave them the tools to do it. Everyday Skills helps them build trust, deepen relationships, and keep leading without burning out.
Friction on the team. Managers in over their heads. Informal leaders carrying too much. It looks different everywhere, but the fix is the same. People need the skills to work through it together.

How People Feel About Our Work

Desiree and Jessica helped my 400+ team at Google build stronger communication, collaboration, and trust. Their training provided practical tools our staff and leaders could use immediately to navigate conflict, difference, and change. Their work continued to influence how people worked together long after their trainings ended. They bring a powerful combination of expertise, charisma, and empathy to their work.

-Daniel Rocha, Senior Director, Google

Desiree and Jessica’s training gave our team practical tools we could use immediately, and we're still using the frameworks and language they taught us. They are engaging trainers who create an experience of belonging and openness. It was one of the most impactful professional development experiences we've offered our staff.

- Viv Watts, Deputy Executive Director at Solar United Neighbors

Working with The Adaway Group has been a truly transformative experience. The content is always exceptionally well-crafted, and their teaching style is both engaging and deeply insightful, equipping me with the tools to lead with transparency and empathy, even through challenging times.

-La Toya Haynes, Founder and CEO of The Talent Practice

What You'll Do Differently

No long lectures or frameworks you'll never touch again. Just skills that work better than what you're doing now, so you'll want to use them every day.

PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN AND PRACTICE HOW TO:

Deal with conflict before it blows up

Stop swallowing it. Stop exploding over it. Bring up the thing everyone's been tiptoeing around, and stay in the room until you get somewhere.

Stay aligned when everything's moving fast

When the deadline is tomorrow and everyone wants something different, keep your values and your relationships from being the first things to go.

Give and receive feedback without the defensiveness

 Say the thing in the moment instead of saving it for the performance review. Hear the thing without spending the rest of the day replaying it.

Apologize and make it right

Skip the "sorry if anyone was offended." Own what happened, repair it, and rebuild the trust. Because things will go sideways.

Talk the same language as your team

When everyone knows how you give feedback, disagree, and decide, you stop wasting time decoding each other.

Shape culture from wherever you sit

Culture isn't the values on the website. It's what happens in a hundred small moments a day. You're in most of them. No title required.
This isn't a course you just sit through. It's a lab. You'll leave with the language, the tools, and the nerve to start working differently right away.

How It Works

Five chapters. First, we zoom out and look at the systems and pressures making work feel the way it does right now. It's not just you. 
Then we get into the people part, how we talk to each other and what we do when we don't agree. Last, we bring it home to you and what you're going to do differently.Each chapter has 5 to 7 lessons. Short videos, real workplace scenarios, interactive activities, reflection prompts, and assignments that get you trying things out with real people. Go through it solo or bring your team along.
You'll look hard at how your values, your habits, and your pace shape your relationships at work, and your relationship with work itself. Inspiration is nice. What lasts is having the words, the tools, and the permission to do it differently.

What Changes

When people know how to handle tension, say what they mean, and own how they show up, things shift fast and it keeps adding up. A hard conversation goes better. Then the next one does. Pretty soon, you've got a team that trusts each other.
Small shifts in everyday interactions create larger shifts in trust, accountability, and how work feels over time.

For You

Participants leave with greater clarity, confidence, and consistency in how they show up at work.
You'll be able to
  • Stop over-rehearsing hard conversations in the shower and just have them.
  • Think clearly when everything's urgent and everyone needs something from you.
  • When you get it wrong, you'll know how to make it right and move on.
  • More deeply live your values at work

For Teams and Organizations

As these skills become shared practices, teams experience stronger alignment, momentum, collaboration, and more resilience:
  • People stop protecting their "territory" and start solving problems together.
  • Tension gets dealt with  before it escalates
  • Leadership feels reliable no matter whose team you're on.
  • Less friction, so people want to stay.
  • Your values start showing up in how people treat each other.

Who We Are

We're Desiree and Jessica. Between us, we have more than 50 years of coaching, training, research, facilitation, and helping organizations change. We've worked together for more than a decade and trained over 70,000 people, at small nonprofits, big philanthropies, global tech companies, and universities.

Our work starts from one belief:

Work can be joyful.

We know how that sounds right now. We've seen it anyway.
People relax when they trust they can work through hard things together, because they have the skills, the language, and the room to do it.
That's what we teach. How to stay steady when things keep changing, make good calls when the answer isn't obvious, and build teams where people trust each other, own their mistakes, and treat each other like humans.

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.

Ready for More Joy at Work?

You've seen what's possible. Here's how to start.
Small shifts in everyday interactions create larger shifts in trust, accountability, and how work feels over time.

Lead the Change

Most organizations start with a group: managers, team leads, a task force, or the people who shape how work gets done every day. Then they grow from there. Pick the number of seats you need and get started today.

$349

PER SEAT

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

Start the change

If you're dealing with real conversations, real relationships, and real tension at work, these skills will help you right away. Whatever your title.

$349

One -time payment

Want us in the room with you?

We also bring this work to you live. Workshops, leadership programs, and consulting built around what your people are dealing with right now.