Everyone A Leader®

Facilitative leadership is an approach to leading others that honors the six principles of trauma-informed environments articulated by SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration): Safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment and choice, and cultural, historical and gender sensitivity.

Everyone A Leader (EAL) is a series of interactive, virtual workshops that equip all employees with methods and tools to help them become effective, trauma-informed, facilitative leaders. Designed to help organizations create a culture of empowered, engaged employees, our workshops embrace the principle that everyone can lead—no matter what position they occupy. The result: A high-performing organization with employees who can think and take action together.

“Lead where you are”

We have a saying in our EAL workshops: “Leadership is a decision, not a job description.” Simply put, that means effective leadership can happen from any position in an organization as long as the person who occupies that position feels empowered to lead. Everyone a Leader helps your organization take steps toward creating a culture where each employee is allowed—and expected—to “lead where you are.”

EAL is a great training. Not only did it provide resources that help me to move things into action, to help me be successful, but it has given my team those same resources. I've seen one of my committee members really come out of her shell since the training. She's really blossomed and so much more engaged in our work, thinking strategically, sending me frequent emails. This individual has really grown, and is willing to speak out in a way she wasn't before the EAL workshops.

Brandi Turner
DEI Officer
Kansas Department for Children and Families

On a personal level, EAL has helped me see that I really can act on my vision for myself. I'm a big dreamer, and sometimes my visions for my life seem unattainable. The 'Vision – Reality – Choice' Life Method has helped me break down the tasks I need to do to implement my vision—and to see what's getting in the way of achieving it. 

Azariah Butler Ruthford
West Region Human Services Consultant
Kansas Department for Children and Families

EAL teaches our facilitators how to build on their skills and put them to more creative use. It gives them a framework that's designed to make sure every voice at the table is heard. As a leader myself, I find its organizing principal indispensable to the work I do: Collective participation is the best path toward taking collective action.

Chandra Green
Program Director

I'm a frontline worker and not accustomed to sharing my ideas for improving operations. I figured that was a job for my supervisor and management. But since going through EAL, I realize that my voice matters—not just for myself, but for our organization.

Lacey Mays
Case Manager

I work in a small team. Just five of us. Recently we were tasked with writing out this plan. This was before I'd taken the EAL workshops, and we really struggled, meeting and talking about what we needed to work on but never figuring out how to organize it. Once I was exposed to EAL's tools things started to click. They truly made a huge difference. We'd still probably be trying to write that plan if I hadn't been in the class!

Sarah E. Drake
Staff Fidelity Specialist
Department of Corrections

I recently used EAL's "Wall of Wonder" to move an idea I had into action: Create a nation-wide association designed to strengthen relationships between law enforcement and mental health providers. One participant told me he was amazed at the process. We'd brought together people from across the country who didn't know each other and in half a day we had our plan!

Jessica Murphy
Mental Health Supervisor

The Everyone A Leader workshops have shown us as a team how to get moving with an idea. Everyone knows how you can put so much work into a plan only to watch it gather dust. We don't do that anymore. We want our work to count. And it does.

Corey Lada
Adoption Program Manager
Kansas Department for Children and Families

Everyone A Leader has really helped me feel more comfortable in my position. With EAL, you learn that everyone's voice matters and that organizations that are committed to this approach can create safe spaces where everyone can share their ideas—from the top down. I now feel comfortable coming forward if I have concerns or ideas about improving policies and procedures.

Jamie Ruggles
Forensic Case Manager, Adult Services
Johnson County Mental Health Center

Everyone A Leader has transformed our organization. From the frontline to the director, we all feel empowered to lead from our positions. Our staff is engaged, which means our clients are engaged. In fact, our client ‘no show’ rate dropped from 35 percent to 12 percent. I figured it would take us five to six years to turn the place around, but we’re at an incredible place in half that time.

Tim DeWeese
Executive Director, Johnson County Mental Health Center

I really looked forward to our EAL sessions. The course was broken down into reasonable chunks of time, and the tools we practiced created a lively pace. The materials and workbooks we received are now part of my library. If I don't get anything out of EAL, that's totally on me, because I have the tools and resources I need to make the most of it.

Jason Stary
Mental Health Clinician

The EAL Story

Twenty-five years ago, a TeamTech client had a simple request: “Can you teach our staff the skills you’re using to help us think and take action together?” Never ones to refuse a challenge, TeamTech’s founders spent several months building a curriculum that would eventually be called “Everyone A Leader.” The client’s enthusiastic response to that first set of workshops encouraged TeamTech to offer the curriculum to all of its clients.

Since then, the EAL curriculum has evolved, adapting to rapidly-changing work environments and responding to the latest research in leadership practices. But its core beliefs have never wavered:
1) Leadership is a decision, not a job description;
2) Organizations are stronger when ALL their employees know how to lead from where they are;
3) Trust comes when you lead where you are with intention and authenticity.

A Message from our CEO

EAL Client Testimonials

How EAL Transforms Your Organization

Many leadership trainings tell you what you need to do to be an effective leader.

Everyone A Leader shows you how to do it.

Our workshops bring your employees together as a team so they can learn how to apply principles that are the bedrock of every successful organization.

We use small group work and facilitative apps to help your employees:

  • Identify

    a shared vision and create dynamic plans to realize it

  • Adopt

    a common language and common tools for solving problems

  • Utilize

    mindfulness techniques to maximize potential

  • Collaborate

    rather than dictate

Tools To Move Plans Into Action

For more than two decades, we have refined and expanded the tools and methods that help people think and take action together. They fall into three general categories:

Facilitative Tools

Brainstorming is great. But what do you do once you’ve generated a couple dozen “good” ideas? Our facilitative tools go beyond list making and help ease the way for your employees to think and take action together. One of our most popular tools, the Wall of Wonder, encourages teams to pause, step back, think about, and even celebrate their accomplishments over the last year or two. Once you do this, you’re ready to take the next step: creating a dynamic plan that builds on your team’s strengths.

Life Methods

We make dozens, if not hundreds, of decisions every day without giving them much thought: Where to sit in a room? What shirt to wear? A natural thinking process underlies each one of those decisions. Our Life Methods help you and your team bring more intention and deliberation to this and other natural processes. With EAL, your organization practices these methods in order to close the gap between what you want and what you have so you can arrive at what you need to do.

Bits of Wisdom

TeamTech has applied these tools and methods to help others think and take action together for more than 30 years. We’ve used them in planning sessions with Fortune 500 companies, cabinet level government agencies, and community organizers in developing countries. Along the way, we have learned quite a bit! In Everyone A Leader, we share these insights—our Bits of Wisdom—so you can use the life methods and facilitative tools as effectively as possible.
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EAL Modules

The 15, two-hour workshop format incorporates small group work as well as facilitative apps that make the virtual environment highly interactive. Mind-body science that enhances learning is incorporated throughout.

  • Approach

    Two, 2-hour workshops

    Adopt an intentional and authentic facilitative style to build trust, achieve stability, take healthy risks – and lead where you are.

    Workshop Titles
    A Facilitative Approach
    Preparing Yourself

  • Action

    Four, 2-hour workshops

    Creating a common vision and moving plans into action.

    Workshop Titles
    The Life Method for Action
    Sustaining Momentum
    Planning Together
    Moving Plans Into Action

  • Empowerment

    Two, 2-hour workshops

    Learn how to coach people to empowerment.

    Workshop Titles
    The Life Method for Empowerment
    The ALPS Journey

  • Thinking Together

    Four, 2-hour workshops

    Build reflective capacity in yourself and others – that important “pause button” that deepens and broadens insights.

    Workshop Titles
    The Life Method for Thinking Together
    Reflective Conversations
    Revealing Insight
    More Thinking Together Tools

  • Big-Picture

    Two, 2-hour workshops

    Filtering initiatives, ideas and actions to gain a comprehensive perspective for next steps.

    Workshop Titles
    The Life Method for Big-Picture Perspective
    Aligning During Change

  • Lead Where You Are

    One, 2-hour workshop

    Identifying and practicing your “go to” EAL skills.

    Workshop Title
    Your Everyone A Leader Journey

EAL BLOG

Click the headlines to read more…

On Everyone A Leader®

There are many great examples of how Everyone A Leader (EAL) stands apart from traditional leadership curricula. It doesn’t simply tell you what it takes to be an effective leader, it shows you how to be an effective leader. It provides you with the tools you need to turn your ideas into action. It demonstrates the necessity of valuing all the voices that make up an organization–from clerical staff to CEOs. But as an African-American woman who has navigated workplaces where Black voices are too often silenced, I believe that EAL’s greatest attribute is something even more powerful: Its ability to create a culture of belonging, and, in the process, help people heal.

HOW TO GET STARTED

Everyone A Leader workshops are offered as in-person or virtual formats. View the current schedule below, or for more information, contact Kathleen Harnish McKune at [email protected] or 913-706-8797.

Are you an EAL graduate? Click here to learn about the EAL Learning Collaborative.

Kathleen Harnish McKune, Everyone A Leader® (EAL) author will facilitate Virtual EAL Workshops in 2025. Contact Kathleen Harnish McKune for registration information or questions:

The following DEI-focused workshops are led by Certified EAL Facilitator, Brandi Turner, and are available to DCF employees and DCF partner agencies only. Contact Brandi Turner for registration information or questions:

The three Johnson County Mental Health Center Certified EAL Facilitators will facilitate In-Person EAL Workshops in 2025 available to all Johnson County, KS employees. Contact Tim DeWeese for registration and information or questions.

TeamTech also offers training for embedded EAL facilitators to train employees within your organization. Learn more here.

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About EAL’s Creator

Kathleen Harnish McKune, MBA and former CFA, is a co-founder of TeamTech and its current CEO. Coming from the world of finance and quality management, Kathleen has worked with for-profit, non-profit, and local and state governments, including two Kansas governors and their cabinets. In 1991, she studied as an intern with one of the fathers of the quality management movement, Dr. W. Edwards Deming. First under Dr. Deming’s guidance, then in partnership with her TeamTech co-founders, Kathleen deepened her understanding of facilitation, reflection, data driven-decisions, systems thinking, and the value that insights from front-line workers can bring to organizations. Click here for more of Kathleen’s story.