Budget cuts. Frozen headcount. Rising expectations. Sound familiar?
HR leaders are being asked to do more with less while somehow still developing talent, improving retention, and building high-performing teams. But here's the uncomfortable truth: most "people development" fails not because you lack resources—it fails because you're avoiding the hard conversations and real work that actually develops people.
When you have no budget and no staff, you can't hide behind programs and platforms. You're forced back to what actually works.
In this practical, no-BS webinar, executive leadership coach Leila Bulling Towne will show you how to strip away the performative development theater and build people processes that cost almost nothing but require courage, clarity, and commitment.
What you'll learn:
ELEVATE: Raising the Bar When You Can't Raise the Budget
- Make invisible standards visible and create peer accountability structures that cost nothing
- The Manager Accountability Audit: Can your managers articulate what capability they're building in each direct report?
- Kill low standards disguised as kindness
EMPOWER: Give People Authority to Grow Through Real Work
- Decision-making boundaries framework: What people can decide alone vs. what needs approval
- Remove approval bottlenecks that steal development opportunities
- Let people fail small in contained environments where mistakes teach
EDUCATE: Build Competency Without a Training Budget
- Turn your best people into your training program
- Zero-cost peer learning: Lunch-and-learns, manager swaps, cross-functional shadowing
- Real project post-mortems that build judgment (not the sanitized version)
What You'll Gain:
- The Process Kill List: Which "development" activities are pure theater and can be eliminated
- Decision Visibility Playbook: How to embed development into existing work
- The Shoestring Audit: Does your process build capability or just make you feel productive?
Meet the Presenter
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Leila Bulling Towne
Leila Bulling Towne is the creator of AwesomeLeader.com and founder of The Bulling Towne Group. She’s been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, NBC.com, Inc magazine and the BBC.com. She’s also the host of the podcast, “The Leadership Shot.” Her clients range from startup executives to super smart technical people managing teams for the first-time leaders with EQ challenges to newly promoted directors with a new span of control, to seasoned execs at Fortune 500 companies. Her sweet spots include emotional intelligence, teamwork and collaboration, executive presence, leadership brand, self-esteem as a high achiever, teamwork dysfunction and 1:1 “training” in leadership and management skills. She has over 270,000 online students.
SHRM certification has approved this webinar for 1 PDC toward SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP recertification. A program code will be provided at the end of the webinar.