Tech Leader Toolbox - Where Strategic meets Tactical

Being a tech leader means balancing vision, strategy, and innovation—yet too often, the administrative burden of the role becomes a persistent obstacle, especially for those who found themselves thrust into leadership accidentally or reluctantly. If you're a technical expert navigating the transition into leadership, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by information overload, endless meetings, follow-ups, and scattered responsibilities.

In this practical, immediately applicable full day workshop, Michael introduces the Digital Knowledge Management (DKM) Tech Leader Toolbox—a proven approach to taming the chaos and reclaiming your clarity, productivity, and sanity. Leveraging Tiago Forte's “Building a Second Brain” methodology combined with powerful tools like Logseq, you'll learn structured workflows to capture, organize, distill, and effortlessly retrieve critical information exactly when you need it.

You'll discover how to streamline meeting notes, simplify administrative tasks, track decisions and outcomes, hold your self and your team accountable, and build your personal leadership knowledge base. With these tools and techniques, you'll not only master the administrative aspects of your role but transform them into a powerful advantage. Join us and take control of your leadership journey today!

Mastering Tech Leadership: From Problems to Programs to People

Unlock your full leadership potential with actionable insights and strategies to take you to the next level of your leadership journey. This immersive, hands on workshop promises no slides- just deep, meaningful discussions and real-world applications to elevate your awareness and capacity to lead.In this session, we walk the path of technical leadership - from solving problems to guiding programs to developing people - and the key challenges and changes required at each stage. Blending research with pragmatic and applicable practice, you’ll leave with new clarity and actionable steps to accelerate your growth as a leader.

Led by Pete Behrens, an engineer turned leadership trainer and coach, this workshop draws on 20 years of his experience developing technical leaders and transforming organizations for sustained performance and health.

Key Topics Include:

1. Understanding how technology and change are shaping new leadership approaches.
2. Differentiating your authority as a leader from the respect required for effective leadership.
3. Recognizing how your own technological mastery impedes your growth as a leader.
4. The art of letting go - and why it is only half the battle to becoming a better leader.
5. Developing a more strategic orientation, and aligning and engaging others towards it.
6. Navigating the fine line between influence and manipulation and how to know if you’ve crossed it.
7. Honing your power as a leader to foster safety, shared ownership, and engagement.

Note: This workshop is limited to 30-participants, ensuring an intimate, highly interactive experience for leaders at all levels.

Tech Leadership in the Time of AI

The typical path to senior tech leadership involves learning the
tools, tips, tricks, and artistry of using technology to further an
organization's business goals while satisfying the needs of its
customers. The collective experience of a leadership team benefits the
entire organization by providing them the vision and capacity to make
decisions in the face of technical and business change.

AI has emerged like a rocketship of disruption across our industry and
around the world. It has undermined the foundations on which this
collective wisdom has been forged with both promises of inconceivable
productivity and the fears of wide-scale obsolescence. The problem is
exacerbated by the wholesale failure of tech journalism to hold AI
companies and their advocates accountable for the wild claims they
have put out into the world.

This day-long workshop will help technology leaders evolve their thinking
to absorb these new realities into their collective wisdom. With a grounded
position on the realities of both the promises and pitfalls, I believe I can help
shape this discussion by facilitating discussion around the following topics.

• AI Reality Check
• The 21st Century Corporation
• How Your Vision of AI Shapes the Role It Will Take
• Making the Case for Adoption via Business Alignment
• Tech Trends Influenced By and Influencing AI
• The Role of Chief AI Officer
• The Path from Automation to Autonomy
• Augmenting Employees vs Replacing Them
• Extracting the Value of Institutional Memory
• Adopting Agents with Agency
• The Future of Work and Education
• The Security of AI Systems
• AI Legal Risks and Protections
• Ethics of Adoption
• Proactive AI Governance
• Measuring Success
• The Impact on Decision Making
• Preparing for What Is Next

Come have a deep, rich, and valuable discussion about AI that isn’t couched in greed
and fear. We will give you the tools to evaluate and select AI strategies that are reasonable,
profitable, lower risk, and based in reality.

Staying Grounded in the Chaos: The 4 Skills Every Tech Leader Needs

Missed deadlines. Underperforming teammates. Stakeholders pushing too hard. If you're a technical leader, you're probably avoiding at least one conversation that matters. In this workshop, you’ll learn a simple, proven 4-step framework (inspired by Nonviolent Communication) to handle tough conversations with clarity, confidence, and zero drama. Think of it like debugging communication: identify what’s really going on, name it without blame, and make a request that moves things forward.

You’ll also learn two essential FLOW skills to handle what makes these talks hard in the first place—pre-conversation anxiety and post-conversation rumination—and how to own your part without sliding into blame. You’ll leave this workshop with tools to approach difficult conversations with steady confidence and get your point across without triggering confusion or conflict. It will feel less like a confrontation and more like a real conversation—one that actually brings clarity to the situation.