Denver Facilitator
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions for organizations across Denver and the Front Range.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Denver and the Front Rangein person, virtual or hybrid
We design sessions that leave teams with shared clarity, specific commitments, and the momentum to follow through.
Trusted by teams across the public, private and non-profit sectors
Denver & the Front Range
Facilitation for Denver teams
Positive Impact Professional Development facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for organizations across Denver and the Front Range. A great many teams here are assembled from people who moved for the job, which means a Denver room often holds fewer shared assumptions than its org chart suggests, and rather more goodwill about fixing that.
We're a Canadian company and we cross the border for in-person work, which we'd rather say plainly than imply a local office we don't have. What we bring is the facilitation craft: someone neutral who owns the process so your people can own the content. If your footprint runs beyond the metro area, our Colorado facilitator page covers work further out along the Front Range and the Western Slope.
What we do
The areas Denver teams call us in for
Every engagement starts with your context. If your challenge isn't listed here, ask us anyway.
Strategic Planning
Denver has a lot of organizations planning through genuine growth, and growth tends to expose the decisions nobody quite made. We facilitate the process so your team names the priorities out loud, in front of each other, rather than settling them in corridors afterwards.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. It earns its keep quickly on teams built largely from new arrivals, where the shorthand a long-standing group relies on has never had time to form.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. Colorado makes a real offsite unusually easy, and the section further down explains what the elevation does to the agenda.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn shared purpose into commitments people live by, including in organizations that arrived here as a second office and have since become the centre of gravity.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives, aimed at building clarity and confidence in how they lead. Often engineers and scientists who now lead the people doing the work they used to do themselves.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered downtown, out at a campus, or virtually when a full day is more than the question needs.
Every engagement we run is shaped around your team. Tell us what you're working through and we'll build the right session around it.
Share what you're working onHow We Facilitate
Sessions that turn conversation into a plan your team can actually run with
There's no prepared script. We guide the process, your team brings the expertise, and together we build toward a plan your people helped shape and will actually use.
Being an outsider does real work in a market this connected. Denver's senior community is smaller than the population suggests, people move between the same set of employers, and a facilitator with no history at the table is easier to be candid in front of. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and free of any stake in which side wins.
Get in Touch
Why work with us
Three ways Denver teams engage a facilitator
Every engagement is customizable, but most start in one of these shapes.
Quarterly or monthly
Ongoing Partnership
A facilitator who gets to know your team over time, so trust deepens and development compounds instead of starting fresh each session. Mostly virtual, anchored by one or two in-person days a year.
Best for: making development a habit rather than a one-off.
Ask about a partnershipMulti-day, immersive
Multi-Day Offsite
Extended session for strategic planning, leadership development or a culture shift. Good mountain venues sit between ninety minutes and two and a half hours out, so the choice is which one rather than whether it's practical.
Best for: bigger decisions that need room to breathe.
Talk about an offsiteHalf-day to full-day
Single Workshop
A focused session built around one goal, whether that's a decision, a kickoff, or a skill such as communications or building trust and psychological safety.
Best for: teams that know exactly what they need to work through.
Ask about a workshop
How we facilitate
A clear path from first call to follow-through
Each engagement follows a similar path, and includes the same care, from your first call to the work that carries on after everyone flies home.
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Discovery
A call to understand your context, your goals, and who genuinely needs to be in the room.
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Design
Customized session design, built around your team rather than a template.
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Facilitation
One lead facilitator holding the process, on the ground the day before.
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Materials
Materials and tools your team can keep using afterward.
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Follow-up
A summary with commitments and clear next steps.
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Support
Optional support to help momentum carry past the session.
Why facilitation?
How a team works together shapes everything it creates.
$100 Million
is the yearly cost for big companies for staff being in pointless meetings.
65%
of senior managers say that meetings keep them from completing their own work.
58%
of Americans would rather go to a doctor's appointment than attend a work meeting.
75%
of decision-makers feel that collaboration needs to be improved in their companies.
Forrester Research, 2021
Outcomes
What your team walks away with
Decisions the room actually owns
Choices the group gets behind together, rather than a well-run discussion that leaves everyone with a slightly different idea of what was agreed.
Real buy-in
Because people helped shape the outcome, they leave invested in it rather than briefed on it.
A team that knows each other better
The trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on, which matters more than usual where a good share of the group met each other at work rather than through a decade in the same city.
Action that sticks
Clear commitments and ownership that carry into Monday morning, not just good intentions on the day.
Fresh thinking and better ideas
Space for your team's best thinking to surface, including ideas that would not have come up with the usual person chairing.
A record everyone can point at
A written summary of what was decided, who owns it, and by when, which matters when part of the group has to brief a parent company somewhere else.
Client stories
Real teams, real outcomes
These aren't all Denver engagements, and we won't pretend otherwise. They're the kinds of sessions we run and the outcomes teams point to afterward.
What our clients say
It was a pleasure to work with Will and Positive Impact. I was both inspired and empowered to co-deliver a meaningful offsite. Their positive incite into leadership performance and emotional resilience gave me clear direction and tactical tools I could apply to my workplace right away. I thoroughly look forward to working with Will again.
- Haley Daniels
Olympian and Motivational Speaker
Thanks for your incredible support, kindness, professionalism, and realness.
It was my sincere pleasure and privilege to work with you on our event.
You are a unique and special human, and I’m grateful that our paths crossed on this project, and look forward to the next time.
- Shauna Grinke, MBA, CPHR
Vice President - People and CultureThe workshop was an incredibly valuable experience for our team — the facilitator created an open, engaging environment that encouraged honest discussion and collaboration. The content was thoughtfully tailored to our team’s specific goals, making the session both relevant and actionable. We’re excited to continue partnering with Positive Impact to build on the great momentum sparked in this session.
- Shannon Charbonneau
Account Director
Treetop Marketing and Promotion Inc.
I’m leaving our session with a sense of optimism that I haven’t had in a while. It was time extremely well spent! I am sure that we all feel much closer and more connected.
- Participant
MDA Geointelligence Engineering Leadership SummitThe environment that was created made me feel comfortable to participate and collaborate with my colleagues. It was very well organized. I liked the outcome of the brainstorm sessions and warmup activities.
- ParticipantThe level of engagement and pace of the training was excellent. Like the fact that this workshop was trainer-guided, but participants lead!
- ParticipantFantastic facilitating most importantly Will understood when to let us talk and when to corral us back on track. Excellent value this afternoon.
- Engagement Workshop Participant
100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
We stand behind the quality of our work with complete confidence. If you're not fully satisfied with the results, we'll make it right.
Your trust matters more to us, and our guarantee acknowledges our belief that you deserve to feel confident in every investment you make with us. That's a standard we hold ourselves to, every time.
Ready to talk about your team?
Get in TouchAround the metro
Where sessions happen, and what usually fits
The metro is easy to move around and the mountains are closer than most cities can claim. Where you hold the session mostly comes down to who has to travel and how high you're willing to go.
| Area | Organizations based there | Format that usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown, LoDo and the central business district | Corporate headquarters, healthcare administration, energy, law and professional services, associations, state offices | In person. Walkable for most downtown teams and the deepest pool of meeting space in the region. |
| The Tech Center, Greenwood Village and the south metro | Technology and software, financial services, telecom, consulting, aerospace suppliers, corporate campuses | In person, and the easier ask when most of your group is already south. Simpler parking than downtown and a shorter run to the airport. |
| Aurora and the Anschutz medical campus | Health systems, clinical and research teams, life sciences, higher education | In person, and worth choosing when clinicians are in the group. Being close to the wards decides who attends and who half-attends. |
| Boulder, Broomfield and the northwest | Aerospace and space systems, research institutes, climate and instrumentation, venture-backed technology | In person, about forty-five minutes out, and often a friendlier ask than pulling that group downtown at rush hour. |
| Lakewood, Golden and the west | Federal agencies at the Denver Federal Center, energy and renewables research, mining and engineering, municipal teams | In person. Scheduling here follows the federal and fiscal calendar considerably more than the local one. |
| Mountain venues: Estes Park, Winter Park, Breckenridge and Vail | Retreat and offsite venues between roughly ninety minutes and two and a half hours out | Multi-day, with the elevation planned for rather than discovered on the day. The section below sets out how we handle it. |
A local detail that matters
At 5,280 feet, elevation is a session design input rather than a fun fact
Denver sits at exactly one mile above sea level, and each breath here carries roughly a sixth less oxygen than one at the coast. For anyone who flew in from sea level that morning, the effects tend to show up six to twenty-four hours after landing: headache, fatigue arriving faster than expected, broken sleep, and a general flatness that reads across a room as disengagement when it is nothing of the kind.
Set that against a standard offsite agenda and the problem is easy to see. People land late morning, check in, sit down after lunch, and the hardest thinking of the day gets scheduled for late afternoon on day one, which is precisely when that window opens. If there's a dinner attached, alcohol lands harder than it would at home, because nobody has acclimatized yet. Day two inherits the consequences.
So we design against it rather than hope for the best. Where the budget allows we ask people to arrive the night before. The heaviest decision goes in the morning of day two rather than the afternoon of day one. Blocks are shorter with more breaks in them, water sits on the table rather than at the back of the room, and we name the whole thing at the open so nobody spends the afternoon quietly wondering whether it's just them.
Mountain venues change the arithmetic again. Symptoms become considerably more likely above about eight thousand feet, and several of Colorado's favourite retreat towns sit at or above that, Breckenridge among them at roughly 9,600. For those we suggest a night in Denver first and a deliberately light first afternoon once you're up there. None of this is medical advice, it's scheduling, and it's the sort of thing a facilitator who flies in twice a year would never think to ask about.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs in person, virtually, or as a hybrid, and each is designed around your goals rather than delivered off a shelf.
COMS Communication Styles
COMS is our own communication styles assessment, grounded in research and facilitated by our team. It gives your people a shared way to talk about how they each work, so different styles become an advantage instead of a source of friction.
It does particularly useful work on teams assembled quickly from people who arrived from elsewhere. Everyone brings the habits of their last employer, and without a shared vocabulary those differences get read as personality rather than as training.
Eight questions, one simple grid, and a reference the whole team can point at months later.
Learn more
Strategic Planning
This is where your team gets a real say in shaping and carrying out the organization's direction, landing on initiatives that actually move forward.
The facilitator's job in a planning session is to stop a capable group talking itself into twenty priorities. That means pressing when the room is avoiding a choice, which is a good deal easier for someone who doesn't work there.
A strategic plan is a living, breathing document. We stay involved as it plays out over the following months and years.
Learn more
5 Dysfunctions of a Team
This session takes a good team and helps make it excellent. We draw on Patrick Lencioni's well-known framework, approached through an appreciative inquiry lens that starts with what's already working.
It's the session we're asked for most often by groups that get on well and have never had a hard conversation. Warmth is not the same as trust, and the difference shows up the first time something genuinely difficult needs settling. The five behaviours, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are all on the table.
Your people walk away with shared language for how they work together, and a plan for moving forward that they built themselves.
Learn more
Our Core Team
Great content is only made better by great facilitators
Will Chambers
Founder & Facilitator
Award-winning facilitator and Founder of Positive Impact, with sessions delivered to tens of thousands of people. Will focuses on strategy, leadership, team dynamics and communication, turning concepts into clear, committed action.
More about Will
Lindsay Davis
Coach & Strategist
Award-winning coach and entrepreneurial guide, with experience spanning rural entrepreneurs in Africa to multimillion-dollar companies. Helps leaders focus on what matters most and build the resilience to anticipate challenges and move through them.
More about LindsayMichael Lorsch
Facilitator & Learning Consultant
Brings facilitation and learning design from theatre stages to executive boardrooms, including in-house work with lululemon. Blends mindfulness, relationship systems and human-centred design to keep people at the centre of every session.
More about Michael
Jason Maraschiello
Coach & Facilitator
Certified life and corporate coach, mindfulness and meditation teacher. Uses mindfulness and effective communication to help people set manageable goals, find work-life balance and build the support to follow through.
More about Jason
For work in Denver we assign one lead facilitator who runs your discovery call, designs the session, delivers it, and stays with you through the follow-up. You will not be sold by one person and facilitated by another. Beyond the core team, we draw on a wider network of facilitators and subject-matter experts, matched to the goals, sector, and people of each engagement.
Before you book
Worth reading first
Six pieces that answer the questions most teams have before a first session.
- Offsites How a facilitator benefits your next offsite Read the guide
- The case 15 vital reasons to hire a facilitator Read the guide
- Team stages Everything you need to know about the Tuckman model Read the guide
- Leadership The relationship between facilitation and leadership Read the guide
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Facilitation in Denver
Are your facilitators based in Denver?
No. Positive Impact is a Canadian company and our facilitators travel to Denver for in-person work. We'd rather say that plainly than imply a local office we don't have. Arriving with no history with anyone in the group is often the more useful half of being an outsider, particularly in a market where a lot of senior people have already worked together somewhere else.
Does the elevation actually affect a full-day session?
Yes, and more than most people plan for. Denver sits at 5,280 feet and the effects on anyone arriving from sea level usually appear six to twenty-four hours after landing, which lands squarely on the afternoon of a day-one offsite. Headache, faster fatigue and broken sleep are the common ones, and across a room they read as disengagement rather than as physiology. We build the agenda around that window instead of pretending it isn't there.
Should we hold our offsite in the mountains or in the city?
In the city if the priority is a working day, in the mountains if the priority is genuinely stepping away. The trade-off worth knowing is elevation: symptoms become considerably more likely above about eight thousand feet, and several of the popular retreat towns are at or above that. If you choose one of those, plan a night in Denver first and keep the first afternoon light. We'll say honestly which we think fits your goals.
Who would actually facilitate our session?
One named lead facilitator, and you meet them before you commit to anything. They run your discovery call, design the session, deliver it and stay with you through the follow-up, so nothing gets lost in a handover. Our core team is on this page and we'll tell you which of them fits your situation and why.
Could we just have one of our own leaders run it?
You could, and sometimes that's the right answer, which we'll say on the first call if we think it. What you give up is that nobody can run the process and take part in it at the same time without one of the two suffering. When a senior person chairs, their view carries extra weight whether they intend it or not, and the quieter opinions stay quiet. Bringing someone in means your most experienced people get to be participants for once.
What kinds of organizations do you work with here?
Leadership teams, boards, and departments across private, public, and non-profit organizations. In Denver that tends to mean aerospace and space systems companies and their suppliers, federal agencies and the contractors around them, health systems and the research teams on the Anschutz campus, energy and renewables, telecom, financial services, technology, municipalities, and associations. Group size ranges from an executive team of eight to a leadership summit of sixty.
What does bringing in a facilitator from outside the state add in travel?
Travel is quoted as a separate line item so you can see exactly what it adds, and Denver is a straightforward flight with good connections, which keeps it modest. Our facilitator arrives the day before rather than trying to land and lead on the same morning, which matters more here than elsewhere for the reasons set out above. Virtual sessions carry no travel cost at all.
What do we have in writing after the session?
A written summary with the decisions made, the commitments people made out loud, and who owns what by when. Multi-day offsites usually add 30, 60 and 90 day commitments with a named owner on each. Most sessions also produce something structural, such as a plan on a page or shared language for how the team communicates. It lands within a few days, while people still remember why they agreed to things.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what you're working through and whether you're thinking about a day downtown or a couple of days up the hill, and we'll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what a session in Denver would look like.
Get in Touch
