St. John's Facilitator
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions for organizations in St. John's and across the Avalon.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Avalon Peninsulain 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
St. John's & the Avalon
Facilitation for St. John's teams
Positive Impact facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for organizations in St. John's and across the Avalon. Nearly every provincial head office sits here, which means a St. John's room often carries responsibility for communities several hours away and sometimes only reachable by air.
We won't tell you we have an office on Water Street, because we don't. What we bring is the facilitation craft: someone neutral who owns the process so your people can own the content. If your footprint runs across the province, our Newfoundland and Labrador page covers work from the Avalon to Labrador West.
What we do
The areas we're called in for most
Every engagement starts with your context. If your challenge isn't listed here, ask us anyway.
Strategic Planning
Planning for a province from its capital is its own discipline. We facilitate the process so the priorities hold up when they reach a regional office five hours down the highway, rather than needing a translation nobody has time to write.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. Useful in a professional community this size, where the same people work together across several organizations over a career.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. There are good venues within half an hour of town, and shoulder season is both cheaper and considerably more reliable.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn shared purpose into commitments people live by, including in organizations that have been through amalgamation and are still working out what it changed.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives, often people promoted out of technical or clinical roles who now lead the colleagues they used to work beside.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered in town, or virtually to regional teams when travel would cost more than the session.
Every engagement we run is shaped around your team. Share what you're working on 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.
Here that often means a room where head office and the regions both have a seat, and only one of them had to leave home to be there. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and designed so travelling that far buys you a real say rather than attendance.
Get in Touch
Why work with us
Three ways teams here 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. When we're flying east anyway, two days costs far less per day than one.
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 like 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 we fly home.
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Discovery
A call to understand your context, your goals, and what your fallback looks like if the weather has other ideas.
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Design
Customized session design, built around your team, not a template.
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Facilitation
An experienced facilitator in the room or online, and in the room 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
Better decisions, made together
Decisions the whole room actually gets behind, instead of quiet disagreement that surfaces later in the parking lot.
Real buy-in
Because people helped shape the outcome, they leave genuinely invested in it, not just told what was decided.
Stronger team connection
The kind of trust and psychological safety that lets a group say the difficult thing in a professional community where everyone will meet again.
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 might never have come up otherwise.
A record everyone can point at
A written summary of what was decided, who owns it, and by when. Useful when half the group has to brief a site that wasn't in the room.
Client stories
Real teams, real outcomes
These aren't all Newfoundland and Labrador 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 Avalon
Where sessions happen, and what usually fits
Most St. John's work happens within the metro area, and the Avalon adds another hour in most directions. What varies more than distance here is whether the day happens at all.
| Region | Organizations based there | Format that usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown and the harbour | Provincial ministries and agencies, offshore energy operators and their supply chain, professional services, associations | In person. Walkable for most of the people you would want in the room, and where most provincial-scope sessions land. |
| The university and health sciences area | Memorial University, health authority and clinical teams, ocean technology and marine research, spin-out companies | In person, and worth choosing when clinicians or researchers are in the group. Being close to the wards or the lab decides who actually attends. |
| Mount Pearl, Paradise and the northeast Avalon | Supply chain and fabrication, distribution and logistics, municipal teams, trades employers | In person. Easier parking than downtown and a shorter run for teams already based out that way. |
| Conception Bay South and the Avalon | Municipal bodies, health and education, small and mid-size employers, fisheries and marine | In person, under an hour out. Often a friendlier drive for a regional group than asking everyone into the city. |
| Beyond the Avalon | Regional health and education teams, resource operations, municipalities, Indigenous governments and organizations | Virtual or hybrid is usually the honest answer. See our Newfoundland and Labrador page for province-wide work. |
A local detail that matters
Here the weather is a planning input, not small talk
Everywhere else we work, weather is a nuisance. Here it cancels things. A winter system can close the highway, ground the flights and shut the city for a day or more, and it does so with enough regularity that nobody local treats it as bad luck. Fog does its own quieter version to the airport at other times of year.
What that means for a session is specific. If your facilitator is flying in and the date is in February, you have a single point of failure on the most expensive day in your calendar. Worse, the failure usually lands the night before, when twenty people have already cleared their diaries and a venue has been paid for.
So we plan for it out loud rather than hoping. Shoulder season where the content allows, since late spring and early autumn are both cheaper and considerably more reliable. A virtual fallback agreed at booking, not improvised at 6am, with the agenda already adapted for a screen so nobody is redesigning under pressure. And for anything genuinely important, we would rather run it across two shorter sessions than stake a year's planning on one winter date.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs in person, virtually, or as a hybrid, which is worth more here than in most markets.
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's particularly useful in a professional community this size, where the same people work together across several organizations over a career and the habits travel with them.
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.
Planning for a province from its capital is its own discipline. We facilitate the process so the priorities hold up when they reach a regional office five hours down the highway, rather than needing a translation nobody has time to write.
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 lands well with leadership groups in a small professional community, where people are careful with each other because they will meet again in another organization. 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 St. John's we assign one lead facilitator who travels for the session and stays with you through the follow-up, rather than handing you to a different person each time. 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.
- Wider footprint Facilitation across Newfoundland and Labrador Read the guide
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Hybrid sessions Making mixed in-person and remote sessions work Read the guide
- Honest advice When not to hire a facilitator, and what to do instead Read the guide
- Strategic planning Why organize a strategic planning session Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Facilitation in St. John's
Are your facilitators based in St. John's?
No. Our facilitators travel here for in-person work, and we'd rather say that plainly than imply a local office we don't have. It also means we arrive with no history with anyone in the room, which in a professional community this size is often the more useful half of being an outsider.
What happens if the weather cancels the session?
We agree the fallback at booking rather than improvising it at six in the morning. That usually means a virtual version of the day already designed for a screen, so nobody is redesigning under pressure, and a reserve date held where the calendar allows. For anything genuinely important we would rather run it across two shorter sessions than stake a year's planning on one winter date.
When is the best time of year to book?
Late spring or early autumn, if the content allows any flexibility. Shoulder season is cheaper for venues and travel, and considerably more reliable than midwinter. Summer competes with holidays and, for anyone connected to tourism or the fishery, with the busiest weeks of their year. If it has to be February, we'll build the contingency in properly rather than treating it as unlikely.
Our head office is here but our people are all over the province. How does that work?
Usually as an in-person anchor session for the group that most needs to be in a room, then structured virtual sessions that bring the regions in without asking people to fly. Anyone travelling from beyond the Avalon is giving up a day either side, so if they're in the room the day has to buy them a real say rather than attendance. Our Newfoundland and Labrador page covers province-wide work in more detail.
What kinds of organizations do you work with here?
Leadership teams, boards, and departments across public, private, and non-profit organizations. In St. John's that tends to mean provincial ministries and agencies, offshore energy operators and their supply chain, ocean technology and marine research, Memorial University, health and social services, municipalities, professional services, and associations with a provincial membership. Group size ranges from an executive team of eight to a leadership summit of sixty.
Everyone in the room knows each other professionally. Does that change anything?
It changes how candid people will be without help. In a small professional community, people are careful because they will meet again in another organization in five years, and that caution reads as agreement when it isn't. We use written-first input so views are committed before anyone reads the room, and anonymous input for the questions nobody wants to own. What surfaces is usually already widely understood and simply unsaid.
How does travel affect what a session costs?
Travel is quoted as a separate line item, so you can see exactly what it adds. St. John's is a long way from most of the country, so it is a full travel day in each direction and our facilitators arrive the day before rather than trying to land and lead on the same morning. Virtual sessions carry no travel cost at all.
What does our team actually walk away with?
A written summary with the decisions made, the commitments people made out loud, and who owns what by when. Most sessions also produce something structural, such as a plan on a page, a set of priorities the group agreed to, or shared language for how the team communicates. The point is traction on Monday morning rather than a good feeling that fades by Wednesday. We can stay involved afterward if you want support keeping it alive.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what you're working through and when you're hoping to run it, and we'll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what a session in St. John's would look like.
Get in Touch
