Winnipeg Facilitator
Facilitated planning, leadership and team sessions for organizations in Winnipeg and across Manitoba.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Across Manitobain 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
Winnipeg & Manitoba
Facilitation for Winnipeg and Manitoba teams
Positive Impact facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for organizations in Winnipeg and across Manitoba. Winnipeg holds national head offices, a large public sector, and a manufacturing base, which means a facilitator meets very different kinds of rooms in the same week.
We won’t tell you we have a Portage Avenue office, because we don’t. What we bring is the facilitation craft: someone neutral who owns the process so your people can own the content. You know your organization and your communities better than any visiting facilitator will, and our job is to build the room where that knowledge gets used.
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
Manitoba organizations often plan on longer horizons than most, because the capital projects, the harvest cycles and the public funding cycles all run that way. We facilitate the process so a five-year plan still has names and dates attached to its first year.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. It travels well between a head office floor and a plant floor, which is a gap a lot of Winnipeg organizations are trying to close.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. Worth planning around the calendar here, because a January offsite asks a great deal more of everyone’s travel.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn shared purpose into commitments people live by, including where a stated commitment has been on the wall for a while without much behind it.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives, aimed at building clarity and confidence in how they lead. Often people promoted out of technical or operational roles who now lead the people who do them.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered in Winnipeg, or out to Brandon and the north when that’s where your teams are.
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 holding head office and operations at the same table, where the two groups have different vocabularies for the same problem. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and designed so neither group is talking past the other.
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.
-
Discovery
A call to understand your context, your goals, and who genuinely needs to be in the room.
-
Design
Customized session design, built around your team, not a template.
-
Facilitation
An experienced facilitator in the room or online, and in the room the day before.
-
Materials
Materials and tools your team can keep using afterward.
-
Follow-up
A summary with commitments and clear next steps.
-
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 high-performing teams work well together, whether they share a building or a province.
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 Manitoba 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 province
Where sessions happen, and what usually fits
Most of what we’re asked to do sits in Winnipeg itself, but Manitoba stretches a long way north and the organizations that operate up there plan differently because of it.
| Region | Organizations based there | Format that usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown and the Exchange District | Insurance and wealth management head offices, professional services, provincial ministries, arts and cultural organizations | In person, full day or multi-day. The deepest pool of meeting space in the province and the easiest place to gather a provincial group. |
| St. James, the airport lands and CentrePort | Aerospace and advanced manufacturing, transportation and distribution, trades and logistics employers | In person. Easy for anyone flying in, easy parking, and closer than downtown for a lot of shift-based teams. |
| South Winnipeg and Fort Garry | Post-secondary and research, health sciences, technology, agricultural science | In person, and often the calmest option for a full-day session away from head office interruptions. |
| Brandon and the Westman region | Agriculture and food processing, manufacturing, post-secondary, health and municipal teams | In person, roughly two hours from Winnipeg, so it works as its own day or as a second day on the same trip. |
| Northern Manitoba: Thompson, The Pas, Flin Flon | Mining and mining services, hydro, health and education, municipal bodies, Indigenous governments and organizations | Hybrid or virtual is usually the honest answer. When in-person genuinely matters, we build the travel into the scope and say so up front. |
A local detail that matters
What we will and won’t facilitate here
The 2021 Census counted just over 102,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit people in the Winnipeg region, the largest Indigenous population of any city in Canada. A lot of organizations here carry commitments that are real work rather than a slide at the front of a deck, and they often want a facilitator who understands that.
So we should be direct about what we are. Positive Impact facilitates strategy, planning and team sessions. We are not Indigenous facilitators, we do not lead ceremony or cultural teaching, and we should not be the ones running a session where Indigenous knowledge is the content. If that’s what your session needs, it needs an Indigenous facilitator or an Elder leading it, and we’d rather say so on the first call than take the booking.
What we can do is design a session where participation isn’t structurally tilted toward whoever is loudest or most senior, ask early whether someone else should be co-leading part of the day, and build the agenda around that answer rather than adding it at the end. That’s a first-call conversation, not a week-before one.
Featured Workshops
Each of these runs in person, virtually, or as a hybrid, which matters when part of your organization is in Winnipeg and part of it is four hours north.
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 where head office and operations have grown apart. What reads as decisive on one floor reads as dismissive on another, and without a shared vocabulary that difference gets filed under personality instead of distance.
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.
Manitoba organizations often plan on longer horizons than most, because the capital projects, the harvest cycles and the public funding cycles all run that way. We facilitate the process so a five-year plan still has names and dates attached to its first year.
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 that have worked together for years and are extremely polite with each other. Politeness is not the same as trust, and the difference shows up in how quickly a team can disagree and still leave the room aligned. 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 Manitoba 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.
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Mixed rooms Cultural sensitivity in facilitation Read the guide
- Honest advice When not to hire a facilitator, and what to do instead Read the guide
- Hybrid sessions Making mixed in-person and remote sessions work Read the guide
- Facilitation craft The art of asking the right questions Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Facilitation in Winnipeg and Manitoba
Are your facilitators based in Winnipeg?
No. Positive Impact is based in Victoria, BC, and our facilitators travel to Winnipeg for in-person work. We’d rather say that plainly than imply a local office we don’t have. What travels well is the facilitation craft itself, and what doesn’t travel is knowledge of your organization, which is exactly why our sessions are built to draw that out of the room rather than import it.
Do you facilitate Indigenous-led sessions or cultural work?
No, and we want to be direct about it. Positive Impact facilitates strategy, planning and team sessions. We are not Indigenous facilitators, we do not lead ceremony or cultural teaching, and we should not be running a session where Indigenous knowledge is the content. If that’s what your session needs, it needs an Indigenous facilitator or an Elder leading it. We’ll say so on the first call rather than take the booking, and we’ll help you look if that’s useful.
Can you work with teams outside Winnipeg, in Brandon or the north?
Yes, with an honest read on the trade-offs. Brandon is about two hours from Winnipeg, so it works as its own day or as a second day on the same trip and costs very little extra. For Thompson, The Pas and Flin Flon, hybrid or fully virtual is often the better use of your budget, and we’ll say so rather than quietly billing the flights. When an in-person day in the north genuinely matters, we build the travel into the scope up front.
What kinds of organizations do you work with here?
Leadership teams, boards, and departments across private, public, and non-profit organizations. In Manitoba that tends to mean insurance and wealth management, aerospace and advanced manufacturing, transportation and distribution, agriculture and food processing, health and social services, post-secondary institutions, Crown corporations, municipalities, and provincial ministries. Group size ranges from an executive team of eight to a leadership summit of sixty, and the design shifts considerably between those two.
Our head office and our operations people talk past each other. Can facilitation help?
Yes, and it’s some of the most useful work facilitation does here. The two groups usually agree on the goal and disagree on what the words mean, which looks like a personality problem and is actually a vocabulary problem. We facilitate the session that gets both sets of assumptions on the table in the same room, then turns them into shared commitments with names attached. Doing that in a low-risk, high-trust setting is what stops it becoming a complaints session.
How does travel affect what a session costs?
Travel is quoted as a separate line item, so you can see exactly what it adds. Winnipeg is a direct flight from the west coast, which makes it one of the cheaper in-person markets for us east of the Rockies. Virtual sessions carry no travel cost at all, and for a single working session that’s often the sensible choice.
How far ahead should we book?
Six to eight weeks is comfortable for an in-person session. That window covers a proper discovery call, a session design we build around your goals rather than a template, and any pre-work such as an anonymous survey or interviews. Winter travel is worth a little more margin than that, since a cancelled flight in January is not a hypothetical. Virtual sessions can move faster.
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 where in the province your people are, and we’ll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what a session in Winnipeg would look like.
Get in Touch
