Why Work With Us?

At The Hardin Group, we aren’t afraid to take risks and we only care about making a permanent impact. We aren’t your “smoke and mirrors,” check-the-box leadership consultants – we are fully invested in the success of our clients. We work with companies who walk the talk, invest in their people, and are willing to have the difficult conversations. And when we work with an organization, we mean it – we invest our heart and soul into positively changing your people and your culture. 

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."

We aren’t built to play it safe or do leadership training the “normal” way. A forward-thinking company needs a forward-thinking approach to meet your leadership, workforce, and culture needs. And that means you need a dynamic, customized training program to equip your leaders with the tools to manage change and perform at their highest potential. 

The Hardin Group has the experience and proven results to deliver a training program that fits the needs of your leaders and your culture. Our approach is not an off-the-shelf approach, it’s an approach that immerses us in your culture so we can create a sustainable training solution for long-term success.

100+ ORGANIZATIONS HAVE EXPERIENCED THE HARDIN GROUP’S LEADERSHIP CONSULTING, TRAINING, AND SPEAKING INCLUDING:

Leadership Training Topics

Programs, Workshops, Keynotes

The Hardin Group speaks and trains on a variety of leadership topics, including change management, high performing teams, authentic communication, embracing and navigating change, leading with excellence, overcoming perfectionism, leadership influence, confident leadership, and turning conflict into connection.

We also create bespoke training programs to fit the needs of our clients’ organizations. Below is a list of topics. You will find details about our most popular programs on this page.

Leadership Development
  • Becoming a Resilient Leader
  • Confident Leadership
  • Leading with Excellence
  • Overcoming Perfectionism
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Leading High Performing Teams

Team Development
  • Leading with Excellence
  • High Performing Teams
  • Team Culture
  • Embracing Change
  • Leveraging Loyalty
  • Boundaries & Bandwidth
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Leading High Performing Teams

Change Mangement
  • Leading through Change
  • Managing Culture Change
  • Embracing & Navigating Change
  • Building Trust During Transition

Communication + Conflict
  • Internal Communication
  • Having Difficult Conversation
  • Turning Conflict into Connection
  • Employee Engagement

Other Programs
  • Bespoke Corporate Training Programs
  • Needs Discovery Work
  • Mission, Vision, and Values Development
  • Strategic Advisory
  • Executive Coaching
  • Overcoming Perfectionism Accelerator

Our Most Popular Programs

All training programs and workshops are interactive and engaging and can be conducted in-person or virtually. Training length depends on the organization and varies from 60 minutes to a half-day. Below are some of The Hardin Group’s more popular training topics, and each training is tailored to meet the goals of each organization. 

Perfection is one of the most pervasive challenges holding leaders back – in fact, 92 percent of people struggle with some form of perfectionism. We too often believe that if we achieve perfection, we will also achieve happiness and success – this belief is holding us back. Symptoms of perfectionism include unrealistic expectations, fear of failure, procrastination, control, people-pleasing, self-criticism, conflict avoidance, feeling stuck, imposter syndrome, indecision, and anxiety. These symptoms are hindering your leaders and your workplace – 86 percent of leaders believe their work is impacted by these perfectionist expectations. In Overcoming Perfectionism in the Workplace, you will learn how to take your energy toward perfectionism and turn it to success. You will learn about the two types of perfectionism, how perfectionism patterns impact your leadership abilities, and the bold moves to take to break free from it. Attendees will leave feeling more empowered than ever before and will have the tools to help them lead with excellence and build their confidence. 

If perfectionism is impacting 92 percent of your people, then it’s impacting your workplace culture and bottom line. You have probably seen the effects of perfectionism all around you – your leadership team is burnt out and stressed, employees are procrastinating on projects and lack real confidence in their roles, your leadership lacks the skills to manage conflict and handle difficult conversations, employees are afraid to share ideas or speak up, your turnover rate is higher than you’d like, departments are working independently vs interdependently, budgets are not being achieved, and there are overall low levels of engagement, motivation, and trust.

An organization that embraces excellence is one that values trust, vulnerability, accountability, integrity, clarity, communication, and growth. It values the employees over the institution. It’s a growth-oriented organization that is always finding ways to improve and strive for excellence.

Vitale’s leadership philosophy is simple – it starts with you. Who we are is how we lead; and to make the biggest impact on how we lead, we must first look at ourselves. Our ability and effectiveness to lead others is 100 percent reflective of our ability to lead ourselves. Leading with Excellence is designed to first look at the individual leader and give them the awareness of what’s holding them back and the tools to help them succeed. Then we look at how to lead others with excellence, focusing on the Big 4 of leadership – Vulnerability, Trust, Accountability, and Communication.

Day 1 of the training is focused on how to lead yourself with excellence, and Day 2 is focused on how to lead others with excellence. Day 1 also focuses on the two types of perfectionism, how perfectionism patterns impact your leadership abilities, and the bold moves to take to break free from it. Day 2 focuses on tools to maintain momentum and action, and then how to lead others with vulnerability, trust, accountability, impactful relationships, and effective communication. Leaders will leave feeling more empowered than ever before and will have the tools to help them lead with excellence and build their confidence. Your team will also have a common language to use which helps build stronger relationships and stronger culture.

Who we are is how we lead, and that means leadership is an inside job. And that starts with emotional intelligence. So, what is emotional intelligence and why is it important? Emotional intelligence determines how effectively we understand and express ourselves, how we understand others and relate to them, and how we cope with daily demands.

Emotional Intelligence is one of the key predictors of professional success. It’s responsible for 58 percent of professional success and 90 percent of top performers score high on emotional intelligence. In our increasingly competitive market and the demands on our time and attention, emotional intelligence isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.

In this workshop you will learn about the five core areas of emotional intelligence: self-perception, self-expression, interpersonal, decision making, and stress tolerance. Most importantly, you will learn your own score in each of the five areas by taking the EQ-I 2.0 assessment prior to the workshop – this allows you to have a full understanding of your current strengths and opportunity zones. Attendees will also learn about the four leadership derailers and the wellbeing indicator. Most importantly, each attendee will leave this workshop with a clear understanding of emotional intelligence, their personal strengths and opportunities, and a personalized action plan to turn their insight into action. This workshop is interactive, engaging, and informative!

Confidence is one of the most important, yet one of the most underrated leadership skills. Most leaders have a sense of external confidence, meaning it’s based on external circumstances – salary, job title, performance reviews, work productivity, perfectionism, and positive feedback. The problem with this type of confidence is that it’s ever-changing and ever moving, which puts it out of their control. External confidence is a false sense of confidence. The type of confidence that leaders need to develop is internal confidence – which puts it in their control. This training covers the two types of internal confidence: (1) Foundational Confidence – how you build confidence within yourself, and (2) Growth Confidence – how you apply confidence in the workplace. Foundational confidence is all about awareness, mindset, and taking consistent action to build our internal sense of self confidence. Leaders will learn how to build their confidence with tangible tools and action steps. The second piece of confidence is growth confidence – which is how to apply your confidence in the workplace through communication, relationship-building, and decision-making. Leaders will walk away from this training with the tools to build their confidence, and a roadmap for how to apply it. 

The only constant is change. We hear this all the time, and we know this on an intellectual level, and yet change is still difficult for many leaders. One of the most important skills we need as leaders is resilience, which is the capacity to recover quickly from challenges and change. Resilient leaders are mentally and emotionally able to cope with a crisis or move through it and bounce back from stressful circumstances. Stress, change, and new challenges are all part of life and business – and leaders who are resilient will thrive. In this workshop, attendees will learn the three-phase approach to building resilience – awareness, mindset, and action. They will learn how to become aware of their change tolerance and then they will learn the mindset shifts required to become a resilient leader. They will leave the workshop with an action plan for practicing resilience in their everyday, and most importantly the confidence to navigate future change and challenges.  

Right now, we are experiencing a time of massive transition, which can create heightened anxiety, fear and chaos. However, it’s the individuals and organizations that use this time to turn inward and embrace change that will come out ahead. Instead of looking at transition as a time to shrink and be fearful, you can look at it as a time to expand and be open to possibility. It’s time to step into your power. It’s time to embrace and navigate change. In training, leaders will learn the three-step process for embracing change: Awareness, Perspective, and Action. They will become aware of their triggers and resistance to change, then they will learn the mindset techniques to shift out of fear into power, and finally the tools they need to take massive action and find alignment during this time. Leaders will leave this session with the confidence and tools to be the most powerful version of themselves. They will become a leader in embracing and navigating change.

We live in a fast-paced world with high demands and expectations on our teams and our leaders. The demands aren’t changing, which means our teams need to be adapting and performing at a higher capacity. This is where the 3 C’s come into play – Curiosity, Creativity, and Confidence. These are the three most underrated leadership skills, and these are three key ingredients that teams embody if you want to outperform your competitors. In this workshop, you will learn the importance of the 3 C’s and the tangible tools required to implement these skills throughout your teams. Attendees will leave this session more empowered than ever before knowing the tools needed to set their teams up for massive success in 2022. 

Change is a natural and powerful force, a constant and continuing phenomenon. Change may occur in regular, predictable cycles, such as the changing of the seasons. It may erupt abruptly and unexpectedly, as does an earthquake. Or it may develop as an anticipated but highly unpredictable event, such as a revolution. 

Change can create a crisis, and change can be the solution to a crisis. Just as the nature of change is varied, so are human responses. Some people are frustrated and disoriented by changes that confront them. Others find the prospect of uncertainty invigorating. Everyone responds to change in different ways. One thing is for certain, organizations must equip their people with change management tools and resources so they can navigate change effectively and with confidence. 

Our approach to change management training starts with self-awareness because leaders must know how to lead themselves through change before they can lead others through change. We organize our change management training content into three key parts: (1) leader awareness, (2) leadership development skills, and (3) accountability systems.

Bandwidth isn’t just a leadership issue, it’s a mental health issue. Employees are completely overbooked, overworked, and on the verge of chronic burnout.

In fact, bandwidth might be at an all-time low. This impacts workplace culture, productivity, and retention. So how do you solve it?   The solution for low bandwidth is high boundaries. When your plate is already full, you don’t need a bigger plate, you need better boundaries. In this workshop you will learn tangible strategies to solve the bandwidth problem.

You will learn about the different types of boundaries and how to implement them. Attendees will leave this workshop feeling more empowered than ever before with a clear roadmap and actions to take to solve their bandwidth problem!

About Vitale Hardin

President & CEO of The Hardin Group

Vitale is a top leadership consultant, architect of corporate culture, and believes that “who we are is how we lead.” She brings her training and concepts to life in a fun and relatable way, empowering teams and companies to transform the way they work, produce, and relate. Vitale is an iPEC-certified executive coach, trainer, award-winning speaker, and author. Featured in The New York Times, she is the author of the book, Addicted to Perfect, detailing her struggle with perfectionism and how she overcame it.

Vitale considers herself a change agent – working with organizations and leaders to transform their workplace cultures and leadership environments.She does this through intensive team trainings, strategic advisory, workshops, keynotes, culture change initiatives, and leadership coaching. Before starting her own business, Vitale spent 14 years impacting culture change and working in marketing and business development for a variety of industries and professional service organizations. Vitale loves traveling, Fleetwood Mac, morning walks, and lives in Kentucky with her husband, son, and dog.

Fun Facts About Vitale

Loves Sports Movies

Remember the Titans, Coach Carter, Rudy – you name it. I love sports movies. There’s something about transforming a team to reach their highest potential that I love.

StrengthsFinder

StrengthsFinder is one of my favorite assessment tools – it allows you to understand how you work best and how to work best with others according to their strengths. My top 10 are: Futuristic, Strategic, Achiever, Competition, Activator, Significance, Relator, Self-Assurance, Focus, and Command. I love creating strategies for companies and bringing them to life!

Greatest Achievement

My greatest achievement in life has been adopting my nephew and becoming his mom. I got him when he was five and now, he’s almost 11. He has been my biggest source of transformation.

Scariest Moment

I have three scariest moments – (1) getting sober in June 2014 (you can read all the juicy details in my memoir, Addicted to Perfect); (2) becoming a single mom to my nephew; and (3) leaving my corporate job in 2018 to start The Hardin Group.

Favorite Quote

I’m an inspirational quote addict – but my all-time favorite is “a ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for,” by John Shedd.

Watch Vitale in Action

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