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Kirsten AlburgLearning Experience Designer
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Leadership & Manager Enablement

Leadership Conversations

Scenario practice for the conversations managers avoid

Format
Slide-based branching scenario course
Audience
New and mid-level people managers
Length
30 minutes
Sections
5

Portfolio demonstration. This course was designed and built by Kirsten Alburg to show instructional design capability. It was not created for a client and is not built in Articulate.

Slide-based branching scenario course

Leadership Conversations

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Section 1 of 5 — The conversation gap20% complete

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The conversation gap

Two colleagues in an honest one-to-one conversation across a small table by a window
The conversation most managers avoid is usually the shortest one — and the one that would have changed the most.

Managers rarely fail at strategy

Most managers know what a good conversation should sound like. What they lack is practice under the emotional conditions the real conversation carries.

This module puts you inside four conversations, asks you to choose, and shows you what your choice sets in motion.

By the end of this course you will be able to

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Why it matters
Managers avoid these conversations until the pattern is entrenched, and then deliver them badly under pressure. Practicing early, low-stakes framing is what prevents that.
Where you will use it
One-to-ones, performance check-ins, and the moment you first notice a pattern instead of an incident.

Behind the build

Design Decisions

The instructional thinking behind this learning experience. Every interaction has a purpose; every design decision supports a learning objective.

Learning challenge

Managers avoid the performance conversation until it is a formal one. By then, the employee's first honest signal is a resignation.

Audience

Primary learners
New and mid-level people managers.
Prior knowledge
Strong in their technical discipline, untrained in structured feedback.
Learning need
A structure for opening a hard conversation without either softening it into nothing or escalating it.
Context of use
A scheduled one-to-one, with a relationship that has to continue afterwards.

Learning objectives

  • Open a performance conversation with observation rather than judgment.
  • Ask a question that surfaces the actual cause of missed work.
  • Agree a specific, checkable next step.
  • Recognise when a conversation should move to a formal process.

Design case study

Read the full breakdown

Challenge

Manager training is usually delivered as models and acronyms. Managers can recite the model and still avoid the conversation, because the difficulty is emotional and situational rather than informational.

Instructional strategy

Branching scenarios carry the whole course. Content appears only as the minimum framing needed to make the next decision meaningful, and every wrong option is a choice real managers actually make.

Reflection

Building this clarified that the highest-value content was the four-cause diagnostic. Managers who make that distinction handle conversations they were never explicitly trained for.

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