CWA Leadership Workshop
May to July 2027
May to July 2027
Leading people is a skill, and like any skill, it gets better with good coaching and deliberate practice.
We've teamed up with Unblocd to bring you the CWA Leadership Workshop, a leadership program built for climbing gym managers. It pairs an in-person workshop during the CWA Summit with six live online sessions from May to July 2027. You'll work directly with psychologists Madeleine Crane and Kaisa Soininen, and you'll leave with tools you can immediately use with your team.
Workshop At A Glance |
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What You'll Work On
Every topic works on two levels. You build your own skills as a leader, and you leave with something concrete to practice with your team. Open each topic to learn more.
What you'll learn
- Know what you stand for as a leader, and how to act more intentionally even when under pressure
- Explain what your gym is working toward, and why it matters, in a way that motivates the team
What you'll take back to your team
- Run a team session that turns one gym goal into specific things people can do on an ordinary shift
- Set expectations as observable behavior, so standards are clear instead of assumed
What you'll learn
- Set and hold boundaries around availability, responsibility, and workload that protect long-term performance
- Navigate around other people’s boundaries and the gym’s goals in an effective way
What you'll take back to your team
- Learn how each individual in your team works best and what sort of support they need by having them complete a one-page profile for themselves.
What you'll learn
- Give and take critical feedback, so you and your team keep developing
- Practical small ways to interact together with team members to create an open, high-performance culture
What you'll take back to your team
- Give everyday feedback, positive and corrective, that people can act on
- Run short performance discussions with team members that are worth the time they take, using a 10-minute template
What you'll learn
- Become more aware of difficult conversations or actions that you have been avoiding
What you'll take back to your team
- Prepare and hold a difficult conversation, and follow it through instead of letting it drift
What to Expect in This Workshop
You meet your facilitators and fellow managers in person during the CWA Summit, then keep going with six live online sessions every other Thursday for 3 months. The two weeks between each session gives you time to put each tool to work with your team.
In person at the CWA Summit
- 04/27/2026 at the Salt Palace Convention Center
Live online, every other Thursday for 3 months
May 13
Thursday
May 27
Thursday
June 10
Thursday
June 24
Thursday
July 8
Thursday
July 22
Thursday
Every online session starts at 9:00 am Pacific, 10:00 am Mountain, 11:00 am Central, and 12:00 pm Eastern.
Meet Your Facilitators
Madeleine Crane
Co-founder and CEO, Unblocd
Organizational and sport psychologist
Kaisa Soininen
Co-founder and COO, Unblocd
Performance and sport psychologist
Madeleine Crane
Madeleine Crane is an organizational and sport psychologist, and widely regarded as a pioneer of psychology in climbing. She is co-founder and CEO of Unblocd and founder of Climbing Psychology.
For over 10 years, she's worked with climbing gyms, federations, coaches, and various other organizations around the world (World Climbing Europe, the Pro Climbing League, Google etc). A significant proportion of that has been with head coaches on the subject of leadership: how they set the expectations, how they give feedback and how they keep a team together over a season. She also works with recreational and competitive climbers and consistently argues for a performance culture in climbing that enables people to thrive rather than survive.
Madeleine has been climbing, learning and exploring as long as she can remember. She represented Austria at a number of youth competitions around the world and went on to compete at Bouldering World Cup level. She's still out there climbing in the gym and on the rock as much as she can.
Kaisa Soininen
Kaisa Soininen is a performance and sport psychologist and a business leader with over 25 years' experience leading teams of all sizes at a number of international companies. She co-founded Unblocd with Madeleine and is its COO.
She's led teams through growth, through pressure, through restructuring and the very ordinary weeks in between so the leadership situations she teaches are ones she's actually experienced. Her psychology work is all about values based action, attention, stress management, and practical behavioral change. She works with climbing gyms, climbing organizations, and climbing medicine people to help create a healthy, sustainable, and psychologically sound climbing culture. She's coached climbers at all levels from the competitive right through to the recreational.
Kaisa found climbing when her son took her to the bouldering gym down the road. It was love at first sight really. Nothing else had been quite so demanding (mentally and physically) and so rewarding at the same time. The constant exploration of new aspects of the sport satisfies her curious mind.
Built For The People Who Run Climbing Gyms
Unblocd started with a problem they were constantly coming across in their own coaching work. In climbing, often what holds people back isn't strength. It's fear of falling, fear of looking silly, a plateau that won't budge, an injury that has changed the way you climb. One-to-one mental coaching can help with all of that, but it's simply not accessible to most people and reaches very few.
Unblocd started building the alternative in 2023 and launched it commercially at the beginning of 2025. It's an online platform which gives climbers the same evidence based knowledge and exercises that we would use in a private session, just at a price point that is viable for a gym and its members.
Very early in designing the solution for climbers, they also started focusing on the importance of the climbing gym. The local climbing community forms in the gym, and the gym itself is directed by the people who run it. In their conversations with operators, that point was constantly coming back: the staff, and the managers of the staff, need support just as much as members do. Kaisa's experience leading teams and Madeleine's experience in organizational psychology have enabled us to provide support for climbing gym managers too.
Unblocd can integrate into gyms in ways that suit their needs: some gyms use the staff training online resources as a staff development tool to support their team, others focus on making the climber platform available as a resource for members, and many choose to do both. The leadership program is more personalized and intensive training for managers. This flexible approach helps gyms to use Unblocd to strengthen their community and business.
Save Your Seat
Online sessions start Thursday, May 13, 2027. Register yourself, or send the manager on your team who's ready for their next step. If you're an owner, this is a direct investment in yourself or the person who runs your gym.
For questions about the Unblocd Leadership Workshop, membership, or other CWA programs and services, contact hello@cwapro.org.