Professional Development Programs
Creativity & Innovation
Most individuals associate creativity with those in “artistic” fields rather than in the business world. Creativity in the business world results in improvements, new products, problems solved, and improved change resilience in the employee population.
This skill-based program breaks creativity into usable and, most importantly, learnable components. Managers, supervisors, leaders, and individual contributors can implement an entire creativity process with a team or work independently to generate new ideas and solve problems. Each participant works on a group project and a “real life” project from the workplace. Everyone learns that creativity is an important part of business growth and customer satisfaction in the workplace.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is a set of emotional and social skills that collectively establish how well we perceive and express ourselves. We effectively use emotional information to cope with challenges and develop social relationships. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results. It also impacts almost everything we say and do each day.
Using strategies to develop our emotional intelligence helps us excel in our roles and bring our people skills to the next level.
Focused Thinking
The clear communication of ideas, whether to clients, colleagues, or the management board, is a key factor in determining business success. For most people, it is easy enough to explain their ideas when face-to-face, but more challenging when put in written form or as a presentation. A badly written report, a confusing email, or a poorly structured presentation can spell disaster for your ideas, intentions, and ambitions.
Customers, both internal and external, have a high standard for how they interact with people asking for their support, endorsement, or use of their time.
GRACE - Cultivating Compassion while Interacting with Others
GRACE is a compassion-based, transformative practice connecting to our resources of personal strength, integrity as well as care for ourselves and others. GRACE is an acronym for Gather attention, Recall intention, Attune to self/other, Consider what will serve, Engage and end.
The GRACE Process helps to realize our potential in our lives and the way we work with others. It connects specifically to our principles of Transformation, Self-Actualization, Humility, and Respect.
Negotiation Skills
We all have to negotiate. Negotiation is an integral part of creating significant value for the organization and your department. Your success depends on your personal skills as a negotiator, whether you are seeking resources for your project or team, deciding on a new hire’s salary, or inking a high-stakes deal for your company. The principles are the same.
Our methodology to good negotiation isn’t about winning and it isn’t about someone else losing. It is about win/win. Learning effective negotiation skills will help you develop sustainable and respectful relationships and achieve your objectives in the long term.
Resiliency in Action
Bouncing back from Challenges
Individuals who can cope with ambiguity, rapid change, and stress tend to be more productive and engaged in their personal and professional lives – they are resilient. Resiliency is the ability to recover quickly from difficulties. Resiliency is not reserved for a small few people. Almost anyone can improve their resiliency behaviors.
In this program, participants learn strategies for individual well-being. Participants learn approaches they can take that help support team members’ well-being.
Developing Cultural Intelligence
Individuals at all levels of organizations face unique challenges when working in multi-national and multi-cultural teams. They must decode the complex and often confusing dynamics that affect their ability to share information, gain support, and accomplish work – regardless of where that work is happening or who it is happening with.
Through this program, participants gain an understanding of the elements of culture that are always at play when interacting with others – and how to best adapt their approach to create a collaborative, respectful and productive outcome.
Facilitating Successful Meetings
Experts estimate leaders spend 80% of their time in meetings or conducting meetings. This time represents companies’ significant investment of money and resources, often with questionable results. When overused and ineffectively facilitated, meetings become a tremendous waste of resources. If effectively handled, meetings can be an opportunity to collectively solve problems, provide information, manage communication, and persuade customers.
Leaders who confidently facilitate successful meetings harness the one event that often has significant results riding on it – a meeting.
From Conflict to Collaboration
All individuals within organizations experience conflict; this is not unusual. What is unusual – and very effective – is when leaders can handle this conflict in a way that encourages problem-solving and solutions in which all parties get their needs met. This way of managing conflict creates lasting resolutions.
Conflict can be resolved by using a Communication Cycle that gets at the root issues and causes of conflict. In this way, conflict does not become a debilitating reason employee and customer needs are not met.
The program can include the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Assessment (TKI).
Leading Health & Wellbeing
Employee well-being often seems to be an aspect of work companies put off focusing on until it is too late. A systematic plan of action needs to be carried out to improve employee well-being and to increase productivity along with innovation capability.
This learning journey is designed to start a dialogue about well-being topics, create openness to discuss, and exchange best practices to ultimately make lifestyle adjustments that help improve the well-being of leaders and employees. It will help you identify personal areas to focus on and also enable you to help your team members improve their well-being by creating an environment where everyone can flourish.
Organizational Savvy
Based on the book, Survival of the Savvy by Rick Brandon and Marty Seldman, this program gives participants a more positive attitude toward politics and increases their influence and impact.
Your executives, leaders, and employees may need these skills if their blind spots result in an inability to sell ideas, missing the organization’s hidden criteria for success, being sabotaged by others, being underestimated or pigeonholed, or lacking a network of allies and advocates.
Self Management & Use of Time
Being productive and effective in any job means more than just spending long hours sitting at your desk. Doing a job well means being able to balance the many factors that affect an individual’s personal and professional life.
In this workshop, employees look at how managing their workload starts with managing themselves. Participants look at how they can create a balance in their life between the constant demands of their jobs, their families, and their personal needs.
Storytelling in Business
This program focuses on storytelling skills for persuasive and influential communication in presentations and important conversations. People remember stories. You will learn to communicate in such a way that others will listen with curiosity and engagement to what you have to say.
You learn to communicate your ideas clearly to clients, colleagues, or management. A poorly constructed report or a weak presentation can destroy your good ideas, intentions, and ambitions.
Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses, through replacing non-digital or manual processes
with digital processes or replacing older digital technology with newer digital technology.
In this series, executives, senior leaders, and others learn about new Digital Business Models (Ecosystems). They explore and understand the spectrum of digital transformation, experience examples of “digital” in other businesses,
and link the power of data to new possibilities and customer relationship experiences.
Facilitation Skills
Whether the setting is a corporate boardroom, an offsite conference room, or the team’s daily meeting room, facilitation skills are essential for anyone who leads meetings and mini workshops and wants successful outcomes with maximum support.
Facilitation Skills provides a solid framework and proven techniques for facilitating meetings, resolving conflicts, creating buy-in, and building lasting agreements – skills as valuable in everyday life as they are in business. The program teaches the tools, processes, and methods that have been used by hundreds of organizations to maximize output, and level of agreement, generate faster decisions, and increase creativity and productivity.
Giving & Receiving Feedback
Feedback is an important part of development for all professionals – whether you are a leader or an individual contributor – you need information about how you are performing to maintain and improve your results. When delivered well, feedback can build rapport and confidence. If handled poorly, it can reduce motivation and engagement.
In this program, leaders and employees learn how to give formal and informal feedback.
Mastering Personal Leadership
Every leader needs specific skills to be successful in the role of inspiring and directing others. Sometimes, though, even with skills, the leader struggles.
This program’s main objective is to ensure that each participant identifies his or her strengths and challenges as a leader and discovers and decides what individual next steps are needed to achieve mastery of themselves. For those who want to know themselves better in order to create their own highly effective leadership style, this program provides the tools. The more authentic our leadership, the more effective our actions will be, and the more lasting our results.
Powerful Presentation Skills
Presenting effectively means success beyond the speech given at a conference or meeting. It means talking about your company’s strengths and strategy with customers, giving an answer that diffuses a hostile question at a business meeting and persuading your vendors to provide improved service at a reasonable cost. In all these situations, and others, your success depends upon how well you present yourself, your company and your needs.
Top-notch presentation skills allow you to have confidence regardless of the presentation setting and, most importantly, to ensure you inform and persuade in a way that guarantees your audience is receiving the message you intend to send.
Skillful Communication
Leaders and other professionals spend more time communicating than anything else. They interact with team members, peers, customers, vendors, and many other stakeholders in the success of your organization. The most important communication skill – of reading, writing, listening, and speaking – is listening.
Without using effective listening skills, leaders may waste time solving surface issues instead of true problems and may miss customer cues of dissatisfaction or opportunities for increased sales.
Successful Decision Making
Leaders today are faced with endless decisions that have great financial and business effects on the results organizations achieve. While many individuals use a structured approach to decision-making, taking into account various factors and consequences, still more make decisions based on “gut feel”.
Through a process-oriented decision-making system, leaders increase their chance of making the most appropriate decision for the business, as well as reducing the risk of poor decision-making. In addition, this program assists managers in determining when others should be involved with decisions to be made and when to make them independently.