Offerings

OTHER OFFERINGS

Building On Strengths

Gallup has produced an excellent tool for people to learn their strengths. This offering can be a standalone workshop or a tool that is used as part of another workshop. Participants will do the Strength Finder online and bring their results to the workshop. Through a series of exercises and discussions, participants will learn about themselves and the other participants.

Objectives:
  • Identify your top 5 strengths
  • Share your strengths with others to enhance understanding
  • Consider how you use your strengths in your daily work and/or life
  • Identify ways build on your strengths to be more effective

Emotional Intelligence

Using either a self-assessment or a 360 assessment, participants will learn how they are emotionally intelligent. Through activities and discussion, participants will identify strategies they can use to enhance their emotional intelligence.

Objectives:
  • Understand what emotional intelligence is
  • Get feedback on your current emotional intelligence
  • Identify areas you want to grow
  • Create a plan to grow in those areas

Influencing Skills

To accomplish our jobs we need to influence others. We can influence using positive approaches or negative strategies. In this session, participants will assess and identify the influence strategies they tend to use most. A model for influence planning will be introduced. Participants will us the planning model to prepare for an upcoming situation where they need to influence someone.

Objectives:

  • Identify your preferred influence strategies
  • Examine the styles and behaviors associated with influencing
  • Learn an influencing planning process and prepare for an upcoming situation
  • Create a personal action plan to become a more effective influencer

Personal and Career Development

In the hustle-bustle of day-to-day work, we rarely take time to look at ourselves and understand who we are and where we are going. This session is designed to help you do just that. What are your strengths? What are your interests? What are your values and are you living them? Does your attitude need a checkup? Come spend some time answering these questions and creating a plan for moving forward.

Objectives:

  • Broaden your perspective of yourself
  • Increase your understanding of your personal values and strengths
  • Begin to define and clarify your personal and career goals

Working From Home

Allowing employees to work from home is becoming quite common in organizations. People can be very productive working from home. However, it can be challenging to manage the family's expectations and to manage the work/home boundaries. It can also be challenging to manage the expectations of one's manager and co-workers.

Objectives:

  • Explore the issues that surface when working from home
  • Identify ways to clarify expectations with family members
  • Learn approaches for enhancing relationships with remote co-workers
  • Explore one-way vs. two-way communication and determine how to be a more effective remote communicator
  • Create an action plan to work effectively from home

Advanced Facilitation Skills for Facilitator and Leaders (4 days)

This offering builds on the 2 day offering above by going into more depth on the topics as well as providing practice opportunities for every participant. Working in groups, facilitator practice includes feedback and the opportunity to adjust based on the feedback.

Objectives:

  • Enhance your understanding of the dynamics of groups.
  • Examine your current skills in facilitating groups and initiate an action plan for ongoing practice and improvement.
  • Identify and practice core processes in groups including contracting, problem solving, decision making and managing conflict.
  • Practice the facilitation skills of observation, listening, and reflection, asking the right questions and giving feedback.
  • Gain confidence and skills in facilitating power dynamics and dysfunctional behaviors that emerge in groups.
  • Enhance skills in knowing when and how to intervene to encourage individual and group participation and cooperation.
  • Help groups be more productive, energized and creative.
  • Practice facilitating groups around specific case situations and receive feedback on practices.

E-mail Etiquette

Research shows that the average worker is unproductive 25% to 33% of the time. E-mail is a significant contributor to that productivity problem. This interactive session is designed to provide insight to participants about their approach to using e-mail and to identify key e-mail time wasters. Exercises demonstrate the value of conversation over e-mail for complex and important issues. Small group discussion and the sharing of best practices provide many practical and easy to implement e-mail tips. Participants also learn techniques to influence others to use e-mail more effectively.

Objectives:

  • Explore how e-mail impacts productivity
  • Identify key aspects of e-mail that waste the most time
  • Share techniques for using e-mail effectively
  • Learn how to influence others' use of e-mail
  • Determine specific actions to increase personal e-mail productivity

Stress Check: Building Resilience

Stress seems to be common in today's work environment. When we feel stressed our productivity tends to drop. In this session participants will identify how their personality influences their stress. They will learn antidotes for these stressors.

Objectives:

  • Identify the sources of positive stress for yourself
  • Find out your own temperament pattern of core needs, values, and talents
  • Discover some typical stressors you may be unaware of
  • Identify antidotes for these stressors
  • Appreciate that others may be stressed by different things than you
  • Find ways to use your talents to build your own resilience to stressful situations

Managing Up

An employee's relationship with his or manager is important to success. This session helps participants think about their manager's perspective and the impact that has on them as employees. Exercises and discussion provide tips and ideas on how to work more effectively with one's manager.

Objectives:

  • Learn the keys to managing up
  • Examine how you respond to developmental feedback
  • Learn approaches to help you respond effectively to feedback
  • Practice giving feedback
  • Consider how attitudes impact others and the team environment
  • Determine what you will do to more effectively manage up

Facilitation Skills for Facilitators (2 days)

Facilitating meetings or problem solving sessions is a real challenge unless one has the appropriate skills and tools. This workshop clarifies what facilitation is and provides an opportunity to assess one's facilitation skills. Understanding group dynamics is critical to a facilitator's success, and is explored in depth. Focus is spent on decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution tools. A third day is recommended for practice and feedback on use of the tools and approaches.

Objectives:

  • Clarify what facilitation is and is not
  • Learn a variety of methods for groups to gather information for problem solving
  • Explore several approaches for using creativity in problem solving and for prioritizing problems and/or solutions
  • Practice dealing with difficult participant behaviors

Train the Trainer (1 to 2 days)

Subject matter experts are often the best people to train others on technical or functional skills. The challenge, however is that subject matter experts often don't have strong training skills. Participants in this one-day workshop will gain a foundational understanding of Adult Learning Principles, both through the course content and through experiencing effective adult learning first hand. A key area of focus in the workshop will be on platform skills -- using ones physical presence to support a presentation by effective use of eye contact, gestures, movement, etc. Another key area of focus will be on facilitation skills -- managing group dynamics, creating and maintaining group involvement, and keeping a course on track and on schedule. With the addition of a second day, participants will practice delivery and receive feedback from the instructor and other participants.

Objectives:

  • Learn to stimulate and increase your participant's learning
  • Use effective "platform" skills
  • Use visual aids to support a topic
  • Use effective "facilitation" skills
  • Feel more confident in your ability as an effective instructor
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