Training Workshops

Communications Training

Presentation Skills, including Sales Presentations

  • Identify audience needs, sensitivities, objections
  • Frame your action objective so you ask for what you need
  • Organize and structure for attention and retention
  • Use anecdotes, examples, humor to enliven
  • Manage non-verbal communication professionally and cross culturally; deliver with credibility and responsiveness
  • Manage the message; the art of persuasion
  • Use media to enhance and support
  • Control group dynamics, field question/answer
  • Work with small and large groups
  • Provide video, written and verbal feedback

Influence:

  • Assess your individual capacity for influence
  • Master the three influential moves
  • Use a script to demonstrate how to frame your influential objective and interact to support and achieve it
  • Use logic, emotion and authority to support your objective
  • Get feedback on the effectiveness of your personal style

Facilitation Skills

  • Learn to gain the confidence of the group
  • Learn to conduct needs assessment
  • Create meeting and event agendas that use time to keep things vibrant and meet the objectives
  • Learn to facilitate high participation events using professional group processes that foster group ownership
  • Ensure capture of information during the process
  • Create succinct actionable reports
  • Follow up with the stakeholder team

Managing Media Interviews

  • Master the right preparation
  • Decide how you need to be perceived to be effective
  • Package your sound bites
  • Distinguish how to prepare and deliver for print, radio, and television interviews
  • Control your message when the questions are challenging
  • Respond: in an information vacuum, in an office crisis, for damage control, to combat disinformation
  • Develop a positive to neutral relationship with the interviewer
  • Manage the camera; manage your appearance

Writing: Financial/Technical/Business

  • Define your audience; tune into national, regional, cultural biases
  • Define the objective of the communication
  • Determine what your key messages are
  • Structure in one of three important ways
  • Craft press releases, correspondence, email, minutes of meetings, reports, proposals, speeches, PowerPoint, articles, talking points, etc. and get to use great templates
  • Get feedback on your own writing effectiveness

Conflict Management

  • Identify the real interests of the other side
  • Expand the pie and add more options to negotiate resolution
  • Learn to frame your objective as a win/win proposition; learn how not to respond to an ultimatum
  • Use the DESC script to avoid judging, whining, accusing, or making sweeping generalities
  • Solve cases in manager-employee conflict; employee-employee conflict; conflict with vendors, contractors, consultants, board members and community activists
  • Role play persistence and dodging pressure tactics
  • Illustrate creative problem solving techniques
  • Create alternatives and options to get past impasses

Communicating for Results

  • This comprehensive communications program provides training in all the interpersonal skills described in the workshops above.

Executive Presence

  • Build self confidence and manage self-consciousness when speaking impromptu
  • Demonstrate key verbal and non-verbal management of executive presence
  • Simulate best practices of speaking at meetings, on conference calls, and interpersonally; demonstrate how to promote identification with your audience and leave an enduring positive impression
  • Use 3 hooks in the art of persuasion
  • Identify the action objective you must accomplish
  • Listen and respond to challenges and objections while maintaining win/win, civility and control
  • Provide video, written and verbal feedback


Leadership Development

  • Define what makes a great leader
  • Take a series of comprehensive and revealing self tests to identify personal strengths and areas for development in one’s leadership inventory
  • Master delegation
  • Master situational leadership
  • Master coaching and feedback
  • Master goal setting and performance planning
  • Create a vision and clarify the mission for your team
  • Learn to build the team
  • Explore how to manage up
  • Employ the latest in motivating employees


Training of Trainers

  • Frame the objectives of training to match the job, the trainees and the content
  • Define training as a change in behavior on the job
  • Demonstrate both the Socratic-Interactive approach and the Blank Slate-lecture approach
  • Frame a lesson as a four step approach: prepare the learner, present/elicit the information, provide opportunities for application, evaluate and provide feedback and coaching
  • Ensure that learning transfer has taken place
  • Use a wide variety of training methods and media to suit all learning styles
  • Train trainers as expert presenters and facilitators
  • Train trainers in coping with group dynamics effectively


Needs Analysis and Instructional Design

  • Conduct needs analysis using a variety of survey techniques so courseware will suit intended audience
  • Write SMART training objectives for the course
  • Allocate time frames based on priorities and importance
  • Design your topical outline
  • Select from a wide variety of proven and exciting training methods and media to meet all learning styles and create stimulation
  • Build in ample opportunity for hands on and evaluation by writing modules and lesson plans that adhere to the four-step model: prepare the learner, elicit/present information/apply the information/provide feedback and evaluation
  • Learn to conduct pilots and work with Subject Matter Experts
  • Learn to market new courses so you get the registration you require


Management/Supervisory Skills

Goal Setting, Coaching, Feedback, Performance Management

  • Learn what goal setting should accomplish
  • Employ best practices in goal setting
  • Set SMART goals
  • Get employee buy in
  • Define what goes wrong in coaching and feedback
  • Use a 5 step model for preparation and application
  • Focus on behavior change
  • Use descriptive versus evaluative language
  • Employ steps in discipline
  • Maintain documentation
  • Deal with difficult employees
  • Role play and case studies

Motivation

  • Apply what social science teaches us about people’s motivation
  • Understand where each employee is in the hierarchy
  • Develop a wide range of motivational tools and techniques to suit different members of the team
  • Solve cases in motivation challenges

Competency Based Interviewing

  • Distinguish CBI from other, less effective, types of interviewing
  • Prepare CBI interview questions to suit the job description
  • Use varied questioning techniques to elicit real life experience
  • Create the right interview setting
  • Demonstrate interview skills that relax the interviewee
  • Capture important information in note taking
  • Manage an interview panel
  • Use a fair system of evaluation
  • Select the best candidate for the position

Time and Meetings Management

  • Apply the first principle of Time Management
  • Identify all your common timewasters
  • Adopt remedies to solve each
  • Handle things once
  • Get closure
  • Do things in a block
  • Apply Parkinson’s Law
  • Plan your day with time frames, priorities and concrete deliverables
  • Write SMART objectives to get the things done you can never get to
  • Reduce the urgent, fulfill the important
  • Have an objective for every meeting, a concrete outcome
  • Manage the agenda and the time frames
  • Create interaction through meeting pre-planning
  • Manage group dynamics to get the objective accomplished

Delegation

  • Identify what goes wrong when you delegate
  • Examine your systematic communication
  • Develop two way communication for all delegation
  • Recognize all the reasons for delegation
  • Distinguish between managing and doing
  • Use a system for developing the right purpose, the right directions, the right communication, the right follow through
  • Recognize the importance of up front communication instead of back end communication

Team Building

  • Recognize the role diversity plays on teams
  • Define characteristics of effective teams
  • Compare your team against the criteria
  • Employ the keys to team success; build an action plan
  • Recognize the stages of team development
  • Recognize the role of conflict in team building
  • Build a social team for greater cohesion
  • Use the Belbin instrument to determine what roles your team enjoys, which they lack and how to improve this
  • Create an action plan to build a better team