Nothing says more about your competence, confidence and professionalism than the way you communicate with others.  Your ability to communicate skillfully and confidently is vital to your success.

The goal of this workshop is to help you understand the impact your communication skills have on coworkers and provide tactics for getting along with others, gaining respect, and strengthening your professional image in the workplace.

Improving your communication skills will also increase your effectiveness and productivity - sharpening your listening skills and communicating with clarity saves time by eliminating rework.

Key Training Points

• Identify your communication strengths and weaknesses
• Develop your ability to ask questions to get the information you need
• Develop skills to listen actively and with empathy
• Examine your self-awareness and ability to ask for feedback
• Recognize how we all take actions based on the assumptions we make
• Investigate ways to improve your self-image and assertiveness

• Understand yourself and others through the DiSC model
• Appreciate the communication preferences of different people
• Recognize when your behavior is inappropriate or likely to be misunderstood
• Build strategies to adapt your behavior for more effective communication

• Describe the role of a coach.
• Explain why everyone in the organization needs to be a coach.
• Describe how coaching can benefit you, others, and the organization.
• Identify behaviors that help foster a supportive coaching environment.
• Demonstrate a variety of asking and listening techniques to coach others formally and informally.
• Use six key steps to conduct a coaching session.
  

• The definition of a "meeting"
• Six steps for planning a meeting
• Tools for following up after a meeting to ensure outcomes are achieved
• Five intervention techniques for handling challenges during a meeting

• Learning to improve business results by establishing, enhancing, or repairing trust in the workplace.
• Determine ways to increase teamwork and collaboration by creating a high-trust work environment.
• Repairing relationships where lack of trust is negatively affecting job performance.
• Identifying ways to build trust through a foundation of open communication.

It is important to systematically look at the work that you do for ways to improve work processes. In this seminar participants will acquire skills that will enable continuous improvement on the job and identify effective critical thinking and proactive problem solving skills needed to increase job efficiency.

• Identifying the difference between chronic and special cause problems in the workplace
• Identifying the root causes and effects of problems through charting and diagramming
• Translating a current workplace problem into a process map
• Verifying and implementing corrective action plans for handling problems and preventing recurrence

Cross-training can evoke fear and even anger. People fear they will have to do another job they don't like. They worry about how they will juggle their present job with training others. And they might feel their own job is in jeopardy.

Training Others gives employees the skills they need to effectively help others prepare for new tasks and responsibilities. The seminar also will help build employee commitment to and understanding of the importance of training to your organization.

Key Training Points

• Recognizing the importance of training others in the workplace.
• Planning and conducting on-the-job training with one or more people.
• Identifying potential roadblocks to training and how to handle them.

Are partnerships strained across your organization, or do organizational silos exist? Do your leaders understand their role in building business partnerships, and do they employ strategies to ensure they encourage partnerships?

Failed partnerships are all too common in today's workplace. Changing boundaries and responsibilities make it difficult to build and sustain partnerships, yet they are more important than ever to reaching organizational goals.

Key Training Points

• Define a partnership and differentiate it from other business relationships.
• Identify the five factors that make a partnership successful.
• Use a set of Checkpoints to help identify and focus on important issues and promote open communication between you and your partners.
• Create a Scorecard to evaluate how effectively your partnership is operating and to facilitate the exchange of feedback.
• Utilize tools and skills to address common challenges that can arise within a partnership.
  

Today's workforce comprises four distinct generations; each with its own shared history, common biases and core beliefs. In this seminar participants are given insights into the common drivers of each generation in order to change current communication approaches to more effectively lead their teams.

• Defining the four generations and their workplace characteristics
• Describing how each generation defines success and understanding how the differences affect communication and relationships
• Identifying employees' generational biases in order to change your approach when coaching, managing, and retaining employees of different generations

How do people in organizations define "accountability"--a word typically seen in a negative light?  Is it blame?  Is it taking credit when things go well?  Is it complex piles of procedures, paperwork, cost control and red tape?  Accountability is not a way to control people?instead, it?s a way for them to take charge of their own actions and efforts to be more effective, and to promote better relationships throughout the organization.

The "cycle of accountability" is a three-step process that, when handled properly, will ensure the clarity and completion of any task.

Step 1. Responsibility is a before-the-fact mindset of ownership of a task or job.

Step 2. Empowerment is taking personal action to ensure an agreed-upon result.

Step 3. Accountability is a personal willingness, after-the-fact, to answer for the results of your behaviors and actions.

Use this training as one component of a management or staff development program, as part of a new product or service initiative, or as part of ongoing project management support.

• Define Responsibility, Empowerment, and Accountability, and describe the role they play in achieving project or task success.
• Describe how clear agreements build the framework for maintaining focus and overcoming obstacles.
• Discuss guidelines for managing agreements, including renegotiating or updating them when necessary.
• Discuss how to hold ourselves?and others?accountable for our results, no matter how things turn out.