If you and the people who work with you don’t understand where the company is going, they may all develop their own priorities and actually prevent you from getting where you need to be. Part of getting everyone on board is creating a strategic plan complete with the organization’s values, vision, and mission. Then, there’s the challenge of bringing these principles to life in a meaningful way that people can relate to. This two-day course will help you describe what you want to do and get people where you want to go.

Key Learnings:

  • How to define the vision for their company
  • How to write a mission statement that explains what the company’s purpose is
  • How to complete meaningful SWOT analyses
  • Tools and techniques to create a strategic plan that directs the organization from the executive to the front line
  • Ways to implement, evaluate, and review a strategic plan
  • How related tools, such as the strategy map and balanced scorecard, can help them develop a strategic plan

We have so many interactions in the run of a day, it’s reasonable to expect that some of them are going to be difficult. Whether these are conversations that you have in person, or you manage a virtual team and need to speak with someone in another city, there are things that you can do to make these conversations go smoothly. This one-day workshop will give you the tools to manage difficult conversations and get the best results possible out of them.

Key Learnings:

  • How to define their frame of reference
  • How to establish a positive intent and a desired outcome
  • Good communication skills
  • How to draft a script for a difficult conversation
  • Use specific steps to carry out a difficult conversation
  • How to access additional resources as required
  • How to maintain safety in a conversation

There are two major myths about conflict: that it always involves anger and that it’s always negative. Conflict can actually be a positive tool for growth if you know how to manage it properly. This one-day course will teach participants just how to do that.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand conflict
  • Be able to identify the stages of conflict
  • Use LECSR to resolve conflict
  • Identify other ways to resolve conflict
  • Develop personal skills necessary to resolve conflict

Everyone gets angry; it’s a completely natural response. But do you know how to manage that anger constructively? By the end of this one-day course, you will!

Key Learnings:

  • Understand anger and its causes
  • Understand behavior types
  • Develop coping tools
  • Improve your communication skills

Have you ever had to take on one of the following tasks?

  • Planning a party
  • Building a shed
  • Preparing an annual report
  • Developing a new product

These could all be projects! Managing projects successfully is a key skill for success. This one-day course will teach you how to manage each phase of a project: conceptual, planning, execution, and termination.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand project management basics
  • Be familiar with the conceptual phase
  • Understand the planning phase
  • Execute and terminate a project

Every day, training is becoming part of more job descriptions. Whether it’s teaching a new employee what their role is or training 100 employees on how to manage their time better, some basic learning principles apply. This one-day course will help you become the type of trainer that people really learn from.

Key Learnings:

  • Develop the essential skills for a trainer
  • Understand adult learning
  • Know how to develop a training session
  • Know how to add fun and games to your program
  • Be familiar with delivery methods

Negotiation is a key skill that, when mastered, can enhance communications and provide better results from communication. This one-day course will teach participants the basics of negotiation, how to prepare to negotiate, ways to respond to negotiation challenges, how to create win-win solutions, and how to create sustainable agreements.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand the basic principles of negotiation
  • Prepare for negotiation
  • Respond to challenges
  • Create win-win situations
  • Develop sustainable agreements

In today’s world, change is inevitable and often difficult to deal with. During this one-day course, you will learn how to implement, manage, and cope with change.

Key Learnings:

  • Find different ways of looking at change
  • Create a change implementation strategy
  • Make change easier for yourself and others
  • Develop techniques to cope with change, including resiliency and stress management
  • Know how to maintain a sense of control during a change

Stress seems like an inevitable part of life. The demands of work, home, and society can place a lot of stress on just about anyone. This one-day workshop will help you identify your personal stressors and will explore some ways to manage and prevent stress.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand stress
  • Be better able to deal with stressful situations
  • Become more stress-resilient
  • Personalize techniques to manage stress
  • Develop time management and problem solving skills

What exactly makes a decision ethical? The problem with ethics is that what may seem morally right (or ethical) to one person may seem appalling to another.

This two-day workshop will not provide you with an easy way to solve every ethical decision you will ever have to make. It will, however, help you define your ethical framework to make solving those ethical dilemmas easier. We’ll also look at some tools that you can use when you’re faced with an ethical decision. And, we’ll look at some techniques you can use so you don’t get stuck in an ethical quandary. Best of all, we’ll look at a lot of case studies so that you can practice making decisions in a safe environment.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand the difference between ethics and morals
  • Understand the value of ethics
  • Identify some of your values and moral principles
  • Be familiar with some philosophical approaches to ethical decisions
  • Identify some ways to improve ethics in your office
  • Know what is required to start developing an office code of ethics
  • Know some ways to avoid ethical dilemmas
  • Have some tools to help you make better decisions

In the past ten years, the workforce has changed dramatically. More than ever, a workplace is a diverse collection of individuals proud of who they are: their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, their ethnic background, and all the other components that make an individual unique. In order for your workplace to succeed, your employees must be able to appreciate and celebrate those differences.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand what diversity and its related terms mean
  • Be aware of how aware you are of diversity and where you can improve
  • Understand how changes in the world have affected you and your view
  • Be able to identify your stereotypes
  • Understand what terms are politically correct and which are not, and why
  • Be familiar with the four cornerstones of diversity
  • Understand what the pitfalls are relating to diversity and understand how to avoid them
  • Develop a technique for dealing with inappropriate behavior
  • Develop a management style to encourage diversity
  • Know what to do if you or one of your employees feels discriminated against

Workplace accidents and injuries cost corporations millions of dollars and thousands of hours lost every year. They also have a profound, often lifelong impact on workers. Introducing a safety culture into your organization, where safety is valued as an integral part of the business’ operation, not only saves the business time and money, it also builds a committed, loyal, healthy workforce. This one-day workshop will give you the foundation to start building your safety culture.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand the difference between a safety program and a safety culture
  • Have some resources to help you understand the regulations in your area
  • Be able to launch a safety committee
  • Understand how to identify hazards and reduce them
  • Know some hiring measures that can improve safety
  • Understand what a safety training program will involve
  • Be able to identify groups particularly at risk for injury and know how to protect them
  • Be able to help your organization write, implement, and review a safety plan
  • Be better able to respond to incidents and near misses
  • Understand the basics of accident investigation and documentation

In 2009 alone, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ordered that $294,200,000 (that’s 294.2 million dollars!) be paid out for discrimination and harassment charges. No wonder companies are working to be more proactive in preventing harassment.

But how do you prevent harassment from occurring? What sorts of policies should be in place? What should managers do to protect their employees? And if a complaint is filed, what will we do? All of these questions (and more!) will be answered in this two-day workshop.

At the conclusion of this workshop, you should be able to:

  • Understand what behavior is and is not appropriate in the workplace, and why
  • Help your company create and implement a harassment policy
  • Protect yourself and your staff against harassment incidents and complaints
  • Understand when mediation is and is not appropriate
  • Understand the four-stage complaint resolution process
  • Help identify solutions to a harassment complaint

Violence of any sort has many roots. 99% of the time, there are warning signs of workplace violence. That is why this three day workshop will take a comprehensive look at workplace violence: how to prevent it on an individual and an organizational level, and how to respond to it if it does occur.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand what workplace violence is
  • Be able to identify some warning signs of violence
  • Understand the cycle of anger
  • Understand Albert Bandura’s behavior wheel and how it applies to anger
  • Develop a seven-step process for managing your anger and others’ anger
  • Have better communication and problem solving skills, which will reduce frustration and anger
  • Develop some other ways of managing anger, including coping thoughts and relaxation techniques
  • Be familiar with the nine components of an organizational approach to managing anger, including risk assessment processes
  • Know what to do if a violent incident occurs in the workplace, on both an individual and organizational level

This two-day course will give you the foundation to begin implementing Lean process improvement tools in your workplace. The first day will explore the foundations of Lean through the Toyota precepts and the five critical improvement concepts (value, waste, variation, complexity, and continuous improvement). The second day will give participants tools to perform continuous improvement in their organization, including 5S, 5W-2H, PDSA, DMAIC, Kaizen, Genchi Genbutsu, and various Lean data mapping methods.

Key Learnings:

  • Define Lean, its key terms, and the five critical improvement concepts
  • Describe the Toyota Production System and the TPS house
  • Use the Kano model to understand, describe, analyze, and improve value
  • Identify and reduce various types of waste
  • Create a plan for a more environmentally Lean organization
  • Use the PDSA and R-DMAIC-S models to plan, execute, and evaluate Lean changes
  • Use Lean thinking frameworks, including 5W-2H, Genchi Genbutsu and Gemba
  • Prepare for and complete a basic 5-S
  • Describe the key elements of Kaizen events, particularly a Kaizen blitz
  • Gather, analyze, and interpret data using flow charts, Ishikawa and SIPOC diagrams, and value stream maps
  • Go back to your organization with a plan to begin incorporating Lean into your corporate culture

An article in the March 11, 2010 edition of TIME magazine purported to explain “why we have entered the post-trust era.” Indeed, we seem to be in a time where people act inappropriately and then refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Who can we blame for the world economic crisis, the issues in the Catholic Church, or the state of the environment? More to the point, why do we spend so much time and energy looking to pin the blame on someone (usually anyone but ourselves)?

With this in mind, it’s no wonder that organizations who promote accountability are more successful and more productive. In this one-day workshop, you will learn about what accountability is, how to promote it in your organization, and how to become more accountable to yourself and others.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand what accountability is and what events in history have shaped our view of it
  • Identify the requirements for personal and corporate accountability
  • Understand the cycle of accountability and the fundamental elements required to build an accountable organization
  • Identify what individuals must do to become accountable
  • Build skills required for accountability, including goal-setting, giving and receiving feedback, and delegation
  • Pinpoint ways to build ownership in your organization
  • Isolate areas for further self-improvement

Over the past several decades, organizations have come to realize that success cannot only be measured in dollars and cents. Intangible assets (like a company’s reputation, the knowledge base created by their employees, and training initiatives) can make up a huge portion of a company’s wealth. It only makes sense, then, that we need a new tool to help us measure this expanded definition of success. Enter the balanced scorecard! This tool and its related components will help your organization identify, document, plan, and execute a balanced strategic mission. It will also help your organization evaluate and revise its strategic execution.

This one-day workshop will introduce you to the basics of the balanced scorecard and help you determine if this powerful tool is a good fit for your organization.

Key Learnings:

  • Define what the balanced scorecard is and its benefits
  • Describe common balanced scorecard pitfalls & how to avoid them
  • Determine if the balanced scorecard is right for your organization
  • Describe the key elements of the balanced scorecard process
  • Identify a strategy map, tactical action plan, and balanced scorecard
  • Create a vision statement for the balanced scorecard
  • Understand what corporate values, mission statements, and vision statements are and how they tie into the balanced scorecard
  • Understand what processes support the balanced scorecard

Bullying is called the silent epidemic. Although half of workers have experienced or witnessed bullying, policies and laws dealing with it are far less prevalent.
This is, in part, because bullying can be hard to identify and address. People wonder, what does bullying look like? How can we discourage it in our workplace? What can I do to protect my staff and co-workers? All of these questions (and more!) will be answered in this one-day workshop.

Key Learnings:

  • Define what bullying is and is not
  • Understand the costs of bullying to people and organizations
  • Identify bullying behaviors and the reasons behind them
  • Know some ways to prevent bullying and understand what role you can play
  • Know some ways to protect yourself from bullying
  • Know what to do if you are bullied
  • Identify appropriate solutions for a bullying incident (within and outside the organization)
  • Be able to assist in creating an anti-bullying policy
  • Have you ever had to take on one of the following tasks?
  • Planning a party
  • Building a shed
  • Preparing an annual report
  • Developing a new product

These could all be projects! Managing projects successfully is a key skill for success. This one-day course will teach you how to manage each phase of a project: conceptual, planning, execution, and termination.

Key Learnings:

  • Understand project management basics
  • Be familiar with the conceptual phase
  • Understand the planning phase
  • Execute and terminate a project