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The following objective descriptions are general in nature. We have found that the best practice for any staff development initiative is to initiate a gap analysis to identify the unique nature of the workplace and to adapt our information subjectively.
Work/Life Balance in Practice
This is our hallmark program. It combines using the Myers-Briggs Self-Assessment with a series of work/life balance exercises. Participants gain self-knowledge coupled with self-confidence through the techniques of “Appreciative Inquiry.” As participants gain insights into their work and life needs, they can immediately apply (or detach) those issues that affect satisfaction and meaningful existence possibilities. This class is recommended for staff at all levels of the organization.
Networking Is Not Work
Through a series of participant exercises and self-assessments, this workshop explains all forms of networking from the basics of professionals’ advice to the practice of our personal everyday encounters. This program offers many ready-to-use tips to keeping people connected to you. Using an abbreviated version of the Myers-Briggs, participants identify how their TYPE can work for them in building relationships that support strong networks.
Positive Results Communication
Participants practice how to accentuate the positive in communicating with others and get it. Individuals who attend this course learn how to induce successful interactions and reduce stressful situations using positive results scenarios as practice opportunities designed into the program.
Achieving Personal Growth
This session is a boost to our everyday events. Based upon John C. Maxwell’s “The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth”, it examines the simple steps to individual achievement and potential. Many program examples are practical and useful tools that we each have handy to feel stronger and more fulfilled. All level-employees would gain value from this course’s approach to their individual impression of personal growth.
Leaders At All Levels
This program sets a high value on a well prepared frontline staff. Through a series of interactive exercises, our program develops confidence through leadership skills for entry-level staff who interact with clients. Participants show an amazing positive transition that will improve customer relations immediately.
Practical Sales Skills
This program offers a basic overview to how to sell effectively. Participants review how selling affects them, indicating preferences in buying as well as how they weigh good sales performance. These sessions enhance views of consumer decision making, how to improve individual and team sales records and communicating how sales are the bottom line in business. Sample situations assist participants to practice their sales skills with confidence.
Project Management: Beginning to End
Every business task we undertake involves project management, even when our individual inputs are not the "whole" project. Whether you manage a project from start to finish or not, you will benefit greatly by reviewing the standard steps to the entire process.
Business Acumen & Customer Service
Too many of us miss out on the enrichment of understanding how to value customer needs and how to predict their expectations. Good service distinguishes leading companies from the rest. When all of us make it a practice to "serve" each other as customers in any organization, the walking and the talking pays off. As a participant, you will walk away with a new perspective of how to serve and how to be served whatever your current position or job responsibility.
Running Successful Meetings
Every gathering - large or small - can be an opportunity to spend time wisely or not. This is most important when you are the meeting leader, and both you and your audience have limited time to spend. This program emphasizes several simple questions that become 2nd nature to anyone who puts a group together. This information will jog your meeting memories and help you to make the most of any future meeting you lead.
Personal Presentation Skills
This offering is an opportunity to become a more comfortable and capable presenter. We encourage you to consider "you" at your presentation best. Each of us has a Myers-Briggs style that is critical to understand when we engage in public speaking. Once understood, our MBTI style can be our best resource for preparation plans and delivery methods. This program is not meant only for new speakers, it is valuable for all levels of leaders since our topics and our audiences are ever changing.
"Soft Skills" Muscle Building
There is a process that weightlifters go through in order to add hard muscle to their "soft" tissue. We have taken this formula and connected it as an analogy to the soft skills that all professionals require in order to lead at all levels. Through group interaction, fun and practical work place scenarios, participants change their perspective on the value of developing "soft skills".
Group Thinking: Creating Productive Work Groups
Myers-Briggs self-assessments are the groundwork for effective team action. Participants initially learn what their MBTI letters stand for; our facilitator further incorporates the MBTI letters of personal type to create a group type; eventually proving how the benefits to multiple types in work groups increase creative thinking. This process is short, simple and stays with you as a useful interpersonal tool.
Motivating and Rewarding Performance
In order to be rewarded for anything that we do, it must first be recognized as important. This course covers the A-Z of walking the talk in order to acknowledge good jobs, but it also explains how to put systems in place that will encourage great workplace performance. Practice scenarios and role-play techniques are critical tools to train these skills.
Golden Rule Service Training
This program underscores the core principle of good service - the Golden Rule, "Treat others as you want to be treated." It opens with a review of how the Golden Rule has shaped all successful cultures and religions throughout human history. Through facilitated group exercises participants highlight the Seven Steps of Golden Rule Service. This 2-hour interactive session defines and develops experiences for a new or renewed sense of confidence in employees’ service roles within their organization.
Supervisory Skills Series
This three-part series covers the topics most associated with managerial success and the lack of it: motivating teams, problem-solving and decision-making. Through a 3-segment (2 hrs each segment) training plan, supervisors perform tasks that expand their practice of supervision and highlight people skills that work. As a hard look at "soft skills" training, this series approaches supervision from its problem-solving and decision-making aspects as well as the psychology of performance management. The "Supervisory Skills Series" is a hallmark program that is recommended for individuals who are either new supervisors or for those who are preparing for advancement into a supervisory role since it clarifies the real needs associated with real-good supervision.
The Mentor in Me: Coaching and Counseling
Many of us miss out on the personal perks of sharing our expertise by the simple act of encouragement. Many individuals in the workplace believe that this task falls only to management or HR - WRONG. By raising the bar on co-worker involvement with their peers, we are opening the door to better workplace performance, stronger team bonds and employee retention in all the right places. This program positively positions the participant to begin coaching and counseling as well as trains managers to help make that happen at their worksite.
Better Budget Breakthroughs
The good news - "I got the job." The bad news - "I have to manage a budget." Too many of us recall those days when we realized that we had all of the talents for a promotion, except the budget-one. You are not alone. Our facilitator will share some tried and true approaches to help even the least-savvy non-financial participant. Group interaction and case studies play an important practice phase of this program.
ADA: An Employment Rights Overview
This is a program with background information from EEOC for employees who will learn about the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990 (ADA). In this 2/3hr session, facilitated by an ADA Certified Administrator, we cover a sampling of the basic ADA topics: what disabilities are covered, who is protected, what is reasonable accommodation, what are essential employee skills, requirements of medical examinations, drug-usage and coverage etc. This program is meant to help staff understand the value of properly dealing with valid disability in the workplace.
“Ouch” That Stereotype Hurts
This program is a trend-setting session for any organization that values respect in the workplace. It defines both bias and stereotype, exploring how bias-free communication can exist and how easily work teams can practice it, without stereotyping. This session is accompanied by the award-winning DVD of the same name.
Effective Leadership Skills
This program covers the basic for supervisors who are new to the position or who have the experience of managements but no recent training. Through this program, participants examine the value of autocratic, participative and free-reign styles of leadership and when their applications will be most valued and effective.
How To Know A Good Team When You See It
This fun-based approach to teambuilding covers the positives of what cooperation, trust and results looks like when individuals work together as a team. Highlighted within this program are multiple practice sections that encourage participants to do the “right thing” as a team member. “Appreciative Inquiry” (reviewing what goes right) is used to explain how important it is to know what goes well within a team.
Typewatching Made Easy
Through this program, participants will explore how understanding MBTI types can help them in many work situations. Whether an individual is providing customer service, selling products or doing telephone work, the ability to recognize behavioral cues in oneself and in others is both stress reducing and performance enhancing. A Myers-Briggs Self-Assessment is the basis for introducing the MBTI letters, upon which “Typewatching” is built.
Coaching for Smoking Cessation
If you are someone who would prefer not to smoke and you have tried and failed, this is the program for you. Through an introduction to your choice preference, you will review your Myers-Briggs TYPE and how you are “hard-wired” to best stop smoking. After we discuss your personal preference to change, participants will devise an Action Plan that will list step by step how they will realize their goal to cease smoking. Finally, participants will create a Contingency Contract which will seal their expectations and has been proven to be the most beneficial to making it through to their goal of being a non-smoker. Taking this class will involve (2) two-hour sessions @ $150 per hour.
Dealing with Difficult People
This 2 hour session covers the “work through” techniques of conflict comparing and practicing the “Five Conflict Handing Modes” (Competing, Collaborating, Compromising, Avoiding and Accommodating). The basics of personality as well as understanding how confidence and assertiveness play a role in proactive conflict resolution. This is a good basic approach to better interpersonal relationships, better team projects and better supervision.
The Generational Workplace
Each of us represents a generation at our workplace (Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, The Millenials). Each generation has varied backgrounds and experiences from the other generations and we share many of the same mindsets as our own generation. This 2 hour program will reflect upon all the current at-work generations. It will highlight adult development but concentrate on how to assess and work together as engaged employees intergenerationally. This workshop is excellent for managers, supervisors, work teams or individual contributors.
One-On-One Coaching Sessions
As individuals achieve success in their careers, they are invariably burdened with the baggage of past institutional practices and perspectives. It is refreshing for them to take a break from the norm and allow themselves to re-discover what made them successful, what is changing in the present business environment, and how will they play it forward.
Even though Myers-Briggs is an essential element for the personal style piece of this perspective, it assumes a minor role with regard to the one-on-one (preferred although not restricted) nature of this program. Accordingly, one meeting can extend to many meetings. Each session is reflective of each professional’s direction and interest. To be most effective, our facilitator should shadow the executive so that specific performance feedback is available.
Our interpersonal approach to one-on-one coaching is strictly confidential for the client, who will only receive its feedback. We have found that organizations that value their staff offer them the time to privately study their styles and to build the business on their strengths. It is therefore possible for them to better envision and reflect their company’s culture.
In Conclusion
This is only a partial list of the many programs available to your organization. One-on-one consulting usually occurs prior to program development. In all situations, every aspect of the sessions will cater to our specific client organization, its jargon and its special needs.
Work/Life Connection, Lead Trainers from left to right are Bonnie English, Debbi Harris, Lani Carrow, Kim Neubauer.
Review & Satisfaction Guarantee
Work/Life Connection takes pride as an organization in subscribing to the three-tier process of review; we will assess on-site immediately, 1-3 months after our work and 3-6 months following. We do this to insure that our development initiative has met your business needs. Also, we work with all clients in a diverse manner, considering the similarities and differences in our client bases. Lastly, we will guarantee that employee retention improves within 6 months of participation in our programs.
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