Leadership Skills

We have developed a process that enables leaders to select their own personal case regarding a difficult conversation that needs to be had within their own organization about a meaningful change. This exercise will allow you to be able to advance your ability to exercise leadership to improve the effectiveness of your organization. Leadership is the ability to inspire, connect, and mobilize people to solve important business problems. It needs to be exercised both within and beyond one’s authority. This activity will give you the ability to identify, diagnose, and take action to address the “real issues” facing you and your organization.

1. Real-World Problem Selection & Documentation.

2. Build awareness with Real-World Problem Selection & Documentation.

3. Transform your approach by using intuitive tools. 

4. See Results through effective application of intentional practices to diverse business problems

What five words would people use to describe you?  Whatever they are, they are your Personal Brand.  Just like a company's brand--Apple or Theranos--your Personal Brand can be positive or negative. 

No matter what their function or role, everyone has a Personal Brand, but not everyone manages their brand strategically or successfully.  When ignored, a person’s brand relies on word of mouth and reputation, which poses two main problems:

1. Your Personal Brand is out of your control and people are left to decide for themselves, and

2. A negative image or reputation is quite difficult to turn around.

Participants will learn the fundamentals of building their brand and will explore a variety of ways to distribute and manage their brand, including managing their on-line image.

• Understand the importance of building and evolving a personal brand

• Identify the “Four Keys to Successful Branding” 

• Build a brand using a three-step process

• Value the impact of “image” on your brand

• Practice skills to greatly improve your image

• Manage your on-line image and brand

Communication: One of the most important words in everything we do.   So how do we communicate?  How do others see us when it comes to communication?  What are the parts to communicating with one another?  What can we do to communicate more effectively?  How does our messaging come across?  These are the questions we hear all the time.   This Module will help answer those questions. 

• Reinforce the importance of Communication

• Introduce tools needed to increase ability to communicate, both one on one and in teams. 

• List barriers (physical, emotional, and intellectual) to effective communication

• Recognize ways to reduce barriers

• Apply a communication model to interactions

Research shows that better business decisions are made when the parties involved experience conflict before coming to a conclusion.  The challenge is having the right tools to manage through the disagreement or conflict without personally attacking individuals or damaging working relationships.   The most common mis-conception about workplace conflict is that it’s a “personality problem.”  Instead, we will abandon this myth and learn to focus on the behaviors, not the personalities involved. One instrument is the Thomas-Kilman (TKI) to understand our approach to conflict resolution.

• Define the types of conflict

• Recognize the positive (constructive) and negative (destructive) nature of conflict

• Determine the cause of workplace conflicts

• Identify difficult behaviors and manage around them

• Use questioning and active listening

• Understand several options for resolving conflict

• Use a problem-solving process to resolve conflicts

Delivering Feedback Effectively can sometimes be a difficult task to master. If done poorly, your colleague will walk away from the feedback session confused and maybe even hurt. There is no guarantee that their behavior will change or that your relationship with them will improve. That’s why it’s so important to learn the basic principles of Delivering Feedback Effectively. 

• Understand how performance feedback helps achieve business goals

• Value feedback as a critical link in the organizational/individual performance circuit

• Determine your own personal feedback style

• Describe characteristics of effective feedback

• Practice/Demonstrate an effective feedback conversation

• Create a feedback plan to help improve or encourage performance characteristics of your direct reports

• Understand different approaches to feedback models

Just fifteen minutes in front of the right audience can be more valuable that a whole year behind your desk…especially if you have outstanding Executive Presence Skills.  Speaking in public is one of life’s biggest challenges, and something that’s absolutely critical as a means to share ideas and opinions in our business life.   You can have brilliant ideas and perfect analytics, but if you can’t communicate your message effectively to an audience, your ideas don’t get heard.

In this intense, hands-on workshop participants will learn the physical skills and techniques of outstanding presenters including how to use stance, gestures, and vocal qualities to convey a message with confidence and conviction.

• Become aware of personal delivery habits – good and bad

• Learn and practice simple yet powerful delivery techniques that will help you appear more confident, credible and convincing

• Prepare and organize your thoughts to deliver on-target messages to any audience

• Understand the basics of creating and using visual aids to enhance a message

• Understand how “traditional” presentation and communication delivery techniques translate using today’s communication technologies including teleconferencing and Web-based meetings

Understanding your Style can help you improve relationships and influence positive outcomes in business -- and personal -- situations.   By completing a simple assessment, participants receive feedback on their Style -- Driver, Expressive, Amiable, Analytic – and then learn the implications of their Style in communication, working with others, etc.  These results provide insight on their potential strengths (to be built upon) and weaknesses (to be turned into strengths) as they relate to Style. 

Because Style is based on observable behavior, it is easier to see in others.  Once participants learn to analyze others, they gain a short-hand on how to relate to them.  This gives them the ability to apply versatility and select strategies for communications, conflict management, and other common business relationships.    Program activities include simulations, action planning, cases and skill practices relevant to participants’ business situations.

• To recognize and understand different social styles and their characteristic behaviors.

• To increase versatility for dealing effectively with people of different styles.

• To identify changes that can be made to work more effectively with colleagues

• Building awareness of your own style