Leading People Workshop

Length: one day or two half days

This workshop is designed for people who have direct reports.

Participants will improve their skills in

• Leadership inside the organization
• Inspiring initiative in others
• Supervising others
• Helping others develop their skills

This program can be designed for your organization’s specific needs, but it usually includes    

• What to look for in hiring people
• Understanding and inspiring motivation
• How to delegate effectively
• How to supervise without micromanaging or stifling people
• Encouraging initiative and an action-oriented attitude
• What managers owe the people who work for them
• Working with problem employees

• How to get people to want to follow your lead
• The responsibilities of leadership
• How to foster creativity – in your department or team and in others
• Exercising leadership when you don’t have the formal authority
• Inspiring people who don’t report to you

This workshop is one very full day or two half days. An adjunct to the day can be an additional half-day coaching lab component, in which people learn about coaching and practice their coaching and feedback skills, making the whole workshop a day and a half.

Creative Thinking for People Who Don’t Think They’re Creative

Length: Half day

Workshop Content

What Is Creative Thinking?
In business, ideas must not only be new, but useful. Creative thinking is much broader than simply thinking up new things; participants will learn to evaluate new ideas, and to present them in such a way that others will understand and approve them.

Limbering Up Your Mind 
To have new ideas, we must allow ourselves to think more freely. This free-association exercise reveals to participants the extensive network of connections and metaphorical thinking that is in their heads right now. It persuades students that they can think creatively, even if they’ve usually demurred.

How Geniuses Think Differently from You and Me
Participants will learn about the research into the work of brilliant scientists, which reveals that they have common patterns of thinking (willingness to generate bad ideas, giving themselves goals, thinking visually and metaphorically) that we can use in business as well.

How the Human Brain Works
In solving business problems, we often get stuck in what we know and what has gone before. In this series of exercises, participants learn how to recognize and break out of patterns of nonproductive thinking. We also discuss why traditional brainstorming so often leads to disappointing results.

A New Way to Generate Ideas
Each group chooses a problem that needs creative thinking, and then learn a methodology, based on silence and use of pattern-breaking “kickers,” that yields a huge number of ideas, none of which would emerge from traditional brainstorming.

Evaluating Ideas
Once many ideas are generated, it’s time to choose the ones that will have the most impact and use resources most efficiently. Participants learn how to use a matrix that simplifies the task of evaluating ideas.

Why Do Others Seem So Resistant to New Ideas?
Even when our peers or bosses ask us for new ideas, they often turn down the ones we propose. Generally it’s because we’ve neglected to help them get comfortable with those ideas. Participants learn how to get others to say yes to their new ideas.

Mind Exercises to Enhance Your Personal Creativity
The more we think (and act) creatively, the easier it is. Participants learn how they can keep their thinking fresh.

My Personal Road Map to Creativity

Persuasive Presentations Workshop

Length: Two days

The very best way for people to learn persuasive presentation skills is not to listen, watch and try to emulate, but to practice. In this intense but friendly workshop, participants get a chance to try out what they’re learning in front of the group, with live feedback, plus instantaneous videotape playback in a private yet supportive environment.

The workshop can accommodate up to 16 people, allowing each person to make five to six videotaped presentations. (The presentations are short, and some of the presenting is done in teams.)

At the end of the workshop, participants have learned specific techniques to make their presentations easier to prepare and more interesting. They’ve developed a personal style they’re comfortable with, so they are more credible and highly persuasive. Participants learn how to talk as naturally standing up as they do sitting down. People tell us that they thoroughly enjoy the presentations workshop – even those who say they hated presenting before we began.

Workshop Content

Finding an Intrinsic Style: There’s no one right way to make effective presentations. To be authentically persuasive, people have to find a style that makes the most of their own personality. Participants learn what others respond most favorably to about their natural style.

Mastering Physical Presence: Brilliant content can be killed by a hesitant manner. Participants learn techniques for calming the jitters, or just masking them, and for commanding attention in the room. They practice making eye contact and using appropriate gestures for emphasis that look genuine and not canned.

Exploring the Power of Voice: The attention span of listeners is constantly getting shorter, so participants learn to keep things interesting by varying the pace, volume, and tone of their voices.

Organizing Effectively: Participants learn how to organize a presentation for greatest impact, based on our flexible ACTION format. Presenters learn to earn credibility and interest with a strong beginning, and then structure their presentations through to a persuasive close. They also learn how – and when – to best use PowerPoint deck and how to keep this tool from diminishing their effectiveness.

Telling a Story: Great presenters instinctively show their material in narrative terms. When it comes to the heart of the presentation, the power of story lets us become more compelling. Participants will learn our business storytelling model, which uses visual and emotional descriptions rather than dry bullet points.

Reading the Room: The object of a presentation isn’t simply to finish, but to finish with the listeners totally in sync with the speaker. To do that, speakers learn to pick up signals while they’re presenting, and to make course corrections in the moment. Participants also learn how to handle questions and frame the conversation around key points.

Presenting with a Team: Often people must present materials with others. But if people just take turns popping up and down, even the best individual presenters start looking like the Whack-a-Mole game at the county fair. Participants will learn how to mesh personal styles and make easy hand-offs to each other, so they are seen as a smoothly-functioning team.

We can conduct this training in one of your organization’s conference room if it’s big enough. You need a video camera on a tripod, someone to operate the camera, and a monitor and VCR in another room so people can watch themselves in private. One word of caution: people need to be committed to spending the time concentrating on presentations. It’s very distracting if they’re called out for internal meetings or to answer the phone. For that reason, many organizations prefer to have this training offsite.
        

Writing For Impact

Length: Full day

Almost everyone in business has a horror story of how a misinterpreted or misaddressed email caused a situation to escalate dangerously. As we communicate more and more quickly, and we increasingly manage long distance client relationships, everyone in business needs to write more clearly and effectively.

Differences in career hierarchy, in personal backgrounds, even in gender, influence how people perceive our written words.

Almost every one of our written messages is intended, directly or indirectly, to persuade someone to move toward “yes.” The style of our writing nudges readers toward or away from that goal, no matter how good the content.

Effective writing doesn’t come naturally to everyone. But everyone can follow simple guidelines to make their writing have greater impact.

In this workshop, participants will learn

• How to let your personality illuminate your writing
• How to organize any piece of writing for greatest impact
• How to inject a human voice into your writing
• How to compose the most influential parts of any writing: the beginning and the end
• Why simple and clear writing works best
• The grammar rules you absolutely need to know and the ones you don’t have to agonize over
• How to communicate bad news
• Writing for both the primary reader and other people who will also see the work
• The uses and misuses of PowerPoint
• Writing and managing email and attachments
• What to watch for in writing to and from Blackberries and other devices
• The five most irritating mistakes that occur in business writing

Participants are encouraged to bring to the workshop examples of particularly good and bad writing they’ve seen recently, as well as examples of their own writing to work on during class.

Teams That Work: Engaged Participation in High-Performing Teams

This workshop is for anyone who is part of a work team. Participants will reflect on their own team experiences and strategize how to make their teams even more effective.

Overview of Workshop Activities

Organizing for Effectiveness

• Assigning team member roles and responsibilities
• Setting joint and individual goals for work product and quality
• Agreements on how the team will work together

Working Together

• Understanding each other’s communications styles
• Mutual support and accountability
• Thinking creatively about issues
• Pitfalls and obstacles in teams and how to overcome them.
• Monitoring progress and keeping work on track

Team Life Cycles

• Stages of team development and how to be effective in each
• Integrating new members
• How to revitalize existing teams
• When to end teams

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