Our Transforming Leaders training, custom-designed for your organization’s circumstances, might include such units as:

• Transforming Organization Relationships – This is a powerful simulation serves as a catalyst for organizational improvement initiatives.
  
  Participants discover why employees ­­­­­– from the top of an organization to the bottom – are often “trapped” in a cycle of counterproductive behaviors because of the positions they occupy in the organization’s universe. 
  
  They uncover issues that prevent them from getting the results they want.
  
  And they consider strategies for breaking free of old habits and make commitments to new and more productive ways of interacting with each other when they return to their office.
  
  The simulation helps make participants aware of previously unseen organizational processes and staff interactions and provides a context for making different choices about how to respond to pressures in a way that promotes partnership and collaboration, particularly across organizational lines.
  
  
• Strategic Leadership and Emotional Intelligence– Participants explore how best to lead in their areas of expertise, no matter their formal role in the hierarchy.  They examine their “default” leadership style(s) and consider how to respond to challenging situations most productively.  Based on the groundbreaking research of Daniel Goleman and others, this exploration with case studies helps participants become more thoughtful about how best to elicit cooperation from others.
  
  
• Strategic Thinking – Before we can lead effectively we must formulate our ideas and reach agreement with others about effective strategies and actions.  Participants learn a new, more organic architecture of strategy that fixes on a goal while at the same time allowing for course corrections to adapt to changing circumstances.
  
  
• Assessing Strategies and Risk  – Before a strategy can be chosen, it’s important to explore the potential impact of the options under consideration.  Participants learn a methodology to forecast potential downsides and assess the risk of a particular strategy and how to use this knowledge to chart a wise course.
  
  
• Mutual Influencing– Participants use the results of a self-assessment instrument as a framework for learning about the strengths and pitfalls of their preferred style(s) of asserting influence on others.  Then, using role plays based on situations related to your organization, they receive coaching from their peers as they practice improving their influencing skills.
  
  
• Decision Making – Participants learn various methods to involve others in idea-generation and decision-making that take advantage of the knowledge others have to offer and foster greater commitment to any decision that is made.
  
  
• Developing and Supporting New Ideas – Human beings have a tendency to fall into habitual patterns of thinking and acting and to resist and reject unfamiliar ideas and different ways of doing things, even when our habitual behaviors don’t serve us well.  Participants learn how to become more open to discerning and adopting new ideas and behaviors and to gain support for them from colleagues at all levels.
  
  
• Managing Performance – Leaders must become skilled at managing the performance of others.  They must know how to set goals, plan workflow, delegate work, monitor progress, provide effective performance feedback (both appreciative and corrective), and handle appropriately any performance and conduct issues that impede progress.  Using situations that are relevant to your organization, participants  practice these competencies to increase knowledge, sharpen skills, and build confidence.
  
  
• Managing Conflict and Resistance – Conflict and resistance to change are inevitable­ and, we believe, healthy because they are often point to what people really care about.  Ignored or mishandled, conflict and resistance can doom a project or initiative to failure.  In contrast, skillfully managed conflict and resistance can generate better options and lead to solutions that generate widespread support.  
  
  
  Participants determine their preferred style of dealing with conflict, learn how it might help or hinder them in achieving their goals, and develop strategies for managing workplace conflict and resistance more effectively.
  
  
• Communication– To be successful in any human interaction we need to be able to listen attentively, to accord others the full hearing we wish for ourselves, and to understand – if not necessarily agree with – another person’s point of view.  Participants practice listening in different modes to strengthen their skills of understanding and empathy – two of the most critical and underused leadership competencies.
  
  
• Using Personal Strengths in Relationships– Participants identify their strengths and learn when and how to apply them appropriately rather than under- or overusing them, and thus increase their ability to form and enhance productive work relationships.
  
  
• Feedback for Results – Working first with scenarios and then with issues that related directly to your organization, participants receive coaching from us and each other in how to give and receive feedback in a way that builds trust, strengthens relationships, fosters teamwork, and advances your organization’s overall goals.
  
  
• Motivation – A highly motivated staff or individual employee can often deliver a sustained high-level performance with minimal supervision, while a poorly motivated staff or employee can lower the performance level of the whole organization and demand a disproportionately large amount of the supervisor’s finite time, attention, energy, and patience.
  Since we are not all motivated by the same things, participants learn how to discern what others find motivating and how to create conditions that maintain high morale and peak performance.
  
  
• Energy Management– Participants learn about and add to their repertoire techniques that recharge their batteries, replenish their energy and emotional resilience, and become more productive when working under the pressure of tight deadlines or other stressful conditions.
  
  
• Meetings That Work® – Participants learn how to transform meetings into real opportunities to move their agendas and projects forward.  They practice techniques to:
  • Save time at meetings
  • Stimulate discussion without wandering off track
  • Communicate effectively
  • Get the best ideas from all participants
  • Generate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions
  • Move on when the group gets stuck                          
  • Evaluate a meeting
  • Ensure that agreed-on actions are followed up on

• Peer Coaching for Success – Coaching, as we use the term in this context, is a method by which one colleague helps another discover solutions to challenging problems.  Through the application of coaching techniques, the coach helps the person being coached think for himself or herself, challenge stuck ways of thinking, explore possibilities, discover strengths, acknowledge weaknesses, and come up with ways on his or her own to resolve issues of concern.  

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