Half-Day Workshops

An Appreciative Inquiry Approach to Strategic Planning

This one-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to help participants experience how the appreciative inquiry dialogue process results in enthusiastic sharing, community building, and commitment generation. The workshop will model the stages in the process, so that the participants can see for themselves why it is effective in creating teamwork and commitment. They will also have an opportunity to plan how they can use this process to increase the level of teamwork and commitment in their own organizations.

Bridging the Generation Gap

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to enable participants to recognize and manage the generational differences that are increasingly at the root of misunderstanding, poor customer service, and conflict in work ethics, interpersonal styles, communication needs, and motivational concerns. Because they do not recognize the difference in generational values, service providers unintentionally frustrate, disappoint, or insult customers, and their employers start to lose their client base. Using interactive exercises, the participants will: identify the reality of the generational gap at work; define four different generational cultures; decode generational miscommunications; and recognize and resolve real-life intergenerational issues. The workshop includes an analysis of irritating listening habits to determine the benefit and consequences of those behaviors, as well as case situations and role playing to provide practice in applying active listening techniques.

Building Employee Coping Skills

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop uses interactive exercises to help the participants: examine their current coping strategies, recognize why they act this way, face their fears or concerns, and identify and seize the opportunities offered by the changes in their lives.

Business Planning: How to Get Your Business Where You Want to Go

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to help business owners learn how to create a strategic vision and set goals to implement that vision so that they have a clear idea of what they want their business to be and what it will take to accomplish that. Participants: define what a strategic vision is; discuss the characteristics of a good strategic vision; create a strategic vision for their business; explain how to set short-term and long-range goals to implement their strategic vision; and set short-term and long-range goals for their businesses.

Coping With Change

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to assist participants who may arrive at the workshop with actual pink slips in hand- in shock, feeling invalidated and expendable, and uncertain about their value in the current workplace. They feel guilty, resentful, depressed or angry about failing themselves and their families, who depend upon them. Using interactive exercises, the participants learn to recognize the impact of the stress on their lives and their choices, gain perspective, consider their options, and feel good again about themselves as people and as contributing members of society.

Coping With Change: A Survivors' Guide

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is targeted at those employees and supervisors who have watched others (co-workers, friends, and family) be affected by change and feel guilty that they themselves are still employed. They are living in limbo, uncertain when they will be directly affected- so they aren't sure where to place their loyalty. They need to decide whether they should stay with their current job until it ends, dealing with the additional work as they have to do more with less, or whether they should leave. It is also targeted at supervisors who must make decisions about which of their employees stay or go- and are feeling guilty and unsure of themselves

Creating an Intrepreneurial Organization

 This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to enable managers to: prepare their environment for intrapreneurship, eliminate barriers to intrapreneurship, build the skills to manage in an intrapreneurial manner, and build the skills of employees to act in an intrapreneurial manner. Using interactive exercises, the participants: define "intrapreneurship" and its four operating principles: collegiality, collaboration, subsidiarity, and accountability; identify the impact of intrapreneurship on organizational success; explain how to create an intrapreneurial organization; practice applying the four operating principles of intrapreneurship to real job situations; and discuss the organizational, managerial, and employee behaviors and qualities needed for an intrapreneurial transformation.

How to Hire the Right Person

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to assist supervisors and managers in improving their abilities to conduct an effective selection interview that protects them from the "professional interviewee" who shines during the interview but tarnishes quickly once on the job. Through interactive exercises, the participants will learn how to conduct an effective hiring interview and develop behavioral situational and organizational- fit structured interview questions and benchmark answers to ensure an effective hiring decision.

How to Keep Your Business Healthy

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to help business owners and managers learn the key dimensions of effective business management so that they can build on their strengths and determine areas for improvement. Participants: discuss the key dimensions of business management; explain the importance of each dimension for a healthy business; assess their service/product mix; review the effectiveness of their customer service and quality care activities; analyze their payer relations; determine if they have the right staffing mix for their level of business development; and evaluate the roles and responsibilities that business owners should play and/or delegate to employees.

How to Keep Yourself Healthy

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to help managers and staff learn how to manage their time and their stress in order to avoid burnout while managing a healthy business. Participants: define stress and correct myths about burnout; identify stress exhaustion symptoms; analyze reasons for past personal success in handling stress; assess their time management personalities; and create a time and stress management action plan.

How to Keep Your Relationships with Key Stakeholders Healthy

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to help business staff learn how to effectively communicate with their key stakeholders in order to build and maintain effective relationships. Participants: identify the potential key stakeholders in their businesses; explain the impact that each stakeholder can have on the success of the business; describe how to establish and maintain relationships with key stakeholders; discuss the value of networking analyze how to meet the communication and trust needs of four different personality types; and problem solve issues concerning key stakeholders.

How to Make the Issue of Gender Less Tender

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to enable the participants to discuss and consider gender differences and misunderstandings in a humorous and nonjudgmental fashion. Using interactive exercises, the participants: analyze gender-specific conversational and behavioral differences; explain the impact of conversational styles and rituals on four areas: connection, confidence, competence, and credit; and identify necessary behavioral or attitudinal changes to minimize misunderstandings based on gender differences.

How to Spring the Time Trap

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop is designed to help managers and employees who want to improve their ability to manage their time. Using interactive exercises, the participants will learn how to spring their time traps by: exploring time management assumptions, analyzing what invests them in poor time management behaviors, learning time management tricks, such as the "Swiss cheese approach" to large projects, and applying what they have learned to resolve specific time management problems.

Managing Your Stress Before It Manages You!

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop uses interactive exercises to help the participants: distinguish between positive and negative stress; assess their stress reactions; identify stress management techniques that can help reduce stress; and assume healthy control over the negative stressors in their lives.

Managing Your Stress Before It Manages You or Your Staff!

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop uses interactive exercises to help the participants: distinguish between positive and negative stress; assess their stress reactions; identify stress management techniques that can help reduce stress; assume healthy control over the negative stressors in their lives; and supervise employees who have stress management problems.

Six Steps to Yes: When You Need Instant Influence

This half-day skill-building participant-centered workshop uses interactive exercises to help the participants learn, recognize how and when they have been used on them, and practice using six decision triggers that can provide instant influence: reciprocity, commitment or consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. These proven psychological principles are based on 25 years of research as reported in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini.