Workshops
Dynamic, motivational speakers and facilitators deliver professional presentations and workshops customized specifically to meet your organization’s needs.
“If you have a brain, then you are biased”. Unconscious bias exists in all of us and we are usually not even aware of it.
You Will Learn:
- An introduction the concept and impact of unconscious bias
- Discuss ways to reduce bias
- Develop processes to acknowledge unconscious bias
- Use conversation to lean towards a more diverse and inclusive workplace
As our day-to-day roles move from the static office based 9-5 jobs to more flexible and remote working practices, it is becoming more important that we focus on modern business etiquette to ensure success. Whether it is in person or over email, video, or telephone, it is important to think about our social impact and behaviours on others to ensure we work collaboratively and effectively.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Identify what we mean by business etiquette, and understand why it is important in a business setting
- Explore email etiquette, and how we can get the best out of writing more simply without the use of business jargon
- Experience the importance of listening, and understand the effect of being distracted in the company of others
- Explore effective meeting management, to ensure you use your time productively
- Understand what might get in the way of other people’s business etiquette, and plan how we may support them in the future
As part of our coaching methodology, we will use various assessments to objectively measure key traits and competencies and/or behaviours and drivers. Self-assessments and 360 feedback help leaders and individuals to identify how they are perceived and to create action plans to improve effectiveness and performance.
- Employee Engagement Surveys
- Well-being Surveys
- Culture Assessment
- Aptitude and Skills Assessment
There is so much research illustrating the benefits of a diverse and inclusive workplace leading to an increase in financial performance, innovation and overall wellbeing. In this workshop, we’ll discuss the differences between diversity, inclusion and belonging and why this matters. We will then explore how you can create a workplace culture that is more diverse, inclusive and fosters belonging.
We all know leaders who are book smart but are poor at communicating, building relationships or understanding and managing their emotions. The good news is that emotional intelligence is a set of skills and behaviours that you can develop over time.
You Will Learn:
- Individuals can learn to develop emotional and social skills
- To use these skills to become more effective
- Leaders
- Communicators
- Relationship builders
- Decision makers
It’s never easy to have a difficult conversation with a co-worker or employee. We know the anxiety that can come with wanting to address an outstanding issue, and navigating the way to start and complete the conversation. We want to help. Our ‘Difficult Conversations’ workshop, can help you identify the steps to making these conversations, a little bit easier. For you, or your workplace, we are here to assist.
You Will Learn:
- How to address an outstanding issue
- Ways to begin the conversation
- Tips to complete the conversation
- Removing the anxiety around this interaction with an employee
Effective communication is key to building positive and productive working relationships with your co-workers, clients, leaders and employees. Knowing how you communicate your message effectively and being able to listen and respond to others is key to building and maintaining trust.
You Will Learn:
- Key skills for effective communication
- Examining different styles of communication: verbal, non-verbal etc.
- Learning how the different methods will allow you to connect more effectively with others
This session will provide leaders and managers with the essential tools they need to not only improve their own skills, but also to drive the performance improvement of the people on their team. The overall aim is to improve their ability to engage and motivate those around them and to increase business success through effective management techniques.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Use a framework for effective management
- Set goals, objectives, strategy and KPIs
- Prioritize and organize your work effectively
- Create employee engagement and motivation
We all have innate natural talents, which if developed can become incredible strengths. Yet, we tend to focus on developing our weaknesses, the things that at best we can become mediocre at. Think about the benefit of identifying and enhancing your natural talents – your superpowers.
You Will Learn:
- The power of developing and building on strengths
- Creating engaged and high performing individuals and teams
- Identifying individual strengths and how they contribute to a team
Are you curious what the 5 five functions of an Effective Team are? We offer a workshop that helps bring teams together to identify and address the issues that are preventing excellent performance and will work with the teams to develop the skills and behaviours for effective team work.
Employees want to know how they are doing and how they can improve. Giving and receiving feedback is an important part of communication and can be powerful when done well but destructive when handled poorly.
You Will Learn
- Frameworks and skills for both giving and receiving effective feedback
- Enabling leaders to introduce a process whereby performance conversations are held throughout the year
- Methods of starting and concluding the conversations
Modern leadership is about having the skills to unlock the power and potential of those around you. It’s about bringing people together to achieve great results.
This session will enhance or develop participant’s leadership skills and is suitable for people that are relatively new to leadership or are in need of a fresh perspective to their leadership role.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Clearly define the core requirements of Personal, Team and Task Leadership
- Increase their self-awareness and develop a positive approach to leadership
- Utilize clear methods of getting the best out of their team and those around them
- Implement working practices that will assist them in becoming a great leader
Having an effective team around you is crucial. However, it is an area that is often left to chance, which can lead to de-motivated individuals that do not feel part of the business and consequently do not perform. This session looks at what it takes to lead an effective team and how you can get the best out of the people in it by understanding the role of a leader, both personally and from the point of view of the team.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Explain the qualities of an effective leader
- Benchmark themselves against those qualities and develop actions to improve
- Explain the difference between leading and managing
- Explain the value of sharing the business vision with the team
- Develop team goals based on the business vision
- Motivate their staff by understanding their drivers and developing actions to support them
- Deal with difficult staff members
- Challenge staff in a meaningful and effective way
- Coach staff effectively using a simple process
What does it take to be a good leader? A question often asked in the workplace. What does it take to lead a good meeting? We create customized leadership development programs, using tried-and-tested models to support leadership development at all levels of the organization from first time managers to executive teams. Our blended approach to learning, ensures that the development continues long after the program is complete. We want to help you create those rockstar meetings for you, as a leader, and for your team.
You Will Learn:
- Whether a first time manager or executive, how to lead a meeting
- What helps capture attention of your co-workers in a room
- How to project information effectively
This session was developed for both new and experienced managers who are finding that they are managing teams who may be struggling to work in the face of uncertainty. They might be wondering about the best ways to manage wellbeing within the team, or how to approach changes in a motivating way. Alternatively, they may realize that they too struggle in the face of uncertainty and want to find ways to help keep themselves resilient while developing and supporting their team.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Understand what happens to our brains when faced with uncertainty, as well as the emotions we may feel during periods of transition
- Explore how our own personal resilience needs to come first to effectively help others, and what we can do to help us thrive
- Plan how we can bring clarity, no matter how small, into uncertain situations
- Identify ways we can set direction in periods of uncertainty
- Understand what affects our people’s mental well-being, and how we can help support their human needs
- Build trust based and supportive relationships with your people
This session provides participants with practical techniques they can apply to ensure they listen effectively on a consistent basis.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will have the tools to:
- Explain why listening skills are important
- Identify key reasons why we can fail to listen effectively
- Adopt simple techniques they can always use to ensure that they listen effectively
This session will help leaders manage a cross generational team with confidence and ease. We will take a close look at the myths and facts for each generation (and what that means for managers) as well as explore different ways of how leaders can make sure they get the very best out of cross generational teams.
Objectives:
At the end of this interactive session, participants will be able to:
- Articulate the different generations in the workplace, and differentiate what is a myth about that generation, and what is a fact
- Explore generational tension, and how different cognitive biases come into play
- Understand how life stages may impact different generations, particularly in regard to priorities for different age groups as well as technological advances
- Demonstrate ways of working cross-generationally to get the best out of people
- Identify the skills and tactics for managing team members that might have more experience than them
The modern work environment places many demands on the manager, not least the need to treat ‘difficult’ employees with the same care and respect afforded to those who are less demanding. Recognizing and understanding the cause or causes of this behaviour, and the manager’s self-awareness of their own behaviour and its impact, are vital in the fight to create a working environment where everyone is treated equally and are afforded the same opportunities. This session will provide participants with both the knowledge to appreciate the reasoning behind what we might consider difficult behaviour as well as the communication tools to manage and overcome difficult behaviours in the workplace.
Objectives:
At the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Identify the root causes of tension in the workplace
- Recognize common triggers and inhibitors of behaviour
- Appreciate the Stimulus-Response model and how to adapt to it
- Explain the attitude and behaviour cycle and relate it to your own experience
- Understand and apply behaviours for defusing/calming situations
Managing virtual teams requires a different approach. It means developing new skills, communication methodologies and techniques to get the best out of teams and improve organizational and personal performance.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Understand and develop the skills required to effectively manage a virtual team
- Build engagement and trust with members of their virtual team
- Effectively use technology and tools to support communication within the team
- Improve their communication and feedback approach with their virtual team
- Track progress and performance management of team members to achieve success
How do we define culture? Often summarized as “The way we do things around here”, there are many parts which make up an organization’s culture.
This session centres around the elements of the Cultural Web and a series of thought-provoking activities are undertaken to determine what culture exists within their workplace. Having established this, participants are then encouraged to look at how they can start to change things where needed.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Describe the 6 different components of Culture in the workplace
- Relate the components to your own work situation and describe the current culture where you work
- Identify what to specifically Start, Stop and Continue doing in order to start to improve the culture where you work
This session steers away from the procedural, form-filling approach to performance management/reviews and instead focuses on the skills required to effectively co-operate with team members, develop their skills and ensure they feel incentivized to succeed.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Manage performance by setting clearly aligned goals that are documented
- Identify causes of poor performance whilst working with employees to improve and develop
- Recognize and communicate success, focusing on behaviour and results
- Co-operate with employees in order to increase productivity, morale and motivation
This session will introduce participants to practical tools and techniques that will enable them to better understand their people during the transformation of their business. It will also provide them with clear methodologies that will assist them in influencing the change for the organization and the people within it.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Recognize your own journey through change and how you have adapted to different situations
- Demonstrate practical methods of delivering a change message
- Prepare a message for teams using a standard process to engage and empathize with staff
- Explain a simple change model that will help you move people through the various stages of change
- Distinguish the 7 steps to influencing change
E-Mail is an important means of communication in business. We use e-mails to communicate internally to our work colleagues and despite other advances in communication, e-mails are still a key tool used to communicate with customers, suppliers, and business partners.
Unfortunately, it can be said that we do not always display the same professionalism in our e-mails as we do with other forms of business communication and professional standards are still evolving.
Objectives:
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Eliminate simple errors when writing and sending e-mails
- Write e-mails that comply with the professional standards of your organization
- Follow accepted protocol when writing and sending business e-mails
Work environments can be unstable and often include contract changes, re-organizations, downsizing, short-term contracts, redundancies and flexible, hybrid and remote working arrangements. To help ensure you succeed in the job you’re in or get the promotion you are looking for, you need to be able to tell people what you are about both visually and verbally. That is where personal brand comes in.
What is so important about developing your personal brand is that it allows you to stand out from the crowd and display your true talents and attributes. A successful personal brand will mean organizations pick you for their job, team, project, or promotion.
Objectives:
At this end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Identify what a personal brand is both personally and from a professional level
- Recognize the positive impact a personal brand can have on their future and start working on their brand
- Develop their 30 second “elevator” speech
Performance review time is a very important time for most employees. At this time of year employees need to organize themselves to ensure they are fully prepared for their review. This session will explain the importance of thorough preparation when approaching performance review time.
Objectives:
At this end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Recognize the need to review performance in readiness for their performance review
- Recognize the need to review behaviours in readiness for their performance review
- Describe various ways to provide evidence for performance reviews
- Identify any development and career aspirations
Presenting information clearly and effectively is a key skill to get your message or opinion across. Yet, so many people dread giving presentations.
You Will Learn:
- How to alleviate nervous energy
- Methods to structure, prepare and deliver an effective presentation
- Skills for presenting that will help resonate with your audience
This session will provide insight into a topic that has been identified as a crucial element in developing high performing teams. Studies are increasingly highlighting the important role that psychological safety plays at work. One of these studies was performed by Google, who spent two years and interviewed 180 different teams, eventually identifying psychological safety as the key characteristic of exceptional teams. In their own words…
“In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.”
Where fear at work is the dominating factor and people are scared to speak up through a worry that they will be dismissed, suppressed, ridiculed, or even threatened, the chances of errors and mistakes increases while opportunities for growth are reduced.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Explain the concept of psychological safety
- Measure how psychologically safe your workplace is currently
- Identify what might be hindering psychological safety in your teams
- Create actions to help you build a psychologically safe workplace
Setting down ground rules for team/business meetings can be highly effective.
By identifying how teams would like to interact with each other, team members recognize the importance of respecting the individual needs of others. This is why team/business ground rules are central to the performance of any team.
The key thing to bear in mind is that team ground rules must reflect the expected behaviour of team members. They are the structure for “how we interact and behave together”.
Objectives:
At this end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Identify how ground rules can help teams function
- Explain the various considerations for setting ground rules
- Recognize the various steps of the Setting Ground Rules process
- Develop a set of ground rules for your team/organization
Teamwork is defined as a co-operative effort by a group or team to achieve a common goal.
This session will help develop participants’ team working skills. It will help them define a common goal, understand how they want to work together as a team and create an understanding of the behaviours required to develop better team performance.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Appreciate team skills and dynamics
- Identify and develop personal skills to become a more effective team member
- Establish effective team processes
- Improve team communication
- Demonstrate skills that help you to implement effective changes in the workplace
We have all found ourselves in situations where we have been put on the spot by an unexpected question. This can happen in many situations such as business meetings, conversations with customers or perhaps during a chance meeting with a boss or a work colleague. Often the questioner just wants some simple information, an opinion or some assistance with a problem. They usually want a clear and accurate answer. They also want to feel confident in the answer that you give.
If you are dealing with a customer, your answer could make or break a sale and there are countless other situations where the answer that you give and the way in which you answer is crucial. This means that being able to think quickly and provide answers in a cool, calm and collected way is an important skill.
Objectives:
At this end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Deal with unexpected questions, quickly and effectively
- Use a four-stage approach to answering unexpected questions
- Answer questions using one of seven highly effective themes to ensure that answers always have a clear focus
This session will help participants tap into the latent ability of their mind. Everyone has the capability required to achieve their desired outcomes, the only restriction being a self-imposed conditioning and belief system.
Objectives:
At the end of this interactive session, participants will be able to:
- Use their inner resources to their positive advantage
- Explain how their conscious and subconscious work together (or not)
- Be successful at the things that matter to them
- Be the best they can be
- Follow a clear action plan for success
Modern life is busy. With so many distractions and demands on our attention, wasting time is easy to do. That’s why improving time management skills has never been more important to your success.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Recognize what prevents them from making the best use of their time
- Make necessary long medium- and short-term plans to help schedule and organize activities
- Manage their ‘To Do List’ effectively
- Control interruptions so they have limited impact
- Recognize and manage common time wasters
- Identify why they procrastinate and how to manage it
In November 2013, Bill 14 was introduced in BC to deal with mental disorders. It became law for employers to protect employees from workplace bullying and harassment. Bullying and harassment in the workplace can take many forms, including verbal aggression, personal attacks, and other intimidating or humiliating behaviours. If workplace bullying and harassment is not addressed, it can lead to lost productivity, anxiety, and depression.
In this interactive session we are going to take a look at:
- What is bullying and harassment
- How to identify toxic behaviours in the workplace
- Personal communication styles
- Tips on how and where to have difficult conversations
- How to diffuse a potential negative situation
- How to work together to promote collaboration, engagement and a positive work environment
Workplace wellness is about organizations and individuals taking a proactive approach to ensuring the health and wellbeing of their workforce. By focusing on the wellness of employees, organizations can help prevent issues with mental and physical health, reducing stress levels and absenteeism and ultimately improving performance. Raising awareness will help encourage people to take responsibility for their own health and wellbeing.
Objectives:
By the end of this interactive session participants will be able to:
- Define wellness and its importance in the workplace
- Practice rational and positive thinking
- Apply the six dimensions of wellness
- Explain the importance of work-life balance
- Describe the business case for wellness
All Workshops can be delivered virtually or in person.
Many of our workshops can also be delivered as keynote presentations.
“Debbie – thanks so much for such a great and informative facilitation. It was very engaging, thoroughly explained, and our needs/criteria were completely fulfilled. I also greatly appreciated you for keeping our limited time on track and ending it within 1-hour.
Sandra – thanks for your collaboration and patience during out planning process. We will definitely reach out for our future relevant training needs.“
“The written evaluations [of your workshop] have now been tabulated and I am delighted to provide you with the feedback we received from delegates. They consistently expressed how much they learned. We know that it takes a considerable amount of time to develop a strong presentation and we appreciate the thought that was put into yours. It is evident from the written evaluations that you took time to ensure your talk addressed the most critical issues [regarding Employee Terminations]. [Sandra Reder’s] individual ratings were excellent; your presentation received a rating of 9.3 and the content of your presentation was rated 9.4. It is rare that speakers receive ratings this high – congratulations!”