Communications Training
Presentation Skills, including Sales Presentations
- Identify audience needs, sensitivities, objections
- Frame your action objective so you ask for what you need
- Organize and structure for attention and retention
- Use anecdotes, examples, humor to enliven
- Manage non-verbal communication professionally and cross culturally; deliver with credibility and responsiveness
- Manage the message; the art of persuasion
- Use media to enhance and support
- Control group dynamics, field question/answer
- Work with small and large groups
- Provide video, written and verbal feedback
Influence:
- Assess your individual capacity for influence
- Master the three influential moves
- Use a script to demonstrate how to frame your influential objective and interact to support and achieve it
- Use logic, emotion and authority to support your objective
- Get feedback on the effectiveness of your personal style
Facilitation Skills
- Learn to gain the confidence of the group
- Learn to conduct needs assessment
- Create meeting and event agendas that use time to keep things vibrant and meet the objectives
- Learn to facilitate high participation events using professional group processes that foster group ownership
- Ensure capture of information during the process
- Create succinct actionable reports
- Follow up with the stakeholder team
Managing Media Interviews
- Master the right preparation
- Decide how you need to be perceived to be effective
- Package your sound bites
- Distinguish how to prepare and deliver for print, radio, and television interviews
- Control your message when the questions are challenging
- Respond: in an information vacuum, in an office crisis, for damage control, to combat disinformation
- Develop a positive to neutral relationship with the interviewer
- Manage the camera; manage your appearance
Writing: Financial/Technical/Business
- Define your audience; tune into national, regional, cultural biases
- Define the objective of the communication
- Determine what your key messages are
- Structure in one of three important ways
- Craft press releases, correspondence, email, minutes of meetings, reports, proposals, speeches, PowerPoint, articles, talking points, etc. and get to use great templates
- Get feedback on your own writing effectiveness
Conflict Management
- Identify the real interests of the other side
- Expand the pie and add more options to negotiate resolution
- Learn to frame your objective as a win/win proposition; learn how not to respond to an ultimatum
- Use the DESC script to avoid judging, whining, accusing, or making sweeping generalities
- Solve cases in manager-employee conflict; employee-employee conflict; conflict with vendors, contractors, consultants, board members and community activists
- Role play persistence and dodging pressure tactics
- Illustrate creative problem solving techniques
- Create alternatives and options to get past impasses
Communicating for Results
- This comprehensive communications program provides training in all the interpersonal skills described in the workshops above.
Executive Presence
- Build self confidence and manage self-consciousness when speaking impromptu
- Demonstrate key verbal and non-verbal management of executive presence
- Simulate best practices of speaking at meetings, on conference calls, and interpersonally; demonstrate how to promote identification with your audience and leave an enduring positive impression
- Use 3 hooks in the art of persuasion
- Identify the action objective you must accomplish
- Listen and respond to challenges and objections while maintaining win/win, civility and control
- Provide video, written and verbal feedback
Leadership Development
- Define what makes a great leader
- Take a series of comprehensive and revealing self tests to identify personal strengths and areas for development in one’s leadership inventory
- Master delegation
- Master situational leadership
- Master coaching and feedback
- Master goal setting and performance planning
- Create a vision and clarify the mission for your team
- Learn to build the team
- Explore how to manage up
- Employ the latest in motivating employees
Training of Trainers
- Frame the objectives of training to match the job, the trainees and the content
- Define training as a change in behavior on the job
- Demonstrate both the Socratic-Interactive approach and the Blank Slate-lecture approach
- Frame a lesson as a four step approach: prepare the learner, present/elicit the information, provide opportunities for application, evaluate and provide feedback and coaching
- Ensure that learning transfer has taken place
- Use a wide variety of training methods and media to suit all learning styles
- Train trainers as expert presenters and facilitators
- Train trainers in coping with group dynamics effectively
Needs Analysis and Instructional Design
- Conduct needs analysis using a variety of survey techniques so courseware will suit intended audience
- Write SMART training objectives for the course
- Allocate time frames based on priorities and importance
- Design your topical outline
- Select from a wide variety of proven and exciting training methods and media to meet all learning styles and create stimulation
- Build in ample opportunity for hands on and evaluation by writing modules and lesson plans that adhere to the four-step model: prepare the learner, elicit/present information/apply the information/provide feedback and evaluation
- Learn to conduct pilots and work with Subject Matter Experts
- Learn to market new courses so you get the registration you require
Management/Supervisory Skills
Goal Setting, Coaching, Feedback, Performance Management
- Learn what goal setting should accomplish
- Employ best practices in goal setting
- Set SMART goals
- Get employee buy in
- Define what goes wrong in coaching and feedback
- Use a 5 step model for preparation and application
- Focus on behavior change
- Use descriptive versus evaluative language
- Employ steps in discipline
- Maintain documentation
- Deal with difficult employees
- Role play and case studies
Motivation
- Apply what social science teaches us about people’s motivation
- Understand where each employee is in the hierarchy
- Develop a wide range of motivational tools and techniques to suit different members of the team
- Solve cases in motivation challenges
Competency Based Interviewing
- Distinguish CBI from other, less effective, types of interviewing
- Prepare CBI interview questions to suit the job description
- Use varied questioning techniques to elicit real life experience
- Create the right interview setting
- Demonstrate interview skills that relax the interviewee
- Capture important information in note taking
- Manage an interview panel
- Use a fair system of evaluation
- Select the best candidate for the position
Time and Meetings Management
- Apply the first principle of Time Management
- Identify all your common timewasters
- Adopt remedies to solve each
- Handle things once
- Get closure
- Do things in a block
- Apply Parkinson’s Law
- Plan your day with time frames, priorities and concrete deliverables
- Write SMART objectives to get the things done you can never get to
- Reduce the urgent, fulfill the important
- Have an objective for every meeting, a concrete outcome
- Manage the agenda and the time frames
- Create interaction through meeting pre-planning
- Manage group dynamics to get the objective accomplished
Delegation
- Identify what goes wrong when you delegate
- Examine your systematic communication
- Develop two way communication for all delegation
- Recognize all the reasons for delegation
- Distinguish between managing and doing
- Use a system for developing the right purpose, the right directions, the right communication, the right follow through
- Recognize the importance of up front communication instead of back end communication
Team Building
- Recognize the role diversity plays on teams
- Define characteristics of effective teams
- Compare your team against the criteria
- Employ the keys to team success; build an action plan
- Recognize the stages of team development
- Recognize the role of conflict in team building
- Build a social team for greater cohesion
- Use the Belbin instrument to determine what roles your team enjoys, which they lack and how to improve this
- Create an action plan to build a better team