Mental Health Issues in the Workplace
Within any work environment, there are likely to be employees who are coping with death and loss, divorce, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders. Leaders must be adept at identifying these issues as they impact the work environment. Balancing compassion and accountability is particularly complex within these often emotionally charged situations.
Learning goals for this session:
- Identify common signs and symptoms of common emotional disorders
- Learn skills and strategies for approaching difficult conversations with employees experiencing these situations
- Discuss helpful referral sources
- Identify strategies for intervening behaviorally and with compassion with employees whose job performance is negatively impacted by these situations
Strategic Public Relations—The Formula for Listening and Learning
Our one-day seminar provides participants a more complete understanding of the importance of public relations as a strategic business advantage. We provide participants specific public relations tools they can implement. The concepts and ideas presented in this seminar help participants improve customer satisfaction, expand brand awareness, improve internal communications, and stimulate product/service. Our seminar is interactive and features a combination of presenter lecture, group dialogue, and individual and group exercises.
Increasing Human Effectiveness
Our two-day workshop is a dynamic, highly interactive learning event that helps employees learn to empower themselves and achieve new levels of personal and professional effectiveness. Our seminar provides every participant the tools necessary to:
- maximize their potential and effectiveness
- achieve new levels of performance
- improve their personal attitude
- enhance their organizational self-esteem
- improve communications with employees and customers
- better manage internal and external conflict
We blend proprietary assessment tools with our interactive instructional methods to provide skills and techniques you can put to immediate use. Our workshop will make you a more effective person and a higher performing member of your transit system.
Integrated Strategic Planning
Our Integrated Strategic Planning Seminar positions and empowers organizations to help their organizations thrive and prosper. Our seminar provides participants a comprehensive overview of the integrated strategic planning process and helps participants understand how organizational focus, detailed direction, and commitment to action can produce significant results for their organization.
Learned Intuition in Hiring
How many times have you hired the wrong person and after the fact recalled a small nagging question you’d had about that person but ignored? In his book, The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker, consultant to CIA and one of America’s leading experts in predicting violent behavior, states that to avoid danger “we must listen to internal warnings while they are still whispers.” The same is true in a hiring process. Our hiring processes are designed to be logical, rational, and fact-based, but our very drive for excellent decisions often creates an environment where the “whispers of our intuition” have no place.
The purpose of this session is to assist organizations to create a hiring culture of “learned intuition” where fact-based, logical hiring processes are intentionally balanced with the subtle perceptiveness of the staff involved.
Goals for this session:
- Learn how to identify the subtle cues, internal red flags, and hunches that are signs of deeper and relevant perceptions about job candidates.
- Learn how to create systems and structures in your hiring process to intentionally elicit and utilize unspoken staff perceptions of candidates.
- Learn to use guided questions to turn intuition into direct behavioral observations, thus contributing to a logical and fact-based hiring process.
Conflict Happens—Manage Differences to Achieve Success
There are three principal reasons why conflict occurs.
- Competition over scarce resources (time, money, people).
- Disagreement about ideas.
- The desire for something “owned” by another.
Each of these reasons can produce a situation where people, or groups of people, engage in adversarial competition. Unfortunately, most people view conflict as a negative process that produces less than desirable outcomes, including damaged interpersonal relationships, less-productive work environments, and/or a loss of business. Worse yet, most people think there is only one way to resolve conflict.
This seminar provides the tools and insights to effectively manage conflict at both the personal and professional level. Using the Thomas Kilmann Conflict mode instrument, you will identify your own preferred conflict style, how your unique personal characteristics impact your response to conflict, and how you can apply different conflict resolution approaches to different situations. You will learn conflict resolution techniques in this seminar that will improve personal relationships, strengthen your organization, and improve customer relationship skills. The seminar is interactive and features presenter lecture, group dialogue, and individual and group exercises.
Understanding Communication Styles
We spend 70% of our waking hours communicating in some form. People see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. As communication takes place, we fill in what we think others mean or what we think we have heard. In this workshop participants learn how to identify their own communication style, barriers to effective interpersonal communication, and solutions to deal effectively with differences.
A key tool in this session is The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), the most widely used instrument in the world for gaining a deeper understanding of self, others and interpersonal relationships. It provides insights on the four basic “people patterns” that hold the key to leadership styles, effective communication, conflict, team building and productivity.
This session introduces participants to the concepts and principles of Myers-Briggs, focusing on how they are applied in a work environment. Participants improve their ability to communicate with people of different types. They learn to recognize how to avoid or reconcile conflicts arising from type differences.
- Discover your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
- Gain insights of your own communication strengths and blindspots.
- Understand four basic “people patterns” and how they think and act.
- Learn how to avoid judging others’ differences
- Discover your preferred communication style.
- Build trust and rapport through communication.
- Recognize barriers to effective communication.
The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades—Planning for the “New Retirement”
What does the next phase of life have in store for you? What will you do? Who will you become? Why should you care? We all spend some time thinking about how nice it would be if we did not have to work. However, the latest research suggests we will be happier, healthier and wealthier if we keep working in some capacity. Why would we want to stop doing something that provides a place to go and people to see, mental stimulation, a feeling of being needed, a way to hone skills and experience, not to mention an income? Join us for an informative, engaging, and participative session to learn how you can prepare the next phase of your work life, with plenty of time for family, fun, community service, and whatever makes you happy.
Balancing Achievement and Enjoyment
Work-Life Balance does not mean an equal balance. Trying to schedule an equal number of hours for each of your various work and personal activities is usually unrewarding and unrealistic. Life is and should be more fluid than that. Your best individual work-life balance will vary over time, often on a daily basis. The right balance for you today will probably be different for you tomorrow. The right balance for you when you are single will be different when you marry, or if you have children; when you start a new career versus when you are nearing retirement.
There is no perfect, one-size fits all, balance you should be striving for. The best work-life balance is different for each of us because we all have different priorities and different lives. However, at the core of an effective work-life balance definition are the concepts of Achievement and Enjoyment, ideas almost deceptive in their simplicity. Achievement and Enjoyment are the front and back of the coin of value in life. You can’t have one without the other, no more than you can have a coin with only one side. Trying to live a one sided life is why so many “successful” people are not happy, or not nearly as happy as they should be.
Career Choices
Are you satisfied in your current career choice? Do you know what steps you need to take to increase your career satisfaction? There are no reliable statistics available on how many Americans go through some kind of career change at least once in their lifetimes – but we know it is increasing! Many of us either choose or are forced at some point to transfer our work skills to another field, or to stay in the same field but take on a different role. The number of career changers certainly goes up when the economy is undergoing its own period of transformation, as ours has been doing for some time.
The most respected and widely used career planning instrument in the world, for nearly 80 years, the Strong Interest Inventory® assessment has helped organizations attract and retain the brightest talent and has guided thousands of individuals in their search for a rich and fulfilling life of work and leisure. This session will utilize the Strong to help you identify your interests, enabling you to:
- Achieve or increase you satisfaction in your work
- Work with your organization to move into roles that are the best fit for your career interests
- Choose appropriate education and training relevant to your interests
- Maintain balance between your work and leisure activities
- Understand aspects of your personality most closely associated with your interests
- Determine your preferred learning environments
- Learn about your preferences for leadership, risk taking and teamwork
- Use interests in shaping your career direction
- Decide on a focus for the future
- Direct your own career exploration at various stages in your life