• The Consciously Competent Relationship Manager – Developing client relationships that are built upon trust and collaboration is vital to continued success as consultants.  By helping clients clearly define their needs and providing solutions, these mutually beneficial partnerships can be leveraged as a source of repeat business as well as positive referrals to other potential clients.

This two-day class will help you maximize the likelihood of achieving success – both for you and your client – by adapting to their optimal communication style as well as listening actively and asking the right questions.  Learn to set relationship management goals, manage expectations, and measure client satisfaction.

A communications style profile is included with this course.  The profile is completed as pre-work by the participants and will be debriefed as part of the class.

• The Consciously Competent Presenter -- Studies show that your words only account for 7% of the effectiveness in a presentation.  The other 93% depends on how you say them.

This one- to two-day course focuses on those how’s including body language and presentation support.  Learn techniques for building self-confidence, engaging an audience, and delivering the most effective presentation possible every time.  Participants will be videotaped and receive written and verbal feedback for improving their presentation style.

• The Consciously Competent Planner – Whether you are doing long range planning or creating an action plan for an event or project, effective planning enables you visualize a successful result, analyze the current reality, create a practical plan, organize needed resources, and mobilize group energy into action.

In this one- or two-day course you will learn how to quickly pull together an effective plan that will maximize group commitment and involvement and achieve your vision.

• The Consciously Competent Facilitative Leader -- There has been a paradigm shift in the leadership role from a “hierarchical” leader -- who assumes authority, knows what to do, seeks the right decisions and relies upon individual responsibility -- to the “facilitative” leader -- who recognizes that there are many diverse perspectives, balances the emphasis of what to do with the methods to accomplish it, seeks a decision that people will own, and emphasizes the group’s ability.

This one- or two-day course defines facilitative leadership, its essential role at every level of an organization, and the skills that are required.  Learn techniques for seeding innovative thinking, building collaborative relationships, creating a supportive environment to challenge comfort zones and create ownership, and expanding learning through questioning and listening.

A leadership style inventory is available with this course to use as a benchmark for participant leadership skills.  The profile is completed as pre-work and then debriefed during the class.

• The Consciously Competent Communicator -- Have you ever finished a discussion and thought you had agreement only to discover that you had a problem instead?  Effective communicators know how to get their “message” across, identify the underlying issues in complex situations, reduce tensions, enhance mutual understanding and build bridges rather than create walls.

In this one- or two-day class, participants will experientially explore the elements of effective communication.  They will identify their own communication style and learn how to adapt it to the communication styles of others for maximum impact.  In addition, this course teaches participants how to tune in to their own "self talk", phrase questions that won’t put people on the defensive, get the information they seek, and provide constructive feedback.

A communications style profile is included with this course.  The profile is completed as pre-work by the participants and will be debriefed as part of the class.

• The Consciously Competent Team Member - In a high performing team, everyone takes responsibility for the deliverables and the work that is required to achieve them, as well as for the team’s “etiquette”.   Whether a team is virtual or if it meets regularly face-to-face, teams work more effectively when the members value the different style of each member, appreciate how all styles are needed to accomplish the goals, and work to leverage these complementary skills and experiences to create team success.

This one-day course introduces the non-process side of being on a team -- the importance of establishing and abiding by team operating agreements, sharing lessons learned, and leveraging diversity.  Through their participation in this course, participants will learn the impact their own behaviour has on other team members and the team’s ultimate success.

A team skills profile is available for use with this course.  The profile is completed as pre-work and then debriefed during the class.

Brown Bag series:

These courses are designed to be 1 hour presentations and are expandable to ½ day or all-day workshops.

• Learn your Lesson about Lessons Learned.  Conducting a “lessons learned” workshop to discuss what worked and what didn’t on a project is usually one of the last tasks on any project plan.  And often it gets overlooked due to time constraints or the team scattering to other projects.  Learn techniques for collecting these lessons throughout the project in order to reap their full benefit, as well as conducting the final workshop and follow-up.
• Meeting for Success.  Do you hate to go to meetings?  Do you think others hate coming to your meetings?  Do you know the eight most frequently made mistakes that are guaranteed to sabotage a meeting?  Learn 14 elements to consider so each meeting is as productive and effective as it should be!
• Catalyzing Effective Dialogue.  Are you tired of meetings and discussions that take endless time and seem to go nowhere?  The Focused Discussion Method is a structured process that enables groups to achieve a new level of understanding and move your discussion to a productive end. Discover how you can avoid the traps of rambling discussions and heated arguments.  Learn how to provoke thoughtful dialogue and discussion of issues, promote maximum input, and develop clear decisions.
• Transforming Conflict.  Conflict is a naturally occurring phenomenon with both constructive and destructive potential. Engaging in conflict can generate anxiety in people who associate it with negative or violent outcomes (i.e., fight or flight). In fact, successfully handling a conflict can be a positive experience, as doing so provides an opportunity for participants to learn about themselves and others, to make necessary changes in the status quo, to challenge obsolete ways of thinking, and to foster new ways of relating and working.

Develop skills for dealing with difficult conflicts, learn a constructive process of conflict resolution in which you distinguish between "interests" and "positions” and define the conflicting interests as a mutual problem to be solved cooperatively.

• Stress in Excess.  Stressed by more to do than time to do it? Pressed for decisions without adequate information to make them or distressed by uncertainty and change?  Would you like a bag of tools which include practical ways for you to stress less?

Learn the 7 essential tools to relax body, mind, and spirit, as well as the 5-step formula to dissolve excess stress, avoid burnout, and increase job efficiency.  Come learn, relax, re-energize … and lighten up!

• Organizing your Time.  While this course can’t grant you the wish of “more time”, it does identify time wasters and offer suggestions for how to capitalize on the time that you do have.
• Anger -- Dealing with Yours and Others.  Do you find your anger controlling you? Do you have to deal with people whose anger invades your space? With one out of five Americans having an anger management problem, mismanaged anger and rage is the major cause of conflict in our personal and professional relationships.

Anger management skills are important skills in reducing conflict and violence. Learn to increase appropriate expressions of anger; keep expressions of anger at a manageable and non-destructive level, deal effectively with the anger of others.

• In A Rut? Have Dessert First!  Are you experiencing difficulty with a work, relationship or life situation?  Discover what keeps you stuck and how it impacts the other parts of your life.  Learn steps you can take to shift gears and get moving.

Other offerings:

• Facilitation Skills Coaching Program.  Facilitation skills are easily transferable to other areas of your business -- from team meetings to boardroom presentations to employee evaluations to community involvement.  To maximize the impact of these skills, it’s important to strengthen and enhance their effectiveness through a coaching program as well as through the inclusion of facilitation skills measurement in the performance evaluation process.

Designed to provide reinforcement and enhancement of the facilitation skills taught in The Consciously Competent Facilitator, this program provides observation of two facilitated sessions with one-on-one feedback for each participant in addition to a mid-year lessons learned workshop for all the participants of the coaching program.  

• Professional Services Evaluation:  All consultants can improve their business by constantly evaluating the work they’ve won…and lost.  A Professional Service Evaluation (PSE) process helps you answer these questions – why did (or didn’t) a client hire you?  Would a client hire you again?  Why? 

Using a combination of a Disposition Review™ to understand your wins and losses and a process that measures client satisfaction, we help you understand your strengths and areas for improvements as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.  This provides important marketing and strategy information to help grow your business.

This service can also be customized and taught as part of your business development methodology.