Group Coaching Labs
Coaching labs are a small group experience that allows each participant to explore their professional issues in a safe, step by step, learning environment.
We will explore the principles and practice of coaching, and then work with each participant to uncover development areas and the belief systems and blind spots associated with them. We then set goals for improved performance. With goals targeted, each participant is set up with action items to accomplish before the next lab. These actions support goal achievement.
We use the following frame in the coaching labs:
- Identify development areas and their impact on others
- Translate development areas into performance goals
- Initiate the coaching action plan
- Track progress towards goals
- Encourage employee to advertise improved performance
- Recognize and reward goal achievement
Coaching labs are fully customized, as participants will all be exploring their own blocks to leadership and management success. The group format allows participants to learn from others as they work to overcome limiting behaviors.
Coaching labs are two hours each, with a minimum of 3 labs required. A small group format of 8-10 participants gives enough individual attention while allowing the group mind to facilitate rapid change.
Effective Meeting Management
This highly interactive workshop covers how to have fewer meetings and get better results. Participants will learn specific easy-to-use tools for creating a more directed focus in meetings.
Remember the last unproductive meeting you had to sit through? Dysfunctional behaviors like people showing up late, wandering off topic, one or two dominating the discussion, storytelling, nay saying, whining, lack of decision-making, and verbal attacks, make meetings painful. Ineffective meetings are the #1 time waster in business today. Everyone hates meetings that are unproductive, negative sources of conflict or useless dialogues with no results.
Proper structure and interaction skills can dramatically improve meetings to prevent dysfunctional meeting behavior.
Meeting Effectiveness Topics Include:
- What makes good meetings good & bad meetings bad?
- Obstacles to meeting effectiveness
- Key attributes of an effective meeting
- Meeting roles
- Meeting process
- Agenda setting
- Meeting evaluation
- Tools to capture dialogue and decision making
This workshop can be tailored to fit your particular needs. It can be taught to cross-functional or intact teams, or in a large group setting in a 2- 4 hour module.
Building a Cohesive Team
Skilled managers and leaders know that all team needs to be tended to, if a cohesive team is to be built. Taking the time to set communication, culture, and interaction styles on teams, with intention, is always optimal.
Alternatively, teams are flowing along, and then power struggles, communication style differences, and cultural differences, create barriers that only get worse if they are not addressed as soon as the team "is in trouble." Swift intervention is key.
With a skilled facilitator to shake things up, the team can get back on track. Our custom built solutions to your team's challenges, allow us to assess and address only the most relevant issues. Every team has strengths and weaknesses that are a unique combination of the team members. Team issues due to communication breakdowns and misunderstandings are common. To solve the problems that are reducing effectiveness and damaging rapport, the following process is used:
- Conduct confidential interviews with team members to get to the heart of the team's trouble.
- Transform power struggles, and irritations about performance, utilizing interlocking accountability. Each team member identifies goals that are supported by the other team members.
- Establish a communication code of conduct, agreed upon by all team members, that details the way the team commits to operate and communicate.
With a process to deal with individual differences and a model for team conduct, a cohesive team can form.
Sessions include pre-interviews. Problem themes are explored. In a six hour on or off-site, these themes are addressed and solutions are targeted. A team code of conduct is developed and individual and team commitments are made to ensure that positive actions work toward the goals set. This program is designed for senior and middle management teams and cross-functional teams.
Corporate Roles
Within the department, individuals begin to play roles with one another in an effort to fit in or "blend." After a while, these roles create perceptions and expectations, and need to be tended to, before the associated behaviors take on a life of their own.
Staff and team interactions are governed by "rules of conduct" that are established within a corporation. Timeliness to meetings, conversation tones and pace, and some behaviors, are set by corporate and departmental cultures.
The role an individual plays out within the team is often dictated by the individual's historical behavioral style. Someone can interact in a "complaining role," another can be a "fighter." Employees can become set in their way of interacting with others in certain behavioral modes that, try as they might, they cannot seem to change. The team "system" has been set.
Team roles may include: bully, adolescent, mother, father, wise man or woman, victim, complainer, martyr, pollyanna, self-righteous, enabler, co-dependent, fire-fighter, passive-aggressive, and extreme extrovert or introvert, to name some.
Exploration of the corporate roles that each person plays in the organization can help employees choose optimally in any given situation, instead of reacting sub-optimally, from past behavior modes. Understanding interlocking roles, and how they developed, allows each participant to set an intention for change that requires that he or she step out of their comfort zone or role, and into new, healthier behavior. Awareness is the key ingredient for change, along with the team's willingness to support one another.
This training class utilizes a team assessment to identify role preferences. The perceptions of others as they see colleague roles can vary from person to person and may create a range of roles that need to be assessed and addressed. Individual sessions and group sessions (to 10 people) with the trainers are available.
This team module can be done on or off-site in six hours. This program is designed for single-function and cross-functional teams.
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