Wisdom School for Managers
7 (4 Hr) Incremental Learning Modules to Build Wise Managers

1. Individual and Organizational Assessment (and CW 360)

• Assessing the Corporate Culture, Team Dynamics and Empowered Action
• Dimensions of Thinking Toward a Sustainable Mindset
• The Myers Briggs Type Indicator            
• How to Use the Corporate Wisdom 360

2. The Inner Manager – Taking Action on the 360 Feedback

• Review the Myers Briggs Group Profile
• Self Assessment and 360 Results Using CW Leadership Checklist
• Identify Strengths, Development Areas and Negative Beliefs
• The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Leadership Development
• Goal Setting
• Develop Action Plans
• Interlocking Accountability and Support from Group Toward Goals

3. Communication Skills for Managers

• Foundations of Open Communication
  - Review of Belief Systems and Blind Spots
  - Increasing Trust
  - Staying Open to Learn

• Communication Tools
  - Giving Feedback Clearly
  - Reflective Listening Formula
  - Receiving Feedback Non-Defensively
  - Communicating a Task
  - Collaborative Problem Solving
  - Professional Relationship Repair

• How to Mediate Conflict:   Your Role as Manager

4.   Building Wise Teams

• Different Team Approaches                                    
• 4 Phases of Team Development
• Life Stories to Build Understanding and Morale
• Communication Code of Conduct
• Mapping Team Support
• Group Decision-Making with the Consensus Scale
• Process Improvement on Teams & Force Field Analysis
• Team Assessment
• Team Pyramid (Strength, Motto, Success, and Goal for the Team)

5.   Managing with Wisdom, Leading with Vision

• The Difference Between Management and Leadership
• Achieving Flow: Focus on Skill and Challenge
• Management Styles and Tasks - Adapting Styles
• What Makes an Inspiring Leader
• Your Thoughts on Leadership
• Leading a Team with Vision
• Managing Disruptive Forces
• Creating a Vision
• Communicating the Vision

6. Connecting Performance Reviews to On-Going Coaching (Customized)

• The Performance Review Cycle
• Why Coaching Works and Can Fail
• The Role of the Manager/Coach
• Why Coach – What Gets in the Way?
• About Performance Reviews
• Journal Information – Work History
• Success Factors, Performance Review Forms
• Writing about Accomplishments, Development & Growth / New
• Common Appraisal Errors
• The Performance Review Meeting
• Responding to Employee Reactions

7.   Coaching Skills for Managers

• Identifying Areas for Development
• Development Areas Have Impact
• Positive and Smart Goals
• Writing Effective Goals and Goal Writing Game
• Manager Practices Turning Development Areas Into Goals
• On-Going Coaching:   Initiating the Action Plan
• Tracking Progress Towards Goals & Overcoming Resistance
• Advertising Improved Performance
• Recognizing and Rewarding Goal Achievement
• The Coaching Worksheet

Program Fee:  
$1,500 per Participant (Minimum Class Size 12)

Integration and Re-Engagement After a Merger

Mergers, acquisitions and corporate restructurings often fail to produce the hoped for outcomes of executives because the leadership and people component does not get addressed early on in the process of change. Synergy opportunities may exist only in the minds of the corporate leaders. Often underestimated are the consequences in morale and productivity that shake some companies to almost a complete halt. Sadly, a lack of communication about the changes taking place enable naysayers to create worst case scenarios that spread like fire throughout the workplace.

Developing an employee centered strategic M and A plan for synergy beyond the deal is key to successfully navigating the people aspect of re-engagement and corporate integration.

Corporate Wisdom consultants evaluate companies in the process of a merger by asking:

1. What assumptions are being made / have been made about the merger / changes?
2. What do employees need to express in order to let go of the past and move on?
3. What must happen for employees to re-engage in the new combined company?
4. How can executive management lead with a common vision going forward?

Aligning Global Styles for the Silicon Valley Workplace

The Silicon Valley workplace is global within many companies. The best and the brightest from all over the world need to collaborate within teams and integrate into fast growing, high tech and biotech workplaces. Now more than ever, new tools in effective communication are a critical component to business success. The number of cultures represented on any particular team are too diverse to teach each person about the intricacies of each culture or region. Instead, teaching all members of a team to understand one another from a style and values perspective, speeds up the time needed to bring a group of individuals to cohesive rapport and team readiness.

In this team development process, participants learn to:

1. Identify the individual belief systems and blind spots that drive unconscious communication and conflict.
2. Understand style differences and the impact of style on others.
3. Explore a communication code of conduct that is agreed upon by all team members, to make communication practices explicit.
4. Balance assertiveness and withdrawal, control and placating, to determine effective and integrated approaches to collaboration in the Silicon Valley workplace.
5. Increase awareness and compassion for diversity, style and values differences.

Create Your Management Style “On Purpose”

Tools To Transform and Enhance Your Style

To be your best when there are pressures and changes in the organization, you must use your skills in emotional intelligence (EQ). Without this core competancy, changes can bring out the worst in you and your colleagues.

You may notice times when you are not able to maintain your usual upbeat management style, and that you slide to a “back up mode” and lose effectiveness. This course will teach you how to stay positive even in the face of adversity. You will gain insight about yourself and your management style that will guide you to overcome performance barriors.

The steps towards self-mastery require that you:

• Name Your Style On a Good Day and Under Pressure
• Understand Belief Systems and Blind Spots
• Identify Supportive and Sabotaging Roles and Create Positive Shifts
• Recognize Defensive Styles
• Set Intentions to Create Your Style “On Purpose”

Awareness is the key ingredient for change, along with the creation of a supportive environment.

This topic is best taught to groups in a 3-4 hour training module. It has also been requested as a keynote presentation.

The Soul’s Journey at Work

Life isn’t about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself. (Unknown)

What is the meaning of the obstacles that we face at work? Work is a playground where we meet our joys and successes and our fears and failures. In this sandbox, we replay our interactions with family, teachers, and friends through our work relationships with authority (the manager), and through our team interactions. In work and in relationship, we journey toward wholeness to embrace the totality of our soul’s journey.

In this course, we will support you to:

• Achieve connection to your life’s work by answering life’s toughest questions. “Why am I here?” “What is my purpose?”
• Explore spiritual crisis (the door to get on purpose), to see if you have ignored opportunities to quicken the pace on your journey at work.
• Map your career lifeline, the highs and the lows, to understand the lessons learned and unfinished through your career.
• Look for patterns that model specific life lessons that are “up” for examination, integration, and healing.

The soul’s journey at work is a journey to find your purpose and gifts. These gifts often appear after a challenge or crisis breaks down the internal structures that are limiting you, thus allowing your soul’s deepest desires to become reality.

This interactive course is best taught to small groups of 8 – 10 participants in a 3-4 hour timeframe.

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.

Working With Your Intuition

Listening to your intuition can be the difference between success and failure in an endeavor. Trusting your gut and flashes of insight leads you to innovative solutions and helps you to avoid pitfalls when you sense problems ahead.  Knowing the blocks that derail your natural instincts, and aligning with your intuitive abilities are important competencies for managers and leaders.

Internal access to intuition is explored in this presentation. Individuals begin by assessing their ability to listen to their inner wisdom.  

Participants will learn:

• How intuition manifests.
• Left brain / right brain thinking.
• To identify beliefs and blind spots that block intuition.
• The power of intuition with decision-making.
• To access the flow state.
• To understand intuitive empathy.
• To set intuitive intentions.

Join us to learn how to work with your intuition more purposefully and set your intuition in motion with intentions that support your personal and professional goals. This topic makes an excellent keynote presentation or 3-4 hour training module.

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