Our workshops are highly-interactive learning sessions in which participants acquire knowledge and practice skills for a selected topic area. The primary focus is on participants learning and practicing new skills. A secondary outcome is ideas for how to apply the new knowledge and skills to a variety of unique company situations when back on the job. Here are a few of the workshops we offer:

• Soft skills with a hard edge
• Turbo process improvement
• Optimizing organizational interactions
• Large-group methods for results and commitment

Soft Skills with a Hard Edge

“People skills” are essential for project success as well as for effective day-to-day operations. Many workshops focus solely on teaching these “soft skills” in a classroom environment independent of company-specific situations. However, this workshop provides a hard edge by including case studies based on actual difficult situations that have been encountered, or will likely be encountered in the client organization. Participants have an opportunity to practice the new skills in the context of their actual work situations. Input for these tailored, highly-relevant case studies is obtained through a series of pre-workshop interviews designed to elicit organization-specific patterns of interaction that have opportunities for improvement.

This course is based on more than 30 years of research and best practices by clinical psychologists, university professors, PhDs in adult learning theory, and business people. The course is based on the highly-regarded “PeopleSmart” training curricula that has an accompanying textbook and instructional booklets available for participants’ continued learning and practice beyond the classroom. As a certified trainer for PeopleSmart, Tom Devane also has access to videotapes and multi-media instructional materials to assist in participants’ learning in classroom practice sessions.

Course outline

· Understanding human motivation
· Expressing ideas clearly
· Asserting needs
· Exchanging feedback
· Influencing others
· Resolving conflict
· Being a team player
· Shifting gears to become more effective

Each module will contain company-specific material based on data collected in the pre-workshop interviews.

Duration
The base workshop is 20 hours of concept development and practice sessions for skill building. Time for pre-workshop interviews will range from 1 to 3 days. The actual length of the course will depend on the analysis of the data collected in the pre-workshop interviews and discussions with the client sponsor. Experience has shown that delivering the workshop content in four-hour sessions over the course of three to four weeks tends to produce the best results. This provides participants with an opportunity to practice the new skills and formulate job-relevant questions before the next four-hour session.

Who should attend
Project managers, project team members, senior and middle managers, and any other employees who need to influence people, communicate clearly, negotiate, and deal with conflict. It can be quite beneficial for an intact team to attend all the sessions together.