4.1 Anger Management: Understanding Anger - Yours and Others

Anger is a universal experience. Dogs get angry, bees get angry, and so do humans. You don't have to be a psychologist to know that managing anger productively is something few individuals, organizations, and societies do well. Yet research tells us that those who do manage their anger at work are much more successful than those who don't.

The co-worker who can productively confront his teammate about his negative attitude increases his team's chance of success as well as minimizes destructive conflicts. The customer service agent who can defuse the angry customer not only keeps her customers loyal but makes her own day less troublesome.

This workshop is to help give you that edge by helping learn how to:

• Recognize how anger affects your body, your mind, and your behavior
• Use the five-step method to break old patterns and replace them with a model for assertive anger
• Control your emotions when faced with other peoples' anger
• Identify ways to help other people safely manage some of their repressed or expressed anger.

 4.2 Change Management: Change and How to Deal With It

There is no denying that change is often difficult and stressful. However, being able to cope with change well is a key tool for success.

This workshop will help you to deal with change better by teaching them how to:

• Accept there are no normal or abnormal ways of reacting to change, but that we must start from where we are.
• See change not as something to be feared and resisted but as an essential element of the world to be accepted.
• Understand that adapting to change is not technical but attitudinal. Change is not an intellectual issue but one that strikes at who you are.
• Recognize that before we can embrace the way things will be, we must go through a process of grieving, and of letting go of the way things used to be.
• See change as an opportunity for self-motivation and innovation.
• Identify strategies for helping change be accepted and implemented in the workplace.

 4.3 Conducting Effective Performance Reviews

Performance reviews are an essential component of employee development. Someone once said, 'If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.' And, remember what the German philosopher Goethe said: 'Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.'

Setting goals and objectives to aim for will give supervisors and employees a unified focus and targets to aim for. Supervisors must also learn how to give feedback, both positive and negative, on a regular and timely basis so that employees can grow and develop.

This workshop will help you learn all these activities, including:

• The importance of having a performance review process for employees
• How to work with employees to set performance standards and goals
• Skills in giving feedback, listening, and asking questions
• A proven interview process
• How to make the performance review legally defensible

 4.4 Conflict Resolution: Getting Along in the Workplace

All of us experience conflict. We argue with our spouses, disagree with our friends, and sometimes even quarrel with strangers at a hockey game. At times we lose sight of the fact that all this conflict is normal. So long as people are individuals there will be the potential for conflict.

That's the first thing to learn about conflict. It isn't wrong or bad; it's just part of being a person in contact with other people. The only people who don't experience conflict are hermits.

During this workshop, you will learn some other things about conflict, including:

• What conflict is and how it can escalate
• The five most common conflict resolution styles
• How to increase positive information flow through non-verbal and verbal communication skills
• Some effective techniques for intervention
• How to strengthen staff trust and morale
• How to be more confident of their ability to manage conflicts

 4.5 Customer Service Training: Managing Customer Service

In the customer service industry, being able to coach employees towards providing excellent customer service is crucial. In order to be successful, customer service managers must have a wide variety of skills, including motivational techniques, communication skills, and leadership skills.

This workshop will help you learn some of these skills, including how to:

• Identify ways to establish links between excellence in customer service and business practices and policies
• Develop the skills and practices that are essential elements of a customer service focused manager
• Recognize what employees are looking for to be truly engaged
• Recognize who your customers are and what you are looking for
• Develop strategies for creating engaged employees and satisfied customers

 4.6 Hiring for Success: Behavioral Interviewing Techniques

Hiring smart is hard to do. So many factors come into play! And, in order for hiring to pay off, there must be other elements in the recruitment process.

This course will help you learn ways to make better hiring decisions, including how to:

• Analyze the costs incurred by an organization when a wrong hiring decision is made
• Develop a fair and consistent interviewing process for selecting employees
• Prepare better job advertisements and use a variety of markets
• Develop a job analysis and position profile
• Use traditional, behavioral, achievement oriented, holistic, and situational (critical incident technique) interview questions
• Enhance their communication skills
• Effectively interview difficult applicants
• Check references more effectively
• Understand the basic employment and human rights laws that can affect the hiring process

 4.7 Orientation Handbook: Getting Employees Off to a Good Start

A thoughtful new employee orientation program, coupled with an employee handbook that communicates workplace policies, can reduce turnover and save your organization thousands of dollars. Whether your company has two employees or a thousand employees, don't leave employee retention to chance. Give them what they need to feel welcome, know why they were hired, and know how to do the job. This workshop will help you teach participants how to build an effective orientation program.

Learning objectives for participants include:

• Understand how important an orientation program is to an organization.
• Identify the role of the human resource department in the orientation program.
• Recognize how the commitment curve affects both new employees and their managers.
• Know what companies can do to deliver their promise to new employees.
• Determine the critical elements of effective employee training.
• Establish the importance of having an employee handbook for new and long-term employees.

 4.8 Performance Management: Managing Employee Performance

Inspiring someone to be their best is no easy task. Just how do you manage for optimum performance? How do you create a motivating environment that encourages people to go beyond their best? This workshop will help you teach participants some ways of achieving those tasks, including:

• Tools to help employees set and achieve goals.
• A three-phase model that will help you prepare employees for peak performance, activate their inner motivation, and evaluate their skills.
• Motivational tools and techniques.
• Coaching methods and skills.

 4.9 Problem Solving & Decision Making

Why is it that some people find it easy to solve tough problems with simple solutions while others find this feat nearly impossible? You've no doubt looked at solutions to problems and said, 'I should have thought of that.' But you didn't. The answer is not just creativity, although that certainly helps. Rather, the power to find these creative solutions lies in our ability to search for and find facts that relate to the situation, and put them together in ways that work. As an individual, facts and knowledge can only go so far. By tapping into the knowledge of others (staff, colleagues, family, or friends), anyone can expand the range of solutions available. This workshop will help you learn how to do just that.

Workshop topics include ways to:

• Increase awareness of problem solving steps and problem solving tools.
• Distinguish root causes from symptoms to identify the right solution for the right problem.
• Improve problem solving and decision making skills by identifying individual problem solving styles.
• Think creatively and work towards creative solutions.
• Recognize the top ten rules of good decision-making.

 4.10 Stress Management

Today's workforce is experiencing job burnout and stress in epidemic proportions. Workers at all levels feel stressed out, insecure, and misunderstood. Many people feel the demands of the workplace, combined with the demands of home, have become too much to handle. This workshop explores the causes of such stress, and suggests general and specific stress management strategies that people can use every day.

Specific learning objectives include

• Understand that stress is a positive, unavoidable part of everybody's life
• Recognize the symptoms that tell you when you have chronic stress overload
• Identify those situations in your life that cause you the greatest stress
• Identify those actions which add to your stress
• Change the situations and actions that can be changed
• Deal better with situations and actions that can't be changed
• Create an action plan for work, home, and play to help reduce and manage stress

 4.11 Teamwork: Building Better Teams

This workshop will help you learn:

• About the different kinds of teams
• How to develop team norms
• The Gradients of Agreement
• How to identify your team player style
• Ways to become a better team player
• Ways to build team trust
• Two models of team development

 4.12 Employee Dispute Resolution: Mediation through Peer Review

Have you ever been in a workplace situation where a supervisor has made a decision that you didn't agree with? Did you wish that you could ask someone else what they thought of the decision; whether they would have done the same thing? The peer review process offers employees just that chance, using a formalized procedure.

This course will help you learn:

• What the peer review process is
• How employees file grievances and how management should respond
• How a facilitator and a panel is chosen
• What is involved in the hearing process, from preliminary meetings to the hearing itself, to the decision process
• What responsibilities and powers a panel should have
• Questioning techniques
• Why peer review panels fail and how to avoid those pitfalls

 4.13 Business Succession Planning: Developing and Maintaining a Succession Plan

Change is a hallmark of today's business world. In particular, our workforce is constantly changing ' people come and go, and move into new roles within the company. Succession planning can help you make the most of that change by ensuring that when someone leaves, there is someone new to take their place.

This workshop will help you learn:

• The value of succession planning for successful businesses.
• The key elements of a succession plan in terms of roles, responsibility, function, scope, and evaluation.