Management Learning & Culture Ltd

We have never had so many generations in the workforce all at once. With the retirement age increasing and many people choosing to stay financially active beyond it, the opportunities to learn from each other are endless, as are the risks of making dangerous or inappropriate assumptions. This course goes way beyond the legalities of inclusion, discrimination and old-world assumptions of progression by time served, and will explore what we can all learn from each other to the good of the organisation and its audience.

Aims

To help you better understand, work with, communicate with, motivate, engage and learn from all generations across your organisation.

Learning Objectives

You will have the opportunity to discuss the many, many facets of multi-generational working and hopefully slay some unconscious biases and stereotypes. During the course you will:

■      Learn about the generations in the workplace today

■      Understand the formative events for each generation

■      Examine stereotypes that may exist in the workplace

■      Determine the most effective approaches for communication, empowering and acknowledging each different generation

■      Understand the impact of the Communication Channel on the different generations

■      Plan your communication style and work habits to meet the challenges of generational differences

■      Learn and discuss the importance of the 5 Key Communication Strategies against the backdrop of the different generations

■      Create an informal list of ‘dos and don’ts’ for yourself based on what you’ve learnt and what is appropriate for your organisation

Style of the Workshop

The workshop will be informative and as interactive as the technology will allow. The topic lends itself to exploration of the various stereotypes of each generation, the changes in language use, learning styles, values, attention spans, interests, motivators and priorities in the workplace, and attitudes towards – well, everything, really! 

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Most people do not relish the thought of conducting an investigation the first time ‘from a standing start’, especially if you have not been involved in one before. Often the ramifications seem immense and the fear of getting something wrong or missing vital ‘evidence’ can become paralysing. Most managers are not able to ‘practise’ their skills on an imaginary employee or team member, and if they are not confident, may make mistakes or miss a cue by appearing nervous. The course is designed to help you with that confidence, gained through understanding the law and practising the skills needed to carry out the role with grace and ease.

Aim

To provide you with the necessary skills and confidence to carry out investigations into irregularities, incidents, grievances and disciplinary issues in a timely, efficient and sensitive manner.

Outcomes

By the end of this programme you will:

• Have a greater awareness of the Why, What and How of successful investigations
• Have understood and practised the key skills required to successfully carry out an investigation
• Know how to prepare and structure an investigation interview
• Have experience in how to record and document your evidence
• Have had the opportunity to enhance your confidence by practising essential investigative skills and receiving feedback from peers and the tutor
• Have practised giving effective feedback on others’ skills
• Understand better the importance of monitoring and tracking as well as documenting your evidence
• Understand how and when HR (or others) should be involved
• Feel more confident to carry out an investigation 

Style

The course is as interactive and participative as technology will allow; our aim is that you feel more confident and competent by the end of the workshop! The emphasis is on the practical application so you will have plenty of opportunity to practise, practise, practise, particularly where the investigation involves interviews.

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Now more than ever, modern organisations need teams to work effectively to achieve the goals that are set. This course will help you understand how teams work, what can go wrong, and give you practical steps to make you more effective, whether as a team member or team leader.

Aims

To develop your team participation skills. To give you strategies to get to know other team members well and quickly understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, build trust and explore how the team deals with conflict. To help you create high-performing teams and ensure as a team you share a vision for the future. These aims are particularly important for teams that will be working remotely, either from home using technology or in disparate locations.

Objectives

By the end of the workshop you will be able to:

• Better appreciate the value of positive teamworking
• Understand the different stages of team development and how these impact the performance of team members
• Identify what is needed to enable a team to develop effectively
• Identify sources of conflict within the team and find strategies to work through these
• Understand the nature and impact of ‘red flag’ behaviours
• Better understand and recognise the five levels of dysfunction within teams, and have strategies for fixing these

Style

This course can be run as a one-day workshop or a series of webinars, and either with intact teams or individuals wishing to improve the teamwork within their own team. It will be as practical and participative as technology will allow, and based on real work examples. The approach creates an environment which addresses the actual problems and concerns of team members so they can feel confident in addressing them.

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When someone says ‘I need to have a difficult conversation with X, we first need to explore what they mean by difficult. As human beings we all find different things uncomfortable, challenging, even scary; yet fudging or avoiding essential conversations now is likely to lead to misunderstanding and potentially anger, upset or even a tribunal later on.

Aim

This workshop (or series of four 90-minute webinars) is designed to help you prepare, plan and execute any sort of conversation with a colleague, team member, customer or partner and work towards the best possible outcome for all concerned.

Learning Objectives

You will have the opportunity to discuss and try out the different aspects of planning and holding difficult conversations. By the end of the webinar series you will have:

■      Discussed the importance of setting outcomes and objectives for every conversation

■      Prepared for and planned several types of conversations that may arise

■      Learned the Identity of Self model and understand its importance in every interaction

■      Discussed and prepared the 7-step process for any work-based discussion

■      Learned and worked through the Communication Channel

■      Practised dynamic listening

■      Learned and discussed the importance of the 5 Key Communication Strategies

■      Learned and practised the 5-Step Wedge

■      Discussed the importance of reviewing any agreement, formal or informal

Style of the Workshop

The workshop will be informative and as interactive as the technology will allow. The most important thing with anything that can create fear and uncertainty, is to practise in a safe environment; we will use all the benefits of the most up-to-date technology to ensure this happens, and will follow up once delegates have conducted the ‘difficult’ conversation, as appropriate.

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How often do you find you are the initial escalation point for problems, issues, even disagreements about the way forward? Without an agreed process, problem solving can be, and often is, ad hoc, inconsistent and therefore carried out without the buy-in of those expected to implement the solution. The problem is often the problem itself; this workshop will give delegates a range of tools and techniques for clearly defining the problem as well as some creative techniques for finding and implementing solutions.

Workshop Aim

To equip you with a range of techniques and approaches to improve the way you tackle problems, create solutions and arrive at decisions to implement.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this module delegates will be able to:

• use a structured approach to problem solving
• understand the importance of a clearly formulated problem statement before racing for a solution
• expand the number of tools and techniques which they can use during the different phases of the problem-solving process
• increase the range of creative techniques to help generate ideas and alternatives
• practise and apply the process tools and techniques to current work examples during the programme, ie. in real time

Style

The session will be highly practical and participative; delegates will be able to practise the techniques taught throughout the programme.  The principles discussed will be based on well-established theory but the emphasis is on application to your real-world activities.

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Never before has networking been so prominent, or so complex. On the web, social networking sites are proliferating and professional and business sites are becoming increasingly popular. However, not everything happens in cyber-space and there really is nothing to compare with meeting people face-to-face for building trust and refining opportunities to do business together. These half-day workshops will establish ground rules for best practice and give you the chance to practice making a good first impression, every time.

To help you generate more business by talking with business acquaintances about your business in a way that feels comfortable and authentic. To find ways of growing your network of warm leads without resorting to cold calling. To use the resources and networks you already have at your disposal to help more people and thus win more customers. To find new ways of getting the phone to ring, thus negating the need to chase business.

Learning Objectives

At the end of the one-day workshop you will be able to:

• Recognise where your potential customers are
• Initiate conversations with your potential customers elegantly and easily
• Refine your ideas of what networking means for you and the business
• Feel confident and positive that you can benefit from networking events
• Know that you will contribute positively to the experience of other attendees
• Create your networking action plan: before, during and after the event
• Build a checklist of best practice for purposeful networking

Style

The programme will be facilitative and interactive; we will encourage plenty of discussion around the topics, as well as practical application. There will be an opportunity to discuss real situations and come up with opportunities for growing the business through your existing and extended networks. We will work on a form of words that is comfortable, authentic and will generate interest and confidence in others.

Pre-work

We will ask you to complete a pre-course questionnaire on your aims for the workshop.

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English Grammar: The Issues A single day's refresher in written English  The teaching of English Grammar within the educational system over the past thirty years has been uneven.  Some schools avoided any mention of the word and aimed to develop language skills through use and practice.  Others depended on their foreign language studies at school to learn knowledge of English grammar as a secondary benefit to learning the grammar of the foreign language.  Those attending private schools, or educated in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland were more likely to be taught grammar by a traditional approach.

The aim of this workshop is to establish common ground and to share understanding of what is correct, what is incorrect and what may be acceptable but does not read well (the Good, the Bad and the Ugly).

Learning Objectives

By the end of the workshop you will:

• know the different parts of speech and be able to analyse sentences
• be able to recognise, edit and explain mistakes
• know how to plan documents in overview and produce clear outlines
• have picked up tips on sentence construction, spelling and punctuation which will make planning and writing documents quicker and easier

The approach will be practical and fun.  Theory will be kept to the minimum and detailed course notes/a workbook will be given for help with style and for reference.  The workshop will be fast-paced, but there will be plenty of opportunity for discussion and coaching as needed.

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One-Day Workshop (can be run as four x 90-minute webinars)

These days the customer experience is made up of so much more than merely good or poor service at the point of delivery, although this is, of course, vitally important. In this age of online rating/reference sites, social networking rants and the like, customers have more opportunity than ever to tell the world of their experience within minutes of the encounter. Even where customers may not have a choice about where they buy next time, an opinion broadcast widely enough can make or break an organisation’s reputation in an instant.

There is an art and a science to the psychology of customer service, from understanding their wants and needs, to mastering the skills of delivering bad news or delighting through personalised treatment. From the days of ‘Moments of Truth’ (Jan Carlzon, Scandinavian Airlines, 1987) to this day, delivering exceptional customer service with grace and elegance has been shown time and again to build trust, credibility and income faster than almost any other change process.

Aims of the workshop

Every single person in the organisation is an ambassador or a representative of that organisation at all times, however, for those on the front line, the skills, knowledge and attitudes of exceptional customer service are of paramount importance. The workshop aims to pare right back to the fundamentals; who is our customer and what do we know about their wants and needs? What do we want them to be, do, think, feel and say about us? From there it’s about building the skills, competence and confidence to deliver – right first time, every time.

Learning Objectives 

By the end of this one-day workshop you will:

• Have a clear picture of the customer in front of you and their specific wants and needs
• Understand how your own pre-suppositions can help or hinder the conversation
• Have a clear strategy for eliciting the customer’s expectations
• Understand your own ‘locus of control’ and how this will impact on the conversation
• Have experienced building and breaking rapport
• Have some strategies for building your resilience
• Have recapped everything you once knew about body language, gestures, eye contact, etc. and learnt a few advanced techniques on top
• Have a clear plan of action for improving these skills

Style of the Workshop

The workshop will be practical, fast-paced and interactive, integrating input with opportunities to discuss and practise new techniques. Emphasis will be placed on how to translate new knowledge and skills back into the work environment and beyond so exceptional customer service becomes an everyday part of the job and not something to be feared and avoided. Please note delegate numbers may differ if run online

This programme is designed to look at the 'thinking it through' phase with the tools and techniques available to project managers and the 'making things happen' through leading others.

There are two phases to any project:

Thinking It Through and Making Things Happen

This programme is designed to look at the 'thinking it through' phase with the tools and techniques available to project managers and the 'making things happen' through leading others. Course Goal To equip participants with the knowledge, skill and understanding of how to manage their projects more successfully.

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This two-day workshop is aimed at Managers that lead teams and projects and who already have some basic knowledge and understanding of the workings of projects.

The content assumes that delegates have some experience of project working and that they are responsible for running at least one project. The focus will be on the leadership aspects of project working, whilst still covering tools and techniques.

Learning Outcomes

The workshop will:

• introduce delegates to the skills, tools and challenges of leading a successful project
• provide delegates with an opportunity to practise leadership skills and tools
• enable delegates to identify personal learning and prepare a personal development plan

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This single day workshop will help you to prepare, produce and polish minutes with confidence and is designed for delegates at all levels. It includes both writing skills and interpersonal techniques. It will also build the confidence you need to take control and elicit the information you need to write excellent minutes.

Minutes provide a summary of what was discussed and a record of agreed actions and outputs, yet so often these are published too late to be of any use. Why is it that we put off this important task? What do we fear? Why are so many minutes unreadable and useless?

Course Objectives

To give delegates improved skills and confidence to undertake the important task of writing minutes. The overall aim is to enable the job of minute taking to be done better - to ensure that good meetings result in excellent outcomes!

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This programme covers an introduction to project management, project life cycles, initiating and identifying the scope of a project, defining needs of stakeholders, developing a business case, creating a project and communications plan and establishing key success factors.

The workshop also covers the key roles of project team members, managing expectations of stakeholders (client) and others, whilst engaging motivations to deliver according to your plan.

It will introduce some monitoring tools and techniques for project team meetings, managing change during a project and how to report on progress.

Benefits of the workshop

By the end of the programme delegates will be able to:

• Understand the fundamental principles of project management and how to apply them
• Apply some of the key tools and techniques involved in project working
• Understand some of the people issues involved in project working
• Show confidence to take on a role within a project appropriate to their experience

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