Supervisors and Managers

Money matters can be intimidating for even the smartest people. However, having a solid understanding of basic financial terms and methods is crucial to your career. When terms like ROI, EBIT, GAAP, and extrapolation join the conversation, you’ll want to know what people are talking about, and you’ll want to be able to participate in the discussion. The Budgets and Financial Reports workshop will give you a solid foundation in finance. We’ll cover topics like commonly used terms, financial statements, budgets, forecasting, purchasing decisions, and financial legislation.

• Glossary
• Understanding Financial Statement
• Analyzing Financial Statements, Part One
• Analyzing Financial Statements, Part Two
• Understanding Budgets
• Budgeting Made Easy
• Advanced Forecasting Techniques
• Managing the Budget
• Making Smart Purchasing Decisions
• A Glimpse into the Legal World

You are in your office looking over your performance report and it happened again. Your low performing employee failed to meet quota this month even after you spoke with them about the importance of meeting goals. This employee has a great attitude, and you know they can do better. You just do not know how to motivate them to reach the goal. Money used to work, but that has worn off. You are baffled and you know being frustrated makes matters worse. What do you do? The Coaching and Mentoring focuses on how to better coach your employees to higher performance. Coaching is a process of relationship building and setting goals. How well you coach is related directly to how well you are able to foster a great working relationship with your employees through understanding them and strategic goal setting.

• Defining Coaching and Mentoring
• Setting Goals
• Understanding the Reality
• Developing Options
• Wrapping it All Up
• The Importance of Trust
• Providing Feedback
• Overcoming Roadblocks
• Reaching the End
• How Mentoring Differs from Coaching

An annual review can help you keep your employees happy, engaged, and focused. It is human nature to want to succeed. Giving your employees feedback on their positive and negative attributes is part of the pathway to success. A poorly designed annual review can have the reverse effect. With our Conducting Annual Employee Reviews workshop, your participants will discover how to conduct a well-designed employee annual review. By determining the categories for an annual review and understanding how it affects employee compensation, an overall increase in performance should be seen throughout your organization.

• How to Conduct Annual Reviews
• Categories for Annual Review (I)
• Categories for Annual Review (II)
• Common Mistakes (I)
• Common Mistakes (II)
• Successful Tips for Concept of Pay for Performance
• How to Tie Employee Compensation to Firm-Wide Returns
• How to Communicate Employee Expectations Effectively
• Meaningful Questions to Gauge Employee Happiness (I)
• Meaningful Questions to Gauge Employee Happiness (II)

With this workshop your candidates will be provided the skills they need to succeed. By identifying prospective managers early and identifying a clear management track, your company will prosper and thrive with a solid development structure. Becoming a new manager can seem like a daunting and challenging task. To overcome these hurdles, create an environment where employees know what is expected of them. With our How to Develop New Managers course your participants will gain the support, best practices, and knowledge. This workshop will help your company develop well rounded, fair and confident managers. By identifying early, you will be able to groom prospective candidates and provide the best chance for success.

• Managers are Made, Not Born
• Create a Management Track
• Define and Build Competencies
• Managers Learn by Being Managed Well
• Provide Tools
• Provide Support
• Identify Strong Candidates Early
• Review Questions
• Empower New Managers
• Provide Growth Opportunities

When you think of staff motivation, many things may come to mind: more money, a bigger office, a promotion, or a better quality of life. The truth is, no matter what we offer people, true motivation must come from within. Regardless of how it is characterized, it is important to get the right balance in order to ensure that you have a motivated workforce. The Employee Motivation workshop will give participants several types of tools to become a great motivator, including goal setting and influencing skills. Participants will also learn about five of the most popular motivational models, and how to bring them together to create a custom program.

• A Psychological Approach
• Object-Oriented Theory
• Using Reinforcement Theory
• Using Expectancy Theory
• Personality’s Role in Motivation
• Setting Goals
• A Personal Toolbox
• Motivation on the Job
• Addressing Specific Morale Issues
• Keeping Yourself Motivated

Facilitation is often referred to as the new cornerstone of management philosophy. With its focus on fairness and creating an easy decision-making process. Creating a comfortable environment through better facilitation will give your participants a better understanding of what a good facilitator can do to improve any meeting or gathering. The Facilitation Skills workshop can help any organization make better decisions. This workshop will give participants an understanding of what facilitation is all about, as well as some tools that they can use to facilitate small meetings. A strong understating of how a facilitator can command a room and dictate the pace of a meeting will have your participants on the road to becoming great facilitators themselves.

• Understanding Facilitation
• Process Content
• Laying the Groundwork
• Tuckman and Jensen’s Model of Team Development
• Building Consensus
• Reaching a Decision Point
• Dealing with Difficult People
• Addressing Group Dysfunction
• About Intervention
• Intervention Techniques

The Encarta Dictionary defines knowledge management as the organization of intellectual resources and information systems within a business environment. Sounds pretty simple, right?

Take a moment, though, and think about all the information that each person has in their brain. That’s a lot of knowledge! The Knowledge Management workshop will give participants the tools that they will need to begin implementing knowledge management in your organization, no matter what the size of the company or the budget. Wherever there are humans working together for one goal, there is knowledge to be harvested, stored, and dispensed as needed.

• Understanding Knowledge Management
• Dos and Don’ts
• The Knowledge Management Life Cycle
• The New Knowledge Management Paradigm
• Knowledge Management Models
• Building a Knowledge Management Rationale
• Customizing Knowledge Management Definitions
• Implementing Knowledge Management in Your Organization
• Tips for Success
• Advance Topics

They say that leaders are born, not made. While it is true that some people are born leaders, some leaders are born in the midst of adversity. Often, simple people who have never had a leadership role will stand up and take the lead when a situation they care about requires it. A simple example is parenting. When a child arrives, many parents discover leadership abilities they never knew existed in order to guide and protect their offspring. Once you learn the techniques of true Leadership and Influence, you will be able to build the confidence it takes to take the lead. The more experience you have acting as a genuine leader, the easier it will be for you. It is never easy to take the lead, as you will need to make decisions and face challenges, but it can become natural and rewarding.

• The Evolution of Leadership
• Situational Leadership
• A Personal Inventory
• Modeling the Way
• Inspiring a Shared Vision
• Challenging the Process
• Enabling Others to Act
• Encouraging the Heart
• Basic Influencing Skills
• Setting Goals

Six Sigma is a data-driven approach for eliminating defects and waste in any business process. You can compare Six Sigma with turning your water faucet and experiencing the flow of clean, clear water. Reliable systems are in place to purify, treat, and pressure the water through the faucet. That is what Six Sigma does to business: it treats the processes in business so that they deliver their intended result. Our Lean Process and Six Sigma workshop will provide an introduction to this way of thinking that has changed so many corporations in the world. This workshop will give participants an overview of the Six Sigma methodology, and some of the tools required to deploy Six Sigma in their own organizations.

• Understanding Lean
• Liker’s Toyota Way
• The TPS House
• The Five Principles of Lean Business
• The First Improvement Concept (Value)
• The Second Improvement Concept (Waste)
• The Third Improvement Concept (Variation)
• The Fourth Improvement Concept (Complexity)
• The Fifth Improvement Concept (Continuous improvement)
• The Improvement Toolkit

With this course you will be able to provide the skills, guidance, and empowerment to your team of managers. They will then be better suited in leading and motivating their team and thus produce fantastic results. To be a successful manager means having a wide range of skills. Through this workshop you will be able to disperse your knowledge and experience throughout your leadership team. Manager Management takes a special type of leader. This workshop will expand your participant’s knowledge and provide a way for them to teach and lead new and experienced managers. As every manager knows that learning never stops, this workshop will have something for everyone.

• Grooming a New Manager
• Measuring Performance
• Motivating Managers
• Signs of Poor Management
• Trust Your Team of Managers
• When an Employee Complains about their Manager
• Coaching and Mentoring (I)
• Coaching and Mentoring (II)
• When Do You Step In?
• Remember These Basic Qualities

Traditionally, middle managers make up the largest managerial layer in an organization.

The Middle Manager is responsible to those above them and those below them. They head a variety of departments and projects. In order for a company to operate smoothly, it is essential that those in middle management be committed to the goals of the organization and understands how to effectively execute these goals. It is crucial for businesses to focus on these essential managers and provide them with the opportunities to succeed. No matter the organization’s structure or size, it will benefit from employing well trained middle managers. Having a middle manager understand their role in the organization is very important. They are in communication with a very large percentage of the company and will have a large impact throughout the organization.

• Introduction to Management
• Ethics and Social Responsibility
• Managing Information
• Decision-Making
• Control Basics of Control
• Organizational Strategy
• Innovation and Change
• Organizational Structures and Process
• Managing Teams
• Motivation and Leadership

You have likely experienced some form of Office Politics. Working with different personalities, opinions, backgrounds, and values is a challenge in any environment. It is an inevitable fact that when people are working together personalities can and will clash. No one is an island, so working together as a team is incredibly important for the organization and every employee. Office Politics is about creating and maintaining better relationships. It is about communicating and working with your peers and colleagues in a way that is mutually beneficial.

Employees who understand the positive aspects of Office Politics are better team members and end up being more successful and productive.

• New Hires
• It’s About Interacting and Influencing
• Dealing With Rumors, Gossip, and Half-Truths
• Office Personalities (I)
• Office Personalities (II)
• Getting Support for Your Projects
• Conflict Resolution
• Ethics
• You Are Not an Island
• Social Events Outside of Work

In the past few decades, organizations have discovered something incredible: the principles that have been used to create enormous successes in large projects can be applied to projects of any size to create amazing success. As a result, many employees are expected to understand project management techniques and how to apply them to projects of any size. The Project Management workshop will give participants an overview of the entire project management process, as well as key project management tools that they can use every day. Working with project planning documents, such as needs assessments, risk management plan, and a communication plan will provide benefits throughout your organization.

• Project Integration Management
• Project Scope Management
• Managing Time
• Getting It All Done on Time
• Special Tasks
• Verbal Communication Skills
• Non-Verbal Communication
• Empowering Yourself
• The Team of Two
• Taking Care of Yourself

Supervising others can be a tough job. Between managing your own time and projects, helping your team members solve problems and complete tasks, and helping other supervisors, your day can fill up before you know it. The Supervising Others workshop will help supervisors become more efficient and proficient, with information on delegating, managing time, setting goals and expectations (for themselves and others), providing feedback, resolving conflict, and administering discipline.

• Setting Expectations
• Setting Goals
• Assigning Work
• Degrees of Delegation
• Implementing Delegation
• Providing Feedback
• Managing Your Time
• Resolving Conflict
• Tips for Special Situations
• A Survival Guide for the New Supervisor

Teams are unavoidable in any business. The key to successful team building is addressing the importance of chemistry. By staying aware of the chemistry as you build the group, you will increase the chance of avoiding pitfalls and developing a sense of unity. With our Team Building Through Chemistry workshop, your participants will discover the specifics of how building a team through chemistry will lead to success. It is not enough to have a group of people just work on a project. They need to connect and utilize each other’s strength through team chemistry.

• Understanding Teams
• Team Development Model
• Chemistry in Teams
• Diversity
• Vision and Goals
• Roles
• Leadership Functions
• Develop Cohesion
• Build Relationships
• Direction of Team

There are an estimated one billion virtual workers in 2012, and the number is expected to continue climbing well into the future. With a global workforce you are provided with a cost effective and talented pool of employees to draw from. With a virtual team you are given a Follow the Sun production environment. With a virtual team you have the normal issues of a localized team, with the additional challenges of distance and cultural differences. Virtual Team Building and Management will give you participants the knowledge to work with these challenges and succeed in a growing global workforce.

• Setting up Your Virtual Team (I)
• Setting Up Your Virtual Team (II)
• Virtual Team Meetings
• Communication (I)
• Communication (II)
• Building Trust
• Cultural Issues
• To Succeed with a Virtual Team
• Dealing With Poor Team Players
• Choosing the Right Tools