Organized Abandonment

Organizational refinement may involve pruning complexity or removing functional redundancy. Organized Abandonment incorporates and then goes beyond refinement and re-alignment measures to address the growing organizational malady, Subtle Incremental Accretion Syndrome. The only known cure is to abandon the “do more with less” motto and replace it with “Start Less, Finish More”. These sessions will take you through the process of making the necessary tough decisions about what is coming off the agenda, out of the plan and away from the department and prepares you for the even tougher corresponding actions to create a sustainable and work model.

Blending Corporate Cultures

First, the merger, then, the culture clash. Based on research from a leading change management consulting firm, at least 60% of all corporate mergers fail to reach their objectives partially because leaders fail to recognize that people issues are just as important as market synergies. The informal cultural issues that can sink the merger are often underwater and underground and they're easy to ignore, because some of them seem insignificant. These sessions will walk you through exploring proven approaches and finding creative ways to blend multiple corporate cultures into one.

Change Resistance

The effective management of change is one of the greatest challenges facing organizations today. Regardless of the type of initiative engaged, as long as it represents a significant change, resistance is an inevitable response. Although resistance is a natural reaction and cannot be eliminated, these sessions will guide you through the reasons for resistance that will help organizations prepare for and manage it.

Uncovering Covert Processes

Organizational change initiatives often fail because leadership often overlooks the powerful role played by concealed or subconscious factors – hidden agenda, blind spots, office politics, tacit assumptions and secret hopes, wishes or fears. These sessions are designed to provide a coherent approach for identifying and dealing with all of these hidden dynamics, showing precisely how to bring them to light and limit their insidious impacts. Session contents include: Cues and Clues, Decoding Subconscious Expression, Five Basic Keys, Putting Things on the Table, Recognizing and Rethinking Interventions, Rethinking Organizational Politics, Managing Covert Processes.

Teaching "Smart People" How to Learn

Why are your smartest and most successful employees often the worst learners? This session sheds light on the forces that prevent highly skilled people from learning from their mistakes, and offers suggestions for helping your talent to reach their full potential and grow through change.

Communication

The Body Never Lies

Learn the language that everybody uses but no one speaks. These coaching sessions will guide you to detect and send messages of honesty and confidence, gain and maintain the upper hand in negotiations, determine if the person you are talking to is lying, recognize boredom, overcome defensiveness and see through gestures meant to disguise feelings as well as those that contain a double message.

Crucial Confrontations

Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations are individuals that either can’t or won’t deal with failed promises or neglected obligations. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines or just plain behaved badly. If anyone steps up to the issue, he or she often does a poor job, creating a whole new dimension of problems. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren’t just irritating, they are costly. These sessions are designed to increase your skill and confidence in facing tough issues through permanently resolving failed promises, performance review issues, violated expectations and missed deadlines, transforming broken rules and bad behaviors into productive accountability and strengthening relationships while problem solving.

Crucial Conversations

The quality of your life and leadership comes out of the quality of your dialogues and conversations. These sessions are designed to prepare you to handle life’s most difficult and important conversations and discover how to communicate best when it matters most. Together we will explore and prepare for your high-stakes situations, transform anger, fear or hurt feelings into powerful dialogue, make it safe to talk about almost anything and be persuasive but not abrasive.

Communication Styles

We humans possess impressive vocabularies comprised of hundreds of thousands of words. We have access to revolutionary tools such as the Internet, cell phones, and instant messaging and to support us in communicating effectively. Yet even with our innate abilities and the technological advances at our disposal, the alarming number of failed relationships and people dissatisfied with their work provide the evidence that none of us are as effective in expressing ourselves or understanding other people as we would like to believe. These sessions were created to address our communication differences and resulting ineffectiveness. The instruments we use lead you to better understand your own behavioral and communication styles as well as identify the styles of all those around you. When we know more about ourselves, we communicate effectively. When we are better communicators, we thrive.

Teams

Building, Managing and Growing Teams

Establish a productive environment and exploit group dynamics to develop an informed, cohesive, performing workforce. The series of sessions for teams may include team diagnostic tools that are sophisticated yet practical for benchmarking and monitoring assessment, development of a team vision and mission, establishment of team norms and objectives, decision making matrix and criteria creation, communication plans and accountability structure, issue resolution, and team member role clarification and development.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Developed by Visioneer, Patrick Lencioni, these sessions offer wisdom for recognizing and addressing The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. In these sessions we explore the fundamental causes of organizational politics and team failure. The content and session structure is based on an engaging fable that serves as our case study of an old-school CEO who comes out of retirement to accept the monumental task of transforming a dysfunctional group of high profile, egocentric executives into a cohesive and effective team. We will share the journey of the CEO and her colleagues as they confront the behavioral pitfalls that destroy most teams and adopt the five characteristics of a truly cohesive one. The transformation your team will experience in the process will be legendary, not mythical.