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THE BUSINESS, PROJECT AND MANAGEMENT PROFESSIONAL’S TOOLKIT

2 DAY COURSE

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Are you prepared to move ahead in your career?

Successful people know it’s necessary to have a complete “toolbox” of skills at your disposal to keep a competitive edge in today's business climate.

Professional skills above and beyond technical competency set you apart, getting you noticed while achieving results.

Recent surveys of employers regarding qualities they desire in entry-level employees as well as MBA applicants revealed a common list of sought-after attributes. This list of coveted competencies includes:

These things are all part of an individual’s emotional intelligence quotient, and unlike “IQ,”“EQ” can be learned and refined through training and practice.

Understand the factors that define your performance and your environment.

By better understanding both the factors that drive your actions and reactions, as well as the environment in which you work, you will be better able to leverage your innate strengths, as well as enhance skills that will help you excel. Understanding your personality traits, communication styles and behaviors will give you insights into how you perform, and how to better work with those around you.

Learn practical tips and techniques for issues you face every day.

Negotiation skills, team building and performance, improving meeting productivity, and painless presentations are just a sampling of the real-world challenges that will be addressed in this course. If you are involved in the business of doing business, you can’t afford to miss this course. You owe it to your career and to yourself to take your professional skills to the next level.

In-Class Workshops and Group Exercises:

A variety of demonstrations, large-group activities and small-group team exercises will refine and enhance your communication, negotiation, conflict-resolution, and problem solving skills. Working in small groups, you and your peers will better understand key practices that will yield big results in the business environment. Specifically, you will:

Course Outline

"Getting to know me" and your working environment. Of the many factors that contribute to success in your chosen career, an understanding of your personality, behavioral and communication style type is among the most useful and powerful. Traditionally, emphasis has been placed on education, interests, skills, and experience. But these will change over time and cannot always be relied upon as your principal long-term guide. We will take this knowledge one step further and work on understanding how these influence your working style as it relates to your working environment.

Practice Session:
We will begin with an activity that has each individual doing a self-evaluation of their communication, personality and behavioral style and how each of these influences their working style. Then, as a small team effort you will discuss among yourselves what is effective and what isn't. Through self-evaluation and feedback from others, we learn what works and what doesn't in a non-threatening environment.

Culture is so important that it literally underlies the way business is done in every way. Recently, there has been more attention to the influences culture, management style and personality style play in the overall success of a business venture. Understanding a company culture, particularly when entering as a new employee or working as a consultant can be the difference between being effective or ineffective in that environment. Ignoring the culture or working at counter-purposes with it is almost sure to lead to failure.

Practice Session:
Guided by your instructor you and your team will do a corporate assessment and list all the types discovered. As a team you will share your perceptions of the different cultures and strategize on how best to cope with them.

"What's in it for WE?" is a question to ask ourselves. Effective collaboration is one of the keys to your business/financial success. People know how you are thinking about them because your thinking impacts your word choice, your tone, and your body language. The better you get at focusing your thoughts on mutual benefit, the more your words, tone and body language will reflect that thinking. As your behaviors reflect more "What's in it for WE?" thinking, people will be more receptive to working collaboratively with you.

Practice Session:
Working with scripted roles for team members, the team will be challenged to charter their group, assign roles and responsibilities and learn how to ask effective questions. Using role play the team will understand problems, develop consensus, and document it. Then, giving feedback to each other the team will understand the impact of asking the right questions to elicit the needed response.

There's nothing like a strong disagreement to slow down the work in progress. A successful professional is equipped to handle negotiation/conflict resolution in an efficient manner to not only keep the work moving, but to negotiate agreement toward a common goal without giving in. This session will explore the process of principled negotiation which can be used effectively on almost any type of dispute. The four principles of this type of negotiation are 1) separate the people from the problem; 2) focus on interests rather than positions; 3) generate a variety of options before settling on an agreement; and 4) insist that the agreement be based on objective criteria.

Practice Session:
Changing the dynamics of the already formed teams and after reviewing a "problem" as potential for conflict, you will have the opportunity to role play using the options and tactics you learned in this session. Using principled negotiation, you and your team members will generate a variety of options before settling on an agreement and have criteria to support your decisions.

Taming the Necessary Evil - Meetings have gotten a bad rap, because many meetings are unproductive and dull. But they have both a place and a high potential in small and large businesses. Good meetings can increase your effectiveness, customer service, and bottom line. Tailoring your meetings to fit the need and learning facilitation strategies will generate not only a more productive meeting, but also one that participants want to be a part. This session will provide you with pre-meeting strategies as well as post-meeting follow-up guidelines and tips for making your meetings more lively and action-oriented.

Practice Session:
Once again the dynamics of the teams will be changed. Given some possible topics for which a meeting would or would not be necessary, it will be up to you and your team to decide if a meeting is necessary (and there needs to be a reason). You will decide the key attendees (not everyone needs to attend all meetings), what the agenda will be, if resolution cannot be reached at the meeting, will there be action items and who will follow up. You and your team will also be tasked with coming up with alternate ways to discuss issues without having a meeting.

E-mail and Instant Messaging - Think before you write. Just because you can send information faster than ever before, it doesn't mean that you should send it. Analyze your readers to make certain that you are sending a message that will be both clear and useful. In this session you will learn or possibly refresh your email etiquette and have a clearer understanding of when it is appropriate to "cc" another party. You will learn winning solutions on how to tame the communications overload in your work environment.

While hard work and good ideas are essential to success, your ability to express those ideas and get others to join you is just as important. Much of this verbal expression will be one on one or in small groups but periodically (and for some of us often) you will be involved in more formal and public speaking in front of larger numbers. If this thought makes you nervous you are not alone. Many speakers lack the skills and confidence to make effective presentations. We have all been victims of speakers (e.g. teachers) who put us to sleep. Despite knowing how ineffective many speakers are, many of us have found that, despite the best intentions, we haven't fared much better. We knew the topic and the ideas were written down, but the presentation still didn't go well. This session will give you the tools you need to give powerful presentations with or without MS PowerPoint.

Practice Session:
After having negotiated your topic with your teammates, you will be doing a 2 - 3 minute presentation using the newly learned skills from this module. You will have the opportunity to hear positive comment critiques from your fellow teammates and to hone your skills for powerful presentations in the future.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Anyone involved in the "business of business" would benefit from this class. This course is perfect for you if you are a…

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

During this course, you will learn how to:

Special Bonus - As part of your course materials, get a copy of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton.

Immediate benefits of attending this class:

ARI Courses

American Research Institute
170 Southport Drive
Suite 400
Morrisville, NC 27560