ORGANIZATIONAL WORKSHOPS, PRESENTATIONS, AND TRAINING

Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith work with public and private sector organizations in the U.S. and internationally to design and present training and development programs. Each of the following programs can be presented as a unit or integrated into a larger program of personal and organizational improvement. Programs are custom-designed and collaboratively developed with teams, groups and organizations to meet special needs. Programs are currently offered in the following areas:

•  Conflict Resolution: This session explores the most common reasons for conflict in the experience of the participants and identifies the skills that need to be learned to prevent, manage, settle and resolve them. An easy to use 8 step conflict resolution model is presented and demonstrated. Participants examine the sources of impasse, and the steps they can take to resolve conflicts, even when they are completely stuck. Participants learn a number of techniques drawn from mediation, including establishing ground rules, caucusing, contracting, agenda setting, focusing on the future, identifying interests, surfacing hidden agendas and supportive confrontation, which are discussed, explored and practiced in detail.

•  Effective Communication: The skills of active, empathic and responsive listening, communication, reframing, summarizing and reflecting are key to the creation of successful organizations. Participants learn through exercises and role plays how to listen actively, empathetically and responsively, and how to use techniques such as mirroring, summarizing, reflecting, reframing, acknowledging, open questioning, encouraging, clarifying, validating, and acknowledging. Special emphasis is placed on communication in preventing conflicts, on relationships and context, and on improving team interactions. Topics include how to respond to difficult or angry behaviors; how to surface and resolve emotional issues that block workplace effectiveness; how to communicate up a hierarchy, and how to communicate to resolve disputes within and between teams, and among co-workers.

•  Learning from Difficult Behaviors: This program provides skills in how to respond to difficult behaviors, including complaining, victimizing, compulsivity, anger, paranoia, negativity, and others. Participants learn about personality systems and how they are reinforced, and develop alternative strategies for responding to people who engage in difficult behaviors. They learn how to recognize when difficult emotional issues are present, how to surface hidden emotional agendas, how to talk about personal issues such as death, divorce and other “hot” topics in the workplace, do's and don'ts of emotional communication, and techniques for acknowledging and resolving difficult emotional issues.

•  Strategic Planning: Starting with envisioning, this program takes participants through goal setting, analyzing barriers to achieving their goals, developing strategies to overcome their barriers, and creating action plans that help realize their vision. Critical success factors are used to develop practical, effective action plans. This workshop is offered to leadership groups, self-managing teams, and entire organizations, to help them develop a collaborative planning process that aligns everyone behind a common vision, strategy and action plan.

•  Collaborative Negotiation: This hands-on workshop covers the full range of negotiation styles, focusing particularly on interest based negotiation. The session is highly practical and designed to change the participant's attitudes, styles and behaviors in negotiation, especially in negotiations within organizations, between teams, with customers, and among adversaries, as in the collective bargaining process. The session presents a number of techniques for negotiating on a collaborative or win/win rather than win/lose basis, including separating people from problems, distinguishing positions from interests, generating options for mutual gain, developing appropriate criteria, and overcoming resistance to agreement. The session also focuses on impasse resolution, and negotiating in a cross cultural environment.

•  Strategic Integration : Rapidly changing organizations and high performance teams face increasing bureaucratization, fragmentation, isolation and competition for scarce resources. This program provides skills, methods and tools for integrating organizations around strategic objectives, overcoming organizational boundaries, bringing change processes into a strategic alignment to create integrated, coherent, holistic organizations.

•  Team Building : If staff are going to operate with full responsibility and develop a real sense of ownership for the work of the organization as a whole, they need to be trained in how to operate in self-directed and empowered teams. We regularly consult, facilitate, train and coach staff on how to work in high performance teams, assist managers in shifting to new roles, demonstrate how to reach consensus and resolve team conflicts, and help create stretch goals, performance measures and strategies for implementing them. We work with team leaders on ways of encouraging team members to take full responsibility for outcomes, and on how to lead in a team environment.

•  Learning to Lead: Leaders are required at every level in organizations, and leadership skills can be learned and developed by everyone. This session focuses on leadership skills required for personal growth and organizational change, targeting managers, team leaders, labor union and executive leadership teams. It focuses on core leadership competencies of articulating a vision, deepening self-knowledge, communicating with meaning, building trust and taking committed action.

•  Consensus Building and Shared Decision Making: In all organizations, and especially in team based organizations, it is important that everyone know how to use consensus building and shared decision making wherever possible. Skills learned by participants include understanding the full range of decision making options and when to use each, the nature of consensus and why it works, how to build and reach consensus, what to do when consensus fails, impasse resolution techniques, consensus building and project management, how to create more effective meetings, and communication skills that facilitate the reaching of consensus.

•  Leading By Values: Leadership that is based in a context of shared humane values, ethics and integrity creates organization in which staff on all levels are committed to collaborative and respectful relationships. This program provides training for leaders on all levels of the organization to identify the values to which they are committed and to develop skills for integrating these values into their work and self expression.

•  Mediation: We provide intensive training for in-house and peer mediators, and for ombudspersons and HR professionals in advanced mediation techniques which allow them to resolve costly interpersonal and organizational disputes quickly and at low cost. A full forty hours of training and certification for staff and management mediators allows participants to resolve issues between their co-workers and peers, co-mediate cross-peer disputes and resolve complex organizational disputes, including cross-cultural disputes.

•  Conflict Resolution Systems Design: All fast paced organizations confront conflicts on a regular basis, and even chronically.. We have consulted with many Fortune 100 companies to design conflict resolution systems, so that multi-level programs are available to prevent, manage, settle, learn from and resolve disputes. We then provide training for managers, HR staff and conflict resolvers in mediation skills, so that conflicts can be prevented and resolved quickly.

•  Prejudice Reduction and Celebrating Diversity: This workshop presents methods for communicating in a culturally diverse work environment and reasons for valuing cultural diversity, as well as techniques for handling cross-cultural and gender-based conflicts in the workplace. It provides information on how to understand cultural differences, how conflicts arise based on cultural assumptions and expectations, and how cultural context shapes communication. Issues of prejudice and bias, shame and guilt are addressed openly and directly. Exercises for communicating sensitively with diverse groups and improving attitudes towards diversity are practiced.

•  Envisioning the Future: New, innovative organizations need inspiring visions for their future, together with a well-defined mission statement, and a set of shared values that guide behavior. Everyone from the Board of Directors to mail room clerks can play a role in identifying how they can contribute to the company. We facilitate Board, executive staff and entire organizations in creating visions for how to lead their organizations.

•  Creative Problem Solving : Most managers tend to think vertically, logically and sequentially, which is important in many situations. Yet during periods of rapid change, when emotions are present, or when creativity is required, lateral thinking becomes a more useful tool. This program develops skills in understanding and applying the elements of both styles of thinking, and focuses on creating an environment in which risk taking and problem solving are encouraged.

•  Reaching Consensus on Shared Values: One of the most powerful sources of motivation and unity in any organization comes from having a clear sense of shared values. Values are priorities that can be identified, discussed, debated and refined through a consensus building process that allows them to be acted upon. Values can transform organizational culture, and clarify mission and vision. Participants in this program brainstorm and reach consensus on a set of shared values they commit to implement in their daily work.

•  Managing Change: The challenges of a rapidly changing world require all organizations to develop skills in change management, or what Tom Peters calls “Thriving on Chaos.” This program offers improved methods for initiating and streamlining the change process, implementing successful organizational changes, understanding the way change works, strategic planning, and creative ways of building coalitions and identifying change opportunities. Participants create and communicate their visions and expectations regarding change, gain an understanding of the stresses of change, and learn to develop the systems and structures that support staff throughout the change process.

•  Group Facilitation and Dialogue: Skills in facilitating group interactions and dialogue are essential in every organization, and for every team and manager. Techniques presented include introductory processes, flip-chart recording, video feedback on presentation skills, exercises, collaborative group processes, uses of small groups, ground rules, action research, process interventions, creating group dialogues and public conversations, and other techniques.

•  Process Mapping and Organizational Design: Using the "7S" model and principles drawn from reengineering, this program enables participants to re-examine their organizational design and their work processes in order to produce higher quality and better results. Process mapping is a method for outlining key work processes and their interrelationships so as to identify opportunities for improvement. Participants create new organizational structures, and systems for support in realizing their shared goals through targeted strategies.

•  Improving Motivation, Morale, Participation and Responsibility:: Participants learn five fundamentally different approaches to workplace motivation and forty techniques for improving employee motivation and morale, including changing job satisfaction measures, improving team relationships, and developing methods for increasing participation, responsibility and productivity. Participants also examine Japanese methods of workplace motivation, and techniques for increasing esprit de corps and ownership of results.

•  Excellence, Quality and Customer Service: Employees and managers often disregard the human and organizational needs of their customers, and fall short of providing the best service possible, both with respect to products and processes. This program develops excellence, quality and service as part of a new kind of relationship with the customer, that builds not simply on service, but develops creative partnerships as well.

•  Performance Assessment, Feedback and Evaluation: In a cooperative or team environment, it is important to institute regular and continuous feedback, and to use a 360 degree evaluation process to provide performance information based on the different perspectives of supervisors, direct reports, peers, customers and ourselves. A comprehensive approach is taken to performance assessment to assist staff in giving supportive feedback that is direct, on-going and results in significant behavioral changes. Participants learn how to give each other honest and effective feedback and performance appraisals, how to continue the learning process outside the evaluation process, how to use performance appraisal as a form of "positive discipline," and what to do when it fails.

•  Time and Stress Management: This highly experiential workshop entitled “Mission Control” enables managers and team members to develop skills in focusing their time and reducing stresses in high performance situations. Participants are supported in creating work environments in which employees develop improved skills to achieve effective results and reduce debilitating stresses.

•  Peer Coaching and Mentoring: Organizations undergoing rapid change require new behaviors among team members and leaders. Mentoring programs with peer coaching at their heart can provide much needed support for staff and managers in support of new organizational designs and plans. Participants learn how to mentor new employees and managers, and how to coach others to commit to personal and organizational change.

•  Training of Trainers: All the training programs mentioned above can be delivered in-house by individuals who have been trained as trainers, both in the methods of hands-on, interactive training, and in the subject matter required. This program uses videotape to provide feedback to prospective trainers, detailed training curricula, and tips for trainers who have gotten stuck on how to gain the trust and respect of trainees.