Professional Development

Executive Coaching

Several of the Impact staff members are certified as Personal Executive Coaches. Coaching is a co-creative process whereby we will assist your manager, supervisor, or team member in a journey of self-discovery and growth. The team member will assess their current situation, identify their goals, identify the impediments to achieving their goals, develop tactics to overcome these obstacles, and create a step-by-step plan of action to achieve their goals.

  As coaches, we will help team members actualize their greatest potential by maximizing their ability to:

• Interface effectively with their constituents, peers, and superiors
• Develop trust with their constituents
• Understand team dynamics
• Utilize the appropriate style for a given situation
• Present to their superiors

We are interested in working with managers and supervisors who are interested reaching beyond the low-hanging fruit. The sweetest fruit grows at the top of the tree closest to the sun.

Frontline Leadership Skills

Impact has designed a unique and powerful supervisory basics program that is sure to have an impact on the skills and performance of your frontline supervisors and managers. It augments state of the art accelerated learning techniques with classic experiential initiatives. The core concepts from each classroom module will be anchored with an appropriate experiential challenge that will enhance the learning process.

  The concepts presented in this program are:

• Human Interaction Skills- Communication, Listening, Motivation, and Personality Types
• Building Effective Teams
• Participative Leadership
• Coaching Skills
• Conflict Management
• Effective Delegation
• Providing Feedback

The experiential portion of the program will serve as a laboratory for the participants to actually rehearse the leadership concepts presented in the classroom modules. The result is a powerful training tool that will have a major impact on the leadership behaviors of the participants as they apply their lessons back in the workplace. Not only will the performance of the leaders participating improve, but the effectiveness of the teams they lead will improve as well.

Program Goals:
• Enhance the Human Interactive Skills of Managers
• Orient Managers to the Different Personality Types
• Introduce Managers to a Participative Style of Leadership

Executive Leadership Skills

Many American businessmen and women confuse leadership skills with management skills. While effective management is critical to the success of any organization, effective leadership of an organization has a greater impact its’ long-term health and vitality. Management involves the development and manipulation of physical resources and systems. Leadership involves the unleashing of human potential within organizations. Based on Kouzes and Posner’s “The Leadership Challenge”, this two-day course will provide managers with the opportunity to assess and receive feedback regarding their leadership behavior. Utilizing a 360 Degree Feedback Tool, managers will receive feedback from the people to whom they report, their peers, and from the people who report to them regarding their perceptions on how the managers demonstrate the five fundamental leadership practices.

  The Leadership Practices

• Challenging the Process
• Creating a Shared Vision
• Enabling Others to Act
• Modeling the Way
• Encouraging the Heart

During the program, the Ten Leadership Commitments embedded within the Leadership Practices will serve as a basis for learning to lead.

The Ten Commitments

• Search out challenging opportunities to change, grow, innovate, and improve.
• Experiment, take risks, and learn from the accompanying mistakes.
• Envision an uplifting and ennobling future.
• Enlist others in a common vision by appealing to their values, interests, hopes, and dreams.
• Foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust.
• Strengthen people by giving power away, providing choice, developing competence, assigning critical tasks, and offering visible support.
• Set the example by behaving in ways that are consistent with shared values.
• Achieve small wins that promote consistent progress and build commitment.
• Recognize individual contributions to the success of every project.
• Celebrate team accomplishments regularly.

By looking into the 360 Degree Feedback mirror, participants will not only be able to self asses where they are as leaders, they will also gain insight into how others in the organization perceive them. Through this process they will be able to ascertain what their strengths are, and where their leadership gaps may lie.

Other Training Components

• Documentation of Personal Best Leadership Experience
• Creation and Documentation of Vision for Area of Responsibility
• Creation of Personal and Professional Board of Directors
• Identify Alternative Currencies
• Assessment of Values, Interest, Hopes, and Dreams of Self and Constituents
• Power Assessment
• Trust Assessment
• Collaboration Audit
• Transfer Action Plan

Presentation Skills

This is a powerful experiential based program designed to provide a safe environment in which participants will rehearse new skills that will allow them to convey their messages with impact, confidence, and passion. Participants are provided several presentation assignments during the course, which they will present to their peers in the class. After completing each presentation, they will then be given feedback by their peers. This feedback will be given to them in a presentation format. This will provide the other participants with the opportunity to further rehearse their presentation skills as well.

 This training will address the following topics:

• Presenter Effectiveness
• Non-verbal Communication
• Difficult Situations and Nerves
• Handling Questions
• Motivation and Attention
• Presentation Planning
• Overcoming Barriers to Communication
• Utilization of Presentation Aids
• Audience Learning Styles

Presentations given during the training sessions will be video recorded. This will help simulate pressures that presenters experience while presenting to large groups. It will also serve as an additional feedback tool for both the participants and the instructors. Participants will receive one-on-one coaching from the program facilitators.

Performance Tools for Supervisors and Their Teams

MOTIVATION + COMPETENCE = SUCCESS
Motivation without competence yields good intensions.
Competence without motivation yields wasted ideas.
Both must be present in order for individuals and/or organizations to succeed.

When mistakes or problems arise in many organizational cultures, the managers and supervisors will sometimes automatically attribute the cause to a lack of human effort. Without considering all the independent variables affecting the dependant variable – performance, organizations will evaluate the system last. In the end, this can create an organizational culture that is very shaming and blaming that will eventually experience a high degree of costly turnover, and never get to the root causes of poor performance.

Also, many organizations will “empower” their people charging them with the task of improving performance (reduce cost) without ever developing their skills to do so. This is a recipe for disaster. Instead of creating a mentality of power, by structuring for failure, this strategy will reinforce a feeling of powerlessness, thereby perpetuating a dependant work force.

  By learning these resource management tools, supervisors and teams can develop the competencies necessary to succeed in implementing performance improvements, thereby yielding successful empowerment.

Performance Tools

• Identifying Performance Gaps by Category
• Ishakawa Fishbone Analysis
• Force Field Analysis
• Process Flow Analysis
• Pareto Analysis
• Interrelationship Diagram
• Nominal Group Technique

By utilizing this systematic approach to problem solving, supervisors and teams will be able to:

• Identify and Clarify Problems
• Rank the Relative Importance of Each Problem
• Identify the Independent Variables Impacting each Problem
• Develop Theories about Most Probable Cause
• Collect and Evaluate Data to Prove or Disprove Theories
• Brainstorm to Identify Possible Solutions
• Design and Implement Tests to Verify Validity of Solutions
• Implement Solutions into Standard Practices and Procedures

This scientific approach to problem solving is predicated on the proven and sound statistical process control principles advocated by the late Dr. Deming and Dr. Juran (the founding fathers of the Total Quality Improvement Movement of the 1980’s and 1990’s). By structuring for success, this system will allow the users of these tools to experience a mentality of power thereby enhancing intrinsic motivation. Ultimately, the organization will reap all the benefits of a motivated and competent workforce.