National Customer Service Association
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Education and Training :: Leader / Manager Development Workshops

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Executive Coaching

Coaching for the Coach
For especially experienced leaders who have achieved a senior-level position within their organizations, it can be lonely at the top. You are expected to have, if not all of the answers, the bulk of them—immediately and correctly. You have few people, if anyone, to share your frustrations with, safely voice concerns about your own skills and stamina, and bounce ideas off regarding huge upcoming opportunities. You are likely out of balance, spending too much time in your professional life, at least mentally and emotionally. Executive Coaching provides both support and challenge to assist you in better understanding your personal strengths as well as areas for improvement. Through dialogue and appropriate assessment of personal values and purpose, NCSA guides you in creating and implementing your personal development plan, which then allows you to balance your personal and professional lives, fulfilling both—leading to enhanced overall organizational performance and personal satisfaction. NCSA has designed the workshop to be conducted in periodic work sessions based on the focus at that time, associated activities and individual needs. You are too important to your family and to your organization to miss the opportunity for assuring work-life balance through NCSA's Executive Coaching.

 


Delegation – Empowerment

Empower—Take the Risk
Empowerment is risky. Today's workplace requires employees who can make decisions; invent solutions to problems; take initiative and be accountable for results; and nurture and support other employees who feel responsible not just for doing their jobs, but also for making the whole organization better. This workshop will create practical application around:

  • Identifying and implementing the key qualities of empowered workplaces
  • Making employees active problem-solvers through stewardship delegation and other resources
  • Understanding the difference between "delegation" and "dumping" and the benefits of and barriers to successful delegation
  • Assuring employees know how to make a difference
  • Being willingly responsible and accountable for their results
  • Being a part of the team and having control over how they do their jobs
  • Using their full talents and abilities by taking initiative

 


Decision-Making

Practical Application of the Decision-Making Process
Technology will never replace the leader or supervisor's need to make decisions. Decision-making involves uncertainty, risk-taking and intuition. Not every situation requires an equal depth of study and analysis; however, every problem has the same baseline considerations. In this workshop, participants will proceed through a linear step-by-step decision-making process. They will discover an efficient and effective approach that will take them from true problem identification to decision effectiveness evaluation. This approach provides consistency in dealing with problems and decisions of all areas and magnitude.

 


Effective Strategies for Change Management

Personalizing the Change Management Model
Change is inevitable and necessary in everyone's life. The challenge in managing change is that its timing and pace often do not coincide with the scope or timing that is ideal for each of us. Most of us have some understanding of the basics of change management concepts—but because we don't have a full understanding of the how and why, as well as what to do when change occurs, it can often be overwhelming, and in extreme cases even debilitating, to our ability to perform. In this workshop, participants will:

  • Understand the nature of change and how the rate of change is accelerating.
  • Explore the role of technology in both the necessity and our ability to manage change.
  • Discuss the positive and negative consequences of change.
  • Recognize how change impacts each person differently—even an identical change condition.
  • Complete a "Personal Change" assessment—identify personal growth opportunities.
  • Explore a truly understandable proprietary "Change Model" (available only through NCSA).
  • Understand the linkage between one's physical, intellectual and emotional bond to the "pre-change" condition relative to the time it takes to move through the change process.
  • Explore the three reasons people actually reject change.
  • Learn constructive actions to take—for yourself and for others—during each phase of the change process.
  • Explore change regression and strategies to refocus on moving through the change process.
  • Apply classroom learning through interactive simulations.

 


Coaching

Successful Coaching in a Dynamic Work Environment
One of the most critical roles of every leader is that of effectively coaching employees to greater performance and satisfaction—personally and professionally. Too often, opportunities are missed by leaders to share performance-improvement opportunities with employees. This often happens because we do not have a simple, structured approach to coaching our employees. The net results are lower levels of productivity, coupled with a reduction in overall employee satisfaction. This workshop provides leaders, managers and supervisors the tools to strengthen overall coaching abilities. In this workshop participants will:

  • Understand the consequences of timely, focused and respectful coaching (or not coaching) on the organization and the employee.
  • Understand the functional implications between being "boss" and being "coach."
  • Learn why and how to successfully use "momentary" coaching.
  • Discover when coaching is and is not the appropriate course of action.
  • Recognize why coaching is not just a "negative" thing.
  • Learn the traits of successful coaches.
  • Discuss obstacles to effective coaching and strategies to manage them.
  • Learn techniques for building trust between coach and the coached.
  • Implement a simple and effective coaching process for having those hard or crucial conversations with added confidence and more positive results.
  • Identify steps to take beyond the workshop to enhance ongoing coaching skills successfully using workshop-provided coaching skills and templates.

 


Motivation

Creating an Environment Where People Want and Can Be Productive
Creating an environment where people want to be productive requires understanding the key elements of motivation, identifying what can be done to create a motivating environment and creating the circumstances that allow motivation to consistently occur. Role modeling motivation is critical for leadership in order to expect staff to feel and act on it. While it is important to have some sense of the theory behind successful motivation, this workshop will boil down years of research to practical application and cover how to:

  • Get to know your employees—understand their personalities and their needs.
  • Create a reward system—make sure your employees feel that the outcome they have to achieve is doable and that the reward has real value to them.
  • Create a sense of fairness and honesty in the workplace.
  • Communicate clearly about how you expect employees to behave and what you want them to achieve.

 


Critical / Innovative Thinking

Developing the Characteristics of Excellent Critical Thinking
Some people are natural-born critical thinkers; others can be nurtured to develop the skill. We know that the most successful people are accomplished, aware critical thinkers—which means they have spent some time understanding and enhancing that skill. Unfortunately, most people rarely give the concept of critical thinking, in and of itself, much thought. We don't appropriately understand its characteristics and application or our own personal level of skill and how to improve it. We are, therefore, missing the opportunity to progress—personally and professionally. In this workshop, you will (re)learn the characteristics of critical thinkers and how to identify the personal factors that affect our ability to think critically. Understanding the organizational impact of decision-making, why it is important to use an objective process to make crucial decisions, and which tools to use to analyze problems and identify criteria for decisions are all part of an accomplished critical thinker. A standardized problem-solving process drives a successful critical thinking outcome. In this workshop, participants will:

  • Discover how personal factors affect our critical thinking.
  • Identify organizational influences and situational circumstances that enhance critical thinking activities overall.
  • Learn how critical thinking leads to effective problem-solving and subsequent organizational gains.
  • Learn useful techniques and opportunities for effective critical thinking and problem solving day-to-day, on the job.
  • Discover habits that impede critical thinking and problem-solving.
  • Learn how to apply and improve critical thinking—and problem-solving going forward.

 


Stress Management

Clearheaded and Refreshed: Simple Tools to Manage Stress
We all need simple tools to manage our stress. The better we understand the stressors that affect us, the more effective we will be in coping with workplace and general life events in an appropriate and healthy manner. Everyone should periodically examine how they handle stress and where improvement can be made. In this workshop participants will:

  • Enhance their understanding of the stressors in our lives and the cumulative impact of stress.
  • Learn techniques for managing our stress for both long-term and immediate resolution; to improve our overall psychological and physical well-being.
  • Recognize our physical and mental responses to stress.
  • Understand practical tools for managing current stressors and averting potential stress.
  • Discover the relationship of diet, exercise and sleep to stress.
  • Support one another as we encounter difficulties in the workplace and in our personal lives.

 


Diversity

Valuing Our Differences
Promoting and accomplishing a diverse workplace goes beyond simply communicating between groups. Enhancing diversity awareness enables us to work successfully in a cross-categorical–based culture to improve our business as well as personal success. For legal, ethical and moral reasons, we must become more diverse in our attitudes and practices. But this workshop takes us beyond those requirements to embracing a gratifying understanding of diversity and why we must capitalize on it. In this workshop, participants will:

  • Recognize the true nature of diversity in today's workforce.
  • Discover how we are alike and different and yet are a necessary fit for each other.
  • Understand how diversity brings real value to the organization—individually and collectively.
  • Learn "who we are is where we were when" to understand our current paradigms on diversity.
  • Discuss the real consequences of when we feel avoided or tolerated vs. when we feel truly appreciated and accepted.
  • Understand positive steps we can take to update or change our paradigms relative to how we view those who are different than us.
  • Discover how to be a positive change agent for ourselves and others around us.

 


Generational Differences

Working with a Multigenerational Workforce
For the first time in history, the U.S. workforce is made up solidly of four generations and in some venues, up to five. People are staying in the workforce longer out of financial need as well as personal desire. The nature of work itself continues to evolve, and members of the different generations have subtle and not-so-subtle differences in how they go about accomplishing their work-related tasks. By exploring workforce generational diversity, learning how to appreciate one another, and capitalizing on what each naturally and comfortably brings to the table, we greatly enhance the likelihood we will enjoy our work life personally and be more productive. In this workshop participants will:

  • Recognize the true nature of diversity in today's workforce.
  • Identify and understand the four (and in some venues, five) generations or "work cohorts" in the modern workplace.
  • Appreciate that "who you are is where you were when"—understand the impact of major events on a given generation's development.
  • Review the characteristics of generational members to better appreciate differences.
  • Understand the workplace contributions and challenges for each work cohort.
  • Identify techniques and strategies for working successfully with a multigenerational workgroup.

 


Personalities

Harnessing Personality Differences for Successful Outcomes
Understanding how personalities impact behaviors and knowing how to interact with those different personalities is critical to our daily satisfaction at work and elsewhere in life. Personalities are everywhere and we don't necessarily enjoy all of them. Building effective personality understanding and awareness is the focus of the workshop. In this workshop participants will:

  • Learn why understanding personalities is a precursor to effective performance.
  • Understand significant insights into your own personality.
  • Discover how personality traits can be confused for stubbornness, inability to perform, etc.
  • Discover how various personality types irritate, influence and contribute to overall team performance.
  • Find out what your personality says about you relative to social interaction, gathering data, and decision-making.
  • Learn how your personality relates to your contributions to the organization, leadership style, preferred work environment, potential pitfalls as well as developmental opportunities.
  • Grow individually and collectively to improve your business's working environment.

 

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