Communication Seminars
The Communication Centre has developed a selection of seminars based upon developing industry need. These seminars will provide your team with basic or advanced skills in a select area – and may be combined as desired to create a comprehensive training series to meet the specific needs of your organization. While we list below these previously developed sessions, our team has the ability to customize sessions to meet organizational goals or develop seminars on topics not listed here. We look forward to helping you meet your needs!
Sessions:
Coaching/ Providing Feedback
Many supervisors struggle with how to help their employees improve performance.
The skill of performance review comes from learning strategies and techniques
to provide information in the most clear and constructive manner. The focus
of this seminar will be to allow attendees to:
- Comfortably critique co-workers
- Recognize and address the emotional component for the review process
- Evaluate employees
- Provide concrete recommendations for improvement
- Design feedback messages
- Encourage team members
Conflict Resolutions
For many people, conflict has strong negative connotations and should be avoided at all costs. But managers recognize that conflict is a natural process that occurs in all organizations. If handled properly, conflict can actually improve productivity and strengthen relationships. This seminar is to designed to help participants understand the fundamentals of conflict and use it as a tool to help them, as well as other members of their organizations, embrace conflict to achieve their organizations’ goals. Participants in this session will learn to:
- Re-conceptualize conflict
- Recognize the situations that lead to constructive and destructive conflict
- Recognize the personality types that lead to constructive and destructive conflict
- Appreciate the role of personal or cultural perspective in conflict development and resolution
- Identify and implement appropriate strategies for resolving conflicts
- Teach these techniques to other members of their organizations
Effective Presentation Skills
Business interactions mean daily professional presentations. Presenters struggle to grab audiences with the strength of their messages and the dynamism of their delivery. What sounds simple enough to do is difficult to put into practice. How can one engage their audience, stand out, be more persuasive than the next two, four, or twenty people about to make their pitches? It takes skill. Our seminar will help you to be confident, comfortable, and have a strong, effective presentation. You will learn:
- Tactics to ease anxiety
- Strategies for voice control
- Gesture and nonverbal communication methods
- Message construction techniques
- Utilization of visual aids, in depth instruction (seminar dependent)
Group Decision Making
All organizations rely on team work to complete tasks, make decisions, and reach goals. How decisions are reached in groups can either empower individuals or create conflict and dissention. The focus of this seminar will be to allow attendees to:
- Explore different types of decision making methods
- Address issues of power in groups
- Create effective team building in groups
- How to create consensus in groups
Leadership Training
One of fastest growing topics for organizational training is leadership development. Organizations that seek to maintain their core values while keeping pace with the constant whitewater of change need people who not only manage, but lead. This seminar develops leaders who can:
- Communicate organizational values
- Create a shared vision
- Adjust leadership styles to situational challenges
- Build relationships that enable teams to succeed
- Recognize and reward achievement
- Innovate for change
Listening Skills
Despite the fact that employees spend over half of their time listening, few individuals have mastered how to be effective listeners. Improve your effectiveness as a communicator by becoming a good listener. The focus of this session will be to allow attendees to:
- Identify the common barriers to listening
- Distinguish between hearing and listening
- Address the role of nonverbal communication in the listening process
- Provide specific strategies to become more effective listeners
Managing a Diverse Workforce
An often overlooked aspect of having a diverse workforce is learning how to manage it. Managing a diverse workforce involves a commitment from everyone in the organization. The focus of this seminar will be to allow attendees to:
- Avoid the common mistakes in managing diversity
- Create a team approach to issues of diversity
- How to address cultural differences
- How to empower a diverse workforce
Managing Difficult People
Difficult people are a part of daily life – whether this person is a co-worker, a family member, or an uncooperative person encountered at the grocery store. Just how difficult a person is depends on our ability to communicate effectively and appropriately as well as on our ability to engage in active listening and perspective-taking. Therefore, this session is designed to help attendees:
- Recognize common difficult behaviors
- Identify and understand the underlying source of these difficult behaviors
- Develop strategies to avoid communication behaviors that further fuel difficult people
- Choose and enact communication behaviors that will diffuse a difficult person
Negotiations
When is a negotiation successful? When both parties feel as though they have won. This seminar is designed to help you understand how to successfully negotiate for the short-term and long-term within your organization. Participants in this seminar will learn to:
- Clearly identify their goals prior to entering a negotiation
- Analyze the perspective of the other participants in the negotiation
- Recognize the dynamic environment of negotiation to see how you can benefit from an ever-changing process
- Quickly recognize the power relationships and allegiances in a negotiation and use them to your advantage
- Learn and practice effective negotiating techniques
- Lead other members of your organization in improving their negotiating skills to help further your organization’s goals
Nonverbal Communication
Our appearance and demeanor can be far more influential than our words. The new science of nonverbal communication reveals how certain “below the radar” signals affect every aspect of organizational life. Successful organizations will never underestimate the power of face-to-face contacts. This seminar focuses on the role of physical appearance, facial expressions, vocal cues, gestures and body movements in the workplace. Participants will learn:
- The 8 nonverbal communication skills that everyone needs
- How culture, gender, and personality affect nonverbal communication
- How nonverbal cues help us build rapport and gain compliance
- The 10 most important nonverbal signs of deception
- Why leaders need nonverbal skills to be effective
- The value of nonverbal communication for customer service
- How interview outcomes depend on nonverbal communication
Persuasion
There was a time when managers could demand obedience and expect to get it. There was also a time when companies with the best product could expect to sell it. Today command and control is challenged within the organization. Good products do not sell if they are not noticed and credibly promoted. The critical link for internal and external organizational success is persuasion. In this session, participants learn to:
- Design persuasive messages
- Build expert and relationship credibility
- Discover the power of “sequential requests”
- Frame issues to maximize influence
- Create emotional connections with an audience
- Analyze audience needs and negotiate reciprocal agreements
Public Relations
When organizations communicate with their publics, they often limit their thinking about communication to advertising. But public relations can be a less expensive - and more effective - approach. This seminar focuses on the fundamentals of public relations that will help organizations gain valuable coverage from key media. Participants in this seminar will learn to:
- Understand what major media are looking for from organizations
- Monitor media for public relations opportunities
- Identify the media that are most important in reaching target audiences
- Conduct a “public relations audit” to see what is newsworthy within their organizations
- Approach the media to “pitch” a story
- Gain “free” coverage for their organization
- Evaluate the effectiveness of their professional communications program
Recruiting a Diverse Workforce
Diversity has become a goal that most industries and companies desire, but few are able to achieve. Recruiting for diversity is more than creating a position; it involves changing an organization’s culture. The focus of this seminar will be to allow attendees to:
- Avoid the common mistakes in recruiting for diversity
- Define and assess needs for diversity
- Implement organizational change for diversity
- Develop a recruiting plan for diversity
Train the Trainer
Leading organizations frequently do training through their own personnel. When done well internal training can save money. It capitalizes on the trainer’s first hand knowledge of the organization and maintains a core of training experts for refresher courses and crisis consultation. However, to realize these benefits in-house trainers need training. This session trains your trainers to:
- Establish engaging learning objectives
- Design and deliver first-rate instruction
- Open and close workshops effectively
- Teach with confidence before peers
- Facilitate workshop discussions that invigorate learning
- Deal with difficult participants
- Manage the workshop’s time and environment
- Evaluate take-away learning
Work-Family Integration
Most people accept the notion that it is impossible to balance the obligations of work and family. However, organizations and employees can integrate strategies that actually enhance both organizations and families. This seminar is designed to help participants explore ways to help people better integrate these two domains. Participants in this session will learn:
- How work and family life both constrain and enhance one another
- To develop policies and strategies that reduce constraints
- How to implement individual changes that integrate work and family more effectively
- How their own work-family issues affect both their families and co-workers
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