Collaboration Skills

Cross Cultural Collaborations

Increasingly, businesses around the world have become more interconnected, and companies have to think more globally in order to succeed. This course is for individuals who need to communicate clearly and effectively while conducting business in cultures other than their own. Despite economic ties with foreign nations, countries can be ill-prepared for doing business abroad, lacking the knowledge and sensitivity to adjust their business behavior to different cultural contexts. This course will provide you with strategies to communicate effectively across cultures.

Communicating Across Cultures

• Recognize Cultural Differences
• Communicate in Other Cultures
• Follow Business Protocol in Other Cultures

Working with Teams in Other Cultures

• Negotiate in Other Cultures
• Resolve Conflict in Other Culture

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Leading A Virtual Team

Leading virtual teams requires a number of capabilities, including strong virtual communication skills which can motivate and coach workers despite geographical distance and an emotional intelligence which allows the individual to acknowledge the differing needs, objectives, and goals of their intact and remote workers. The virtual leader or manager also needs the flexibility to consider and accommodate the impact that cultural differences may have on their team and team performance, making any adjustments necessary to ensure a collaborative and nurturing atmosphere that can be felt across borders and time zones.

• Managing Remote Workers: Understand Cultural Differences
• Recognize the unique challenges of leading in a virtual environment
• Define a framework of six competency zones for generating high performance on global virtual teams
• Understand the menu of leadership styles required by virtual leaders
• Emotional Intelligence Techniques for recognizing differences on teams
• Virtual Problem Solving
• Global Virtual Teams: Closing the Importance-Performance Gap
• Leading Virtual Teams: Ten Principles
• Time Management

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Facilitate Effective Global Meetings

A key role of the Technical Manager is to enable people to collaborate through meetings to ensure quality results. Typical goals include defining customer requirements, scoping projects, generating ideas, solving problems, gaining commitment, or performing continuous improvement analysis. Facilitation skills help the Technical Manager enhance a group's ability to effectively share and evaluate knowledge, experience and ideas.

• Basic Model of Facilitation
• Meeting Content versus Meeting Process
• Facilitator Styles - Self Assessment
• Core Facilitation Skills
• Questioning
• Responding
• Fielding
• Meeting
• Designing the Agenda
• Selecting Facilitation Methods and Techniques
• Introducing the Meeting- and Ground Rules
• Group Dynamics
• Providing Process Feedback
• Managing Challenging Participant Behaviors
• Staying On-Track and Follow Up-Delegate

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Telecommuting

This Telework And Telecommuting Training Course teaches: the core skills of a remote worker, the tools and techniques to better manage your time, organize and plan your work, how to stay motivated and solve problems on your own, how to recognize which bad habits to avoid, how to deal with isolation and other skills to be a successful teleworker or telecommuter.

• Manage time
• Organize and plan
• Develop communication skills
• Solve problems on their own
• Stay motivated
• Use freedom wisely
• Learn accountability
• Recognize and remove bad habits
• Learn from mistakes and avoid repetition
• Build flexibility in schedule
• Build trust and rapport
• Use feedback
• Beat isolation
• Set realistic expectations from family

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Delegating Skills

All too often team members are delegated a task and sadly they fail. What’s wrong with them? Quite often, absolutely nothing. In many cases the fault lies with the Manager who did not delegate the task properly. Effective delegation is a skill which requires patience, solid coaching and communication skills. It requires a clear understanding of what to delegate, when to delegate, and how to delegate in a way that maximizes employee productivity and performance.

• Benefits, Payoffs and Barriers to effective delegation
• Determine what and when to delegate
• Identify the difference between delegating and dumping
• Know how to select the appropriate person
• Give instructions and establish clear responsibility and authority parameters
• Develop and implement follow-up methods without micro-managing
• Re-direct performance using the right coaching style
• Use delegation to develop a cross-training program to provide cover for absences
• Delegate to motivate
• Apply the appropriate delegation style to build employee confidence and skill
• Communicating Performance Standards
• Clarifying Your Expectations
• Giving Feedback Effectively
• Key Listening Techniques

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Facilitating Effective Meetings

Are the meetings that you sit through unproductive and wasting time? Are you seeking to drastically improve the quality and output of these meetings. Facilitating Effective Meetings will equip you with the structure and the strategies to produce desired outcomes, stimulate engagement, and drive results in every meeting.

Identify the role of meetings, the different meeting types, and how to avoid unnecessary meetings

• Describe typical problems with meetings
• Define the qualities of effective meetings
• Provide a starting set of meeting rights to empower participants
• Describe detailed meeting techniques for achieving masterful meetings
• Provide practice in using the meeting techniques to run masterful meetings
• Provide a roadmap for transforming meetings throughout your organization
• Provide techniques to use when you are not the meeting leader

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Accountability

To be accountable for something or someone means that we bear that responsibility. Being accountable takes maturity and discipline to uphold this significant task. Individually, we must be accountable for our own performance, but as managers we must also be accountable for our employees’ performance. We must clearly define and express our expectations for our employees in order for them to perform at the level that we want them to. We must also provide consistent constructive feedback with the intent to help increase performance. In this session, we will address this topic and provide you with a myriad of practical tips you can begin applying as a manager.

• Defining Accountability
• Creating an Accountable Organization
• Setting Goals and Expectations
• Offering Feedback
• A Toolbox for Managers

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Workplace Professionalism Training

Maintaining a professional workplace favorably impacts both employees and customers. From image, first impressions and attire to communication, it is important to focus on how these factors create a work environment that is comfortable, yet safe and respectful for all. With a mix of diverse groups of people in organizations, there can be different conceptions of appropriate workplace conduct. This course is intended to help to set clear expectations of what is and isn’t acceptable.

This course provides an overview of professional image and etiquette, the communication process, diversity in the workplace and the need to deliver good customer service to all. Participants will learn how to communicate in a professional manner.

• Understand how crucial the first impression is and how perception and image can be improved.
• Demonstrate polished, professional behavior in the workplace.
• Learn about the communication process and factors that influence it.
• Realize the importance of body language as well as words and their impact on communicating with others.
• Be aware of how you affect customer service and seek opportunities for improvement.
• Embrace and value the differences of others and be open-minded in interpersonal relations.

Course Outline

• Professional Image – Learn how attire and image influence perception.  Dressing for success helps create the right first impression.
• Professional Etiquette – How to maintain a respectful workplace including the defining of respect and what is office appropriate language and behavior.
• The Communication Process:  From message composition to delivery, gain awareness of what impacts the meaning – both positively and negatively. Body language and communication barriers are examined.  Ways to better communicate are introduced.
• Customer Service – Internal and external.  Who is your customer? Since you contribute to the customer experience, how can you enhance satisfaction and loyalty?
• Diversity in the Workplace – How to embrace differences and learn from each other through a brief review of The Iceberg Model and ways to be more inclusive and welcoming.

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