Learning & Courses

Welcome to the Change Management course.

Change is a constant in many of our lives. All around us, technologies, processes, people, ideas, and methods often change, affecting the way we perform daily tasks and live our lives.

This course will give any leader tools to implement changes more smoothly and to have those changes better accepted. This course will also give all participants an understanding of how change is implemented and some tools for managing their reactions to change.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”

Executive and personal assistants have always played an important role in business.

The roles and responsibilities of a EA and PA have evolved and therefore assistants are vital to the profitability of any organisation. Training to become an effective assistant will make you a valued employee who assists management on the road to success.

This course will focus on personal and executive assistants and the role that they play. Throughout the course, you will learn about the various skills to become an effective PA or EA, such as time keeping, management and communication skills as wells as tools of the trade.

Watch the video below for a brief introduction on the role of a Personal Assistant:

Time management training most often begins with setting goals. These goals are recorded and may be broken down into a project, an action plan, or a simple task list. Activities are then rated based on urgency and importance, priorities assigned, and deadlines set. This process results in a plan with a task list or calendar of activities. Routine and recurring tasks are often given less focus to free time to work on tasks that contribute to important goals.

This entire process is supported by a skill set that should include personal motivation, delegation skills, organisation tools, and crisis management. We’ll cover all this and more during this workshop.

Every human being makes immediate, snap decisions about new people. It is purely instinctual; our brain categorises the person based on past knowledge; creating a positive or negative judgement. This process is called Unconscious Bias, and can have a huge influence on how we respond to new people or groups of people. We need to be able to recognise and manage this within the workplace.

Performance Management is not a company’s way of employing “micro-managing” techniques that stunt the professional growth of its employees. Whether at the organisational, departmental or employee level, the goal of performance management is to make sure all business goals are being met in a satisfactorily manner.

This course will look at how performance management is defined and teach you how to set effective targets to achieve your goals.

Setting down a few ground rules for team/business meetings can be highly effective.

By understanding and integrating your organisations values and behaviours, you can create a “safe environment” where people are comfortable speaking freely about their opinions, ideas and feelings within team meetings and workshops.

By identifying how teams would like to interact with each other, team members recognise the importance of respecting the individual needs of others.

This is why team/business ground rules are central to the performance of any team. The key thing to bear in mind is that team ground rules must reflect the expected behaviour of team members. They are the structure for “how we interact and behave together” in the team.

This 30 minute course aims to help you identify, explain, recognise, set and develop ground rules that all team members can adhere to.

Positive and negative stress is a constant influence on all of our lives. The trick is to maximize the positive stress and to minimize the negative stress. This course will give participants a three-option method for addressing any stressful situation, as well as a toolbox of personal skills, including using routines, relaxation techniques, and a stress log system.

When stress is at its highest, just know it can only go down – Tom Rataj

For most of us, teamwork is a part of everyday life. Whether it’s at home, in the community, or at work, we are often expected to be a functional part of a performing team. This course will encourage participants to explore the different aspects of a team, as well as ways that they can become a top-notch team performer.

Welcome to the Public Speaking course.

According to a survey by the Sunday Times of London, 41% of people list public speaking as their biggest fear. Forget small spaces, darkness, and spiders – standing up in front of a crowd and talking is far more terrifying for most people.

However, mastering this fear and getting comfortable speaking in public can be a great ego booster, not to mention a huge benefit to your career. This course will give you some valuable public speaking skills, including in-depth information on developing an engaging program and delivering your presentation with power.

CLICK ON GETTING STARTED BELOW TO START THE COURSE

Welcome to the Assertiveness and Self-Confidence course.

Assertiveness and self-confidence are comprised of important interpersonal communications skills and traits that can be learned and practiced. This course will provide you with many tips, techniques, and opportunities to try out your own skills.

The ability to interpret body language is a skill that will enhance anyone’s career. Body language is a form of communication, and it needs to be practiced like any other form of communication. Whether in sales or management, it is essential to understand the body language of others and exactly what your own body is communicating.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Welcome to the Business Etiquette course. Success in any industry relies on relationships, whether with co-workers, clients, suppliers, or investors. When you’re well-mannered and considerate in dealing with others, you create engaging, productive, and long term business relationships. As such, it is important to learn, not just the technical side of a business, but how to conduct one’s self in the company of others.

This is where business etiquette comes in. This course will introduce you to business etiquette, as well as provide guidelines for the practice of business etiquette across different situations.

Manners are more important than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us

Edmund Burke

In the past few decades, psychologists and business people alike have discovered that successful problem solvers tend to use the same type of process to identify and implement the solutions to their problems. This process works for any kind of problem, large or small.

The Creative Problem Solving module will give you an overview of the entire creative problem solving process, as well as key problem solving tools that they can use every day. Skills such as brainstorming, information gathering, analyzing data, and identifying resources will be covered throughout the course.

Join Shona Rowan for this informative 45 minute webinar on The Psychology of Successful Women (Playing to your Strengths). Learn from leading experts Jessica Chivers and Leena Patel on performing and overcoming challenges.

Maximise your success in highly competitive and male dominated environments.

• Would you like to know some of the key success strategies that differentiate “average” female performers from “outstanding” female performers in the corporate arena?
• Would you like to understand some of the common differences between how men and women think?
• Discover how to overcome the imposter syndrome
• Understand how Elite Performers can be applied to your work and life.

What is your natural response to conflict?  Do you tend to overreact?  Do you attempt to avoid it entirely?

The ability to deal with conflict is an essential skill for successful career navigation and effective team leadership.  And yet, for too many of us conflict is an ongoing source of anxiety and struggle.

In this session, we will:

• Examine the key triggers of unproductive conflict
• Discuss the implications for career navigation and team leadership
• Explore strategies for engaging in “productive conflict”, with practical case examples

About the webinar speaker

Justine Lutterodt FRSA is Director of the Centre for Synchronous Leadership. She is passionate about helping clients achieve success on their own terms while staying strategically and emotionally ‘in sync’ with the needs of colleagues, their organisation, and greater society. Justine’s project work has been recognised for its innovative design and high impact, receiving Business in the Community awards in 2013 and 2014. She brings to her practice over 13 years of experience working with senior leaders from professional services and Fortune 500 companies. Outside of client work Justine is a judge for Opportunity Now and holds a number of board positions. Justine has completed an MSc from LSE in Social and Organisational Psychology and a BA from Yale in Mathematics and Philosophy, both with distinction.

You are in your office looking over your performance report and it happened again. Your low performing employee failed to meet quota this month even after you spoke with them about the importance of meeting goals. This employee has a great attitude and you know they can do better. You just do not know how to motivate them to reach the goal. Money used to work, but that has worn off. You are baffled and you know being frustrated makes matters worse. What do you do?

This course focuses on how to better coach your employees to a higher performance. Coaching is a process of relationship building and setting goals. How well you coach relates directly to how well you are able to foster a great working relationship with your employees through understanding them and strategic goal setting.

An easy-to-understand coaching model taught in this course will guide you through the coaching process. Prepare yourself to change a few things about yourself in order to coach your employees to better a performance.

More than ever, millennials – those born between 1980 and 1995 – are entering the workforce and becoming a vital part of our organisations. These workers bring a unique outlook on life to their jobs, and may also pose unique challenges. Taking time to customise the onboarding process for millennial employees helps promote employee retention and ensures that millennials are properly socialised into the workplace. Customising the onboarding process for millennial employees benefits both the employee and the workplace.

Office politics, or work politics, are the strategies and procedures that employees use to function and advance in a work setting. It is important for managers to learn and understand the office environment and the employees that make it tick. Since the manager interacts with several aspects of the workplace, one should learn how to effectively work with colleagues, supervisors, and upper management in order to help keep the department functioning as a whole.

This course will teach you to effectively deal with office politics and learn how to interact among colleagues.

Management is known as a form of art and a science. The key is making employees more efficient and productive while finding the correct way to do it. When preparing to manage one or a group of managers, you are preparing for them to be able to manage their own employees. Every manager is a different personality type and learns differently. But with some helpful tools and tips, you can help them become great managers that will continue to grow and succeed with their new teams.

Welcome to the Leadership and Influence course! They say that leaders are born, not made. While it is true that some people are born leaders, some leaders are born in the midst of adversity. Often, simple people who have never had a leadership role will stand up and take the lead when a situation they care about requires it. A simple example is parenting. When a child arrives, many parents discover leadership abilities they never knew existed in order to guide and protect their offspring. There are countless war stories of simple GI’s and sailors who rose to a challenge on their own in the heat of battle.

Clearly, leadership potential exists within each of us. That potential can be triggered by outside events, or it can be learned by exploring ourselves from within. This training takes the latter approach. Once you learn the techniques of true leadership, you will be able to build the confidence it takes to take the lead. The more experience you have acting as a genuine leader, the easier it will be for you. It is never easy to take the lead, as you will need to make decisions and face challenges, but it can become natural and rewarding.

Leadership is not telling others what to do. Leadership is inspiring others to do what needs to be done. Many people around the world who are in leadership positions are not leaders. Dictators call themselves leaders but they are not – they are tyrants. There have been many presidents of the United States and prime ministers of the United Kingdom, but few were real leaders. Genuine leaders take a stand and motivate others to join them in a noble purpose.

Influence is subtle, yet incredibly powerful. You can order someone to do a task, but you cannot order them to do their best. It simply does not work and usually has the opposite effect. You can influence people to do their best by providing a strong, motivating example in addition to positive reinforcement. Leadership addresses tasks, while influence addresses attitudes and awareness. Influence is the soul of leadership.

As businesses expand in an ever increasing global market place, so our communication skills must expand and improve. Cross-cultural communication is vital for any business that has a diverse workforce, or wants to play a part in the global economy.

It is imperative to be aware of cultural differences, so that we don’t cause offence, and so that we can effectively communicate in situations where language or cultural differences might be a barrier.

Building skills such as active listening; empathy; having a positive attitude to communication and respectful responses will all help contact go smoothly and give results that are positive. Cross-cultural communication must involve an understanding of how people from different cultures communicate, speak and perceive the world around them.

Good communication skills play a vital role in imparting information, to ensure that colleagues and customers understand messages important to the organisation and ourselves. It also enables us to build good relationships with those same colleagues and customers.

Communication is the process of conveying information (knowledge, facts, ideas and feelings). One person (communicator or Sender) makes their ideas, information, knowledge known to the others (receiver or Target). This short course will enable you to identify the need to communicate effectively within organisations and the benefits this brings; explain the importance of feedback; explain non-verbal communication; and demonstrate good listening and questioning techniques.

This course will take approximately 1 hour to complete, so let’s get started.