The purpose of the Professional Development classes offered at ASU-Beebe is to help prepare and advance the managerial and leadership skills of the talent our local business and industry partners possess. Each of these classes will cover a specific topic that will engage a current or prospective leader into discussions that are built for personal and team growth. Corporate rates and group discounts are available depending on size and length of training topic.
Communicating for Leadership Success
In an increasingly complex and fast-paced work environment, leaders often fail to see the impact their interactions with others have on their success as leaders, their job satisfaction, or the success of their business. Meeting deadlines and maintaining operational metrics can overshadow the need for effective communication.
In this course, participants learn when and how to use interpersonal skills that will enable them to prepare for, lead, and participate in a variety of crucial interactions with those they report to, their peers and their team members.
Coaching for Peak Performance
Many leaders might think that coaching should occur only after someone has made a mistake or is struggling to meet expectations, and then spend a majority of their time doing just that. However, good coaches also prepare people to succeed in new or challenging situations.
In this course, participants will be introduced to two types of coaching - proactive and reactive - to meet the needs of their team members not only after the task or assignment has been completed, but also before the task is handed over so they learn from prior success. The goal of this course is to acknowledge the necessity of both types of coaching to help people achieve peak performance.
Driving Change
Approximately 70 percent of workplace change initiatives fail to produce desired results. In most cases these initiatives fail not because leaders don’t know what to do to implement workplace change, but rather because they aren’t skilled in how to implement change.
Driving Change shows learners how they can avoid being included in this statistic by providing the skills and resources they need to accelerate the process of implementing change with their team members and to create an agile work environment where people are more open to change.
Setting Goals & Reviewing Results
Many leaders take on most of the responsibility for setting up each person’s performance plan, and then hope for the best when it comes time to discuss results. Setting Goals and Reviewing Results presents a shift in this traditional approach to one in which leaders and their reports share responsibility for all aspects of their performance.
This course introduces tools and techniques leaders can use to fully engage in performance discussions that result in clear goals and a clear path to achieving results.
Delegating with Purpose
Delegation is much more than just assigning tasks to people. It’s a tool for ensuring that every team member is contributing to business results and continually developing new skills and expertise. Delegating to achieve these purposes requires thought and planning, from identifying opportunities to delegating meaningful tasks and responsibilities, to matching people to these tasks and responsibilities, to planning, communicating, and managing the delegation.
Participants of this course will learn the following key aspects of delegation: Identifying tasks and responsibilities for the leader, the team and the organization; Matching people to tasks/responsibilities; Planning the approach to delegation using Planning Points; Planning the use of Interaction Essentials to build confidence and commitment; Managing delegations to ensure a successful transfer of responsibility.
Resolving Workplace Conflict
Today’s complex business dynamics and fierce global competition force organizations to continually ramp up productivity, improve quality, shorten cycle times, and reduce costs. An unfortunate, but natural, byproduct is workplace conflict. Such pressures inevitably cause people with different personalities, communication styles, priorities, and values to have differences at one time or another.
One of the key messages for this course is that leaders must help employees accept accountability for owning and resolving their workplace conflicts. Leaders learn to do this by leveraging two intervention tactics: coaching and, if the conflict remains unresolved, mediating. It’s also important that leaders are able to recognize the warning signs of conflict so that they can take the appropriate action.
Maximizing Team Performance
Leaders across the board need resources and support that enable them to enhance their team’s performance. The ability to lead a team toward success by achieving maximum results is a key skill needed to succeed in today’s competitive work environment. Maximizing Team Performance develops participants’ understanding of the important role they play as leaders in creating and sustaining a high-performing team environment. Using five Team Success Factors, they learn to diagnose and address conditions that prevent the team from achieving maximum results.
The success factors—Results, Commitment, Communication, Process, and Trust —provide the framework in which a team can work at its best. To determine how their team is performing relative to each success factor, participants complete a Team Success Factors Survey. They learn to leverage the Team Success Factors to strengthen the team’s performance and begin to develop an action plan they can implement back at work. Learners also complete a Trusting Others Survey to help them see how much they trust their team. Participants are introduced to the Team Charter Worksheet, a tool they can use to help their team establish clear goals, responsibilities, and processes for working together effectively. A Team Resource Guide is provided to participants for reference during the session and for use afterward.
Planning & Managing Resources
“Planning and Managing Resources” means establishing courses of action for yourself, and sometimes others, to ensure that work is completed efficiently. This course will equip you with skills and tools to prioritize work, optimize resources, stay focused, and plan and schedule projects. The results? You and your team will be able to make stronger contributions to your organization.