Change Management
One of the key “life competencies” required of people in all sorts of different situations today is the ability to anticipate and respond effectively to change. These skills are even more critical in today’s fast-paced and competitive work environment, where everyone from the newest recruit to the most senior manager is expected to demonstrate some level of “change agent” skills. These skills enable us to lead ourselves, individuals, groups, and ultimately entire organizations in implementing actions that can help transform a personal or collective vision into a positive reality.

This booklet uses a six step approach to more effective change management: Identify, Involve, Inform, Initiate, Implement and Inspect.

Effective Coaching Skills
While the practice of coaching is relatively new in organizations, coaches for other disciplines have been around for a long time. Think of the best athletes in golf or tennis or track — they all have coaches to help them improve and strive to be the best at what they do. Football teams, basketball teams, and hockey teams also have coaches. Likewise, there are coaches for voice and drama, and coaches who help people with job or life change.

It doesn’t matter in what field the coach operates, their key role is to help someone to improve what they are doing.

This booklet aims to help people to become more effective coaches and help people to improve their performance.

Team Communication
Effective communication is a vital part of almost every activity in the organization, including the integration of tasks at every level: production, marketing, selling, servicing, budgeting, managing, employee appraisal, etc. Every activity involves communication, within and between departments and individuals. Although communication is a familiar term, its meaning is often confusing. In recent times, the definition of communication has expanded to reflect the mutual exchange required in meaningful communication of any sort.

This booklet looks at many different aspects of the communication process but places significant emphasis upon team communication and how it can be made to be most effective.

Conflict Resolution
Conflict is often perceived as negative, destructive, and undesirable. Many people go to great lengths to avoid or deny conflict even when they acknowledge that it exists. This is because conflict is usually associated with fighting and the creation of a winner and a loser. Managers often deny or gloss over conflict in the workplace, under the misconception that conflict of any kind is a bad thing. However, conflict is a natural part of our lives: Individuals and groups within families, organizations, and nations have values, needs, feelings, and resources that differ from another person. These differences inevitably lead to conflict in families, groups, and whole societies.

This booklet takes the view that if it is handled properly, conflict can highlight problems that need to be rectified, lead to new ideas and behavior, enhance communication and foster better long-term relationships.

Creativity and Innovation
Human creativity or innovation, a very large and complex subject area, is the subject of considerable debate concerning what it is and how it is applied. One definition holds that to be “creative” or “innovative” is to be original, imaginative, expressive, ground-breaking, inventive, and idea-generative. The problem with all of the above creativity labels is that these are context-sensitive or relative terms. In other words, we can only be truly creative if we have an alternative or a different perspective than everyone else, particularly when most people think the same way.

This booklet takes a different position to the one stated above. It suggests that every person has the potential to be creative and we can also therefore improve our skills in this critical area by learning an applying a few simple principles.

Improving Customer Service
“Customer service” has been one of the significant buzz words used inside organizations of all shapes and sizes in recent times. Crowning the customer as “king” is not a new concept. However, expecting every employee to serve the customer –— or serve somebody internally who is serving the customer — is a significantly different twist to this older concept. In practical terms, this means that every team in the organization serves another team who is a customer for its services or outputs. If this relationship is understood and well managed.

This booklet makes the case that the whole organization will be aligned to serve the needs of the customer and will, therefore, be more successful and effective as a result.

Delegation Skills
With increasing demands on our time and resources, it’s impossible to achieve all we set out to do without the help and assistance of others. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly think that delegation can only be achieved by people with direct authority over employees. In fact, delegation is more often an individual skill — determining the best way to handle a project or a task, and then discovering effective means of soliciting help from others when and where we need it.

This booklet offers advice on how to make delegation part of your normal work schedule, and identify both the need for assistance and how you can enlist others’ cooperation and entrust them with delegated tasks and responsibilities.

Cultural Diversity and Awareness
Depending on how broadly you define the subject, diversity describes all the ways in which people are different from one another. The term does not refer to minor differences like physical height or eye color, or design preferences or the type of cars people drive, but attributes that can define a group fairly quickly and lead to stereotyping and even discrimination.

This booklet aims to provide an overview of the whole subject of cultural diversity and awareness at a broad summary level, or why we tend to focus on difference (or what separates us) more than we look at what is common (what binds us together or is similar between us).

Telephone Skills
A telephone call will often be the first and most long-lasting impression a customer, or even potential customer, forms about your organization. This booklet has been developed to help employees create better first impressions. It can also be used to coach individuals in how to develop more effective and positive telephone skills.

The intent of this booklet is to help employees at every level solve customer problems or issues. Without addressing specifics, we outline a broad methodology based on the premise that every call is an opportunity to provide service that adds value to one or both parties. The emphasis is on providing excellent telephone service: after all, without customers, there would be no business! No organization will survive if it treats its customers poorly, and the initial contact usually sets the tone. Many of the principles discussed represent excellent telephone etiquette no matter who is on the line.

Emotional Intelligence
Although there is some dispute about what constitutes human intelligence or human emotion (and how it can be successfully measured), this booklet suggests that the term emotional intelligence draws on two simple concepts: intelligence — “applying knowledge appropriately,” and being emotionally astute (“tuned in”) — that is, “applying feelings appropriately.” Emotional intelligence is driven by two major factors: a person’s basic drive or motivation, and the relative structure or flexibility of their thinking about themselves and others. We suggest that “applying knowledge appropriately” is fundamentally about analysis and intuition; “applying feelings appropriately” is fundamentally about experience and expression.

This booklet presents a four style model that both creates awareness about one’s own natural tendencies and offers strategies that can be adopted to become more emotionally intelligent and “balanced” in terms of employing all four styles whenever situations or circumstances are appropriate.

Giving and Receiving Feedback
It’s odd how we tend to criticize people in great detail but rarely praise or encourage with more than a few casual words. But how do you tell someone that they’d benefit from changing their behavior? Giving any kind of feedback (and particularly when it is negative or critical in some way) is a tricky task at the best of times – which is why we so often avoid doing it. Handled badly, a few comments that are meant to be helpful can easily become destructive.

Feedback takes practice and is a communication ‘art’ to develop over time. We therefore explore the whole process of feedback giving and receiving in this booklet, and offer a six step model to guide behavior to communicate more constructively as a feedback giver as well as a feedback receiver.

Effective Goal Setting
Advice about setting and achieving goals and objectives now seems to come from almost every quarter. The broad encouragement to set goals for education, work, recreation, and even in retirement suggests that goal-setting is something we will need to do all our lives in order to be successful and progress in meaningful ways. Ironically, this widespread call to establish goals as a means to achieve success is not often done to any great extent.

This booklet explores the steps in setting overall strategy or targets to be achieved and then focuses on the process needed to set and achieve appropriate yet stretching goals (whether these goals are at work or in an individual’s personal life).

Influencing Others
We influence other people every day of our lives, intentionally or not. Every conversation we have, every interaction with another person is an influencing opportunity. This might be as simple as asking directions from a stranger in the street, or being interviewed for a new job. Sometimes, influence is exerted in a matter of seconds and in other situations it is exerted over many hours.

This booklet provides a broad overview of the whole subject of influencing others at the conceptual level. It continues to look at how influence is deployed in general and then specifically in four style “types”.

Listening Skills
Listening skills are a vital part of the oral communication process. Most of us think of listening as a passive activity where we take in information sent by others. As an active listener, you learn to hear what people are really saying. Good listening requires energy — we hear the speaker, select information, interpret information, and respond in just a few seconds. Working at being a good listener is just as important as making your ideas understandable to others. Basically, good listeners are good concentrators. We need to teach ourselves how to concentrate more effectively, so we can be better listeners.

This booklet outlines the behaviors associated with good listening and offers individuals a practical step-by-step guide to becoming more adept in all of their future communication interfaces.

Managing Poor Performance
It is imperative to address unacceptable performance as soon as it becomes apparent, before the situation deteriorates or the opportunity to address the issue disappears. If left too long, options are often reduced to a range of ‘blunt’ tools (discipline, transfer or termination), that can prove to be extremely costly to both the organization and the individual in question.

This booklet provides general guidance on how to handle unacceptable performance in a positive and constructive manner (wherever possible short of formal discipline).

Meetings Management
Meetings are important to organizations, but many people see them as extremely boring, confusing, and a waste of time. In fact, most of us can tell stories about frustrating or annoying meetings we have had to endure. The objective of this booklet is to provide a useful and effective approach to managing meetings in order to reduce the overall levels of frustration and improve the overall quality of your business meetings.

This booklet looks at a number of critical meeting management issues, including: whether a meeting is actually necessary in the first place, how to go about preparing for a meeting, how the meeting should be conducted, and how it can be best managed to a successful conclusion.

Negotiating Skills
Like communicating or listening, negotiating is not an activity we perform or do on rare occasions. Rather, we use negotiation skills throughout the day almost every day of our lives. We negotiate to:

This booklet explores how to use negotiating skills effectively in all of the above situations and more and offers individuals a number of tips and techniques to become more adept at this important life skill.

Networking
To some, networking means no more than just meeting or calling someone new for what might just be a one-time discussion. In this limited sense, networking refers to a trading relationship in which two parties seek to discover whether they have anything of mutual interest to talk about, and either make some sort of exchange or quickly move on. This makes networking a highly transactional activity, much like buying, selling, or negotiating.

This booklet looks at networking and relationship building in a broader and more strategic sense — as a major social and life skill, in fact, to be used in a business, an organizational, or a personal setting.

Performance Measurement
Performance measurement, the establishment of useful and relevant performance indicators, is of significant interest to all sorts of different organizations. However, the challenge is to find the right measurement “yardstick” to ensure that we are as efficient or as effective as we should or would like to be.

Perhaps the very first thing that should be understood about any performance measurement system is that the measures are not an end in themselves. Many organizations publish performance indicators because it is expected of them or just because their competitors do it, or they wish to acknowledge performance measurement as an important activity, or even just to produce statistics for senior management or other stakeholders.

This booklet presents an ongoing assessment process that accurately helps to determine whether or not the goals of the organization are or will be achieved.

Personal Effectiveness
Almost every enterprise spends a significant amount of time trying to ensure that their entire organization works as efficiently and effectively as possible. This is typically accomplished through a range of initiatives designed to develop effective leadership, teamwork, a focus on quality and customer service, the greater use of creativity and innovation, effective goal setting, better communication processes and other programs.

This booklet concentrates the key behaviors needed for each employee to assume greater responsibility and individual leadership within their own role and contribute positively and proactively to the organization’s goals and ultimate success.

Problem Solving
Effective and efficient critical thinking and problem-solving skills are prerequisites for individual and organizational performance and success. If any person or commercial enterprise fails to identify problems correctly or fails to resolve them properly, adverse affects will be felt in sales, market share, expenses, customer and employee satisfaction, and profit and shareholder dividends. If organizations such as hospitals, government departments, or emergency services fail to identify problems effectively, the consequences are equally dramatic (sometimes in terms of human suffering).

This booklet presents an overview of the steps needed to solve common work-related problems and introduces people to some of the more popular tools for doing so.

Project Management
Project management is a broad topic that refers to the coordinated effort of a group of people. For our purposes here, project management can be defined as the active leadership of people and resources to achieve a particular stated end. This project effort is likely to be temporarily collaborative, but it can also apply to a project involving a few people over a few hours to a project engaging the efforts of several thousand people in several places at once over several years.

This booklet looks at the wide ranging topic of project management in six steps and offers individuals several tools and techniques that can be used to excel in most project circumstances.

Safety Effectiveness
Organizations of all types and sizes can benefit from effective safety performance. If a place of work is safe, costly accidents are avoided, insurance coverage is less expensive, and employee morale is higher —to name but a few benefits. It is, therefore, well worth the effort to create a safe working environment or to invest time in improving existing levels of safety performance.

This booklet helps people to focus on better health and safety by taking individuals beyond the tip of the iceberg (death and serious accidents) and encourages them to look at the underlying reasons for poor safety and the many “clues” such as near misses that exist to help guide future safety strategy.

Sales Effectiveness
In an increasingly competitive world, an effective salesperson (no matter what they may be trying to sell) needs a wide variety of skills and competencies in order to be successful. Research has indicated that a number of competencies are common to all four phases of the sales cycle.

Stress Management
Without a certain level of stress to motivate and challenge us, life would be boring and unrewarding. However, when stress builds to extreme levels and we are unable to cope, our physical and mental capacity to enjoy life to the fullest can be significantly reduced. Stress can be defined in the following ways:

The physical, mental, and emotional reaction to demands made on us as individuals.

Any demand that requires some kind of physical or emotional adjustment.

What happens to motivation when there is a bad match between the person, what they are being asked to do, and the way they are being asked to do it. Stress, after all, is motivation gone bad.

Teambuilding
Success in any organization today rests heavily upon how well we perform as a team. Most people accept that a champion team will beat a team of champions — but how do you create a champion team? Unfortunately, effective teams do not just “happen” —they have to be built. This building process has to be carefully customized to the particular needs of each team.

For our purposes, a team is regarded as no smaller than three people and no larger than twenty people in the organization. Usually the team exists around a common purpose or goal in the way that it works or performs. The team also has to see itself as a team by meeting regularly or regularly sharing experiences.

This booklet presents a roadmap for team success and specific steps to follow for strategic advantage.

Time Management
If your bank credited your account with $480 every morning, and then every evening cancelled whatever part of the amount that you had failed to use, what would you do? Withdraw every dollar and every cent you could, right?

Well, time works a little like a bank. Every morning we are all credited with 480 minutes in an eight-hour work day and 1,440 minutes every 24 hours. Every night it writes off as “lost” whatever we have failed to invest in a good purpose. Time cannot carry a balance forward and it does not allow overdrafts. Each new day it opens a new account with you, and each night it burns the record for the day.

If you fail to use your day’s deposit of time, the loss is all yours. There is no going back, no drawing against tomorrow.

This booklet illustrates how to live in the present, on today’s deposit, so individuals invest in it to get the most out in health, happiness, service, and anything else that is worthy.

2004 Worldwide Center for Organizational Development, Site developed by PHMultimedia.com