The following training programs describe some of the ways that I have worked with clients. All programs are "customerized" so that processes and learning tools are directed at the challenges and opportunities facing each organization. I hope that you will find these descriptions informative. You may find that someone else was looking for the same solution you are.
Course Sections:
- Healthcare Initiatives
- Customer Relationship Management Initiatives
- Sales Training Programs
- Leadership Initiatives
- Management Training
- Personal Effectiveness Initiatives
Healthcare Initiatives
The Other Side of Care
A community hospital approached me to address dismal feedback received from patients particularly during Emergency visits. Because patients were not qualified to judge the clinical (medical) aspects of their care (i.e. without medical background they couldn't distinguish between excellent suturing and average suturing), their assessment of the experience was influenced by compassion treatment they received or didn't receive. The hospital wanted an initiative that would help staff see the hospitalization experience through the patient's eyes. After the course was piloted, it was expanded to other hospital divisions.
Length: 2 days
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Discovering Leadership
The concept of MRN (Most Responsible Nurse) had been poorly implemented at a community hospital due to the lack of formal orientation or training to guide practitioners with this in-charge or team leader role assumption. As a result, a plethora of challenges emerged as individuals with seniority assumed responsibility without the clarity of direction or "how to" knowledge. Evening coordinators were being deluged with conflict resolution issues that should have been handled locally.
Length: 1 day
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Conflict Management in the Hospital Setting: Finding Your Voice
Hospital nurses were experiencing frustration and low morale when dealing with upset patients and family members and physicians who treated them as subordinate subjects. They requested tools and skills to help them deal with these stressful interpersonal conflicts.
Length: 1/2 day plus coaching clinics
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Customer Relationship Management Initiatives
Customers for Keeps
Employees in the Customer Service area were new to the company and the role. There were also individuals from Pricing, Materials, Purchasing, and Engineering who were critical to the success of the customer experience. Business challenges included a shrinking customer base as business eroded to Asia. Customer scorecard results showed the organization to have the lowest score in years. In this era where customers were saying, "free/perfect/now" in response to price/quality/delivery questions, the entire organization needed the skills and practices associated with service excellence. The voice of the customer was saying: "You're slow to react; You're big and hard to deal with; you're not clear on what you make; you don't look like a team; you're not communicating with us; you're not looking for what you can do but telling us what you can't do; and, we have to talk to a big title to get service."
Length: 5 half-day sessions
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Creating Customer Relationships
A manufacturing organization was responsible for managing the business of its high-tech customer base. I created a three-stage customer focus curriculum to build the skills, processes and strategies required to produce an assessment of trust and confidence. This training program was the entry phase. Creating and sustaining a relationship with customers requires a total organizational response. Sales and front-line contact people are dependent upon the contributions of colleagues in their quest for delighted customers. Studies have shown that 68% of customers stop doing business with a supplier because of an attitude of indifference displayed by "someone" in the organization. This means that additional to specific job responsibilities, everyone's role is to serve the customer or support someone who is serving the customer.
Length: 3 days
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Designing the Customer Experience
This was the second course in the customer focus curriculum developed for a contract manufacturing company which answered "how do we continue to provide value to customers?" Designing the Customer experience involves being immersed in reading Customers' careabouts and producing recurrently delighting experiences that meet or exceed their expectations. The definition of value is different for each customer. Expert effort needs to be directed externally toward the Customer by identifying and providing strategically targeted value and internally toward company processes and the management of people to meet Customer commitments.
Length: 3 days
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Being Audited by Customers?
A contract manufacturing company's plant in Mexico was undergoing frequent audits by customers and feedback revealed that they did not have a high level of trust in the organization. Company leadership discovered that employees did not understand the auditing process or their role. They needed a training program that would demystify customer audits and show how employees could make a strong contribution to being recognized as world class.
Length: 1/2 day
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Who Needs Customers... We Do!
"If those damn customers didn't keep on bothering us, we could get more work done around here." This appeared to be the sentiment in a manufacturing company whose employees had lost touch with the concept and importance of customer. Senior management wanted a half-day session for every employee in the company, across all shifts.
Length: 1/2 day
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The Customer from Hell
A retail organization in the glamorous world of beauty wanted a "punchy", participative half day session during an annual conference to add objection-handling skills to their behavioural toolbox. They wanted to address customer concerns in a way that would honour and strengthen the relationship.
Length: 1/2 day
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Sales Training Programs
Getting to Commitment
This was the third phase of the customer focus curriculum developed for a contract manufacturing organization. It was targeted at sales and business development staff who had the responsibility of building new business opportunities for the company. A successful salesperson is the one who can provide the customer with business solutions and personal wins since product performance and reliability are "givens". Technological advantage only gets you into the game. This workshop acquainted experienced salespeople with the skills, techniques and processes vital to consultative and value-added selling. It challenged the concept of transactional selling and aligned relationship and sales behaviors with the customer's buying process.
Length: 3 days
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Strategic Account Management
A manufacturing rep firm wanted to ensure that they were effectively and efficiently approaching the right people at the right time with the right presentation. Although they were practicing a consultative selling approach, they were losing too many opportunities to competition, and they felt they needed to understand the causes and shift the balance of sales power. The program needed to address what salespeople can do outside the customer's office to develop an ongoing process for analyzing sales opportunities, setting strong competitive strategies and managing and tracking sales objectives.
Length: 3 days
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Sales Manager as Coach
A medium-sized manufacturing rep firm identified that their sales managers were spending more time selling and were ignoring the vital role of coaching and mentoring staff. As more new employees were hired, this neglected aspect of the position became more important.
Length: 2 days
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Leadership Initiatives
People Project Leadership
The central focus for this engineering division was product development and cost reduction in meeting commitments with the fastest cycle time. The strength of the engineering team was in their technical expertise; their weakness was their lack of knowledge on how to manage the human aspect of project leadership which resulted in project delays and the application of extraordinary, heroic effort to meet commitment.
Length: 6 months
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Growing Leaders
The executive office in Canada had noticed that the management of people had taken second place to the management of function. As a result breakdowns were occurring which were negatively affecting company performance: energy-draining complaining, morale issues, "us" vs. "them" syndrome, and lack of enrolment into the future of the organization. In-depth interviews with the 18 candidates revealed recurring themes: felt they needed legitimate authority to be seen as powerful; reluctant to design their role (wanted it designed for them by sr. management); ownership not actively being taken by the majority; difficulty in having the "tough conversations", and eagerness to "dump" problems on senior management.
Length: 6 months
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Management Training
Back to Basics: The ABC's of Management
A manufacturing company wanted to revisit management fundamentals at a leadership retreat. The 10 senior level managers had excellent technical experience but limited management training. The HR Department had been receiving complaints concerning unresolved issues, unfair treatment, lack of respect, insufficient follow-up and inconsistent communications. Managers tended to communicate by email rather than staying visible and tacking issues personally and directly. The organization had put a focus on communications with initiatives of town hall meetings, safety circles, and production meetings, all supporting 5-S and kaizen strategies.
Length: 2 days
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Interviewing Skills: Hiring the Best
In his book "Good to Great", Jim Collins talks about getting the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off. Various organizations have asked for help in building the skills to populate their organization with winners. Because of an emphasis on employee engagement strategies, many companies have adopted the practice of team interviewing. However, most employees know how to "chat", but they don't know how to interview. The cost of a bad hire is frightening. Most interviews don't produce winners any more effectively than the flip of a coin.
Length: 1/2 to 1 day
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Personal Effectiveness Initiatives
Interviewing Skills: Hiring the Best
The client was a non-unionized ISO 9001 company which designed and manufactured customized automotive equipment. The workforce of approximately 50 was relatively young and while skilled in technical training, they had received little education in the "softer" skills of people/time/commitment management. Their customers' key careabouts were quality, price, and delivery and customers were willing to pay a premium to speed up the schedule. After being awarded business, a project manager is assigned and this individual funnels the work to team leaders responsible for design, electronics and assembly. The three team leaders need to learn to work as a team, and to define, plan, execute and close the project.
Length: 6 hours
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Listening
Customers of a manufacturing organization's supply chain were saying "you're not listening to us". Hearing is a skill most of us are born with while listening is learned and involves choice. Statistics have shown that most of us spend 45% of our time in situations where listening is critical but habits such as interrupting, thinking about what we want to say, daydreaming, and finishing other people's sentences get in the way of powerful communication. Listening comes from the Old English for Hlysnan (hearing) and Hlosnian (suspenseful waiting). Therefore, to listen generously you must wait in suspense to hear what the other person has to say. In the traditional model of listening, the speaker does all of the work and the listener is passive. Studies have indicated that full self-expression can only occur when a profound listener is present since listening evokes the speaking. What is not said is the cause of the listener rather than the speaker. Listeners need to listen not only for what was said but what was not said.
Length: 1 day
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Presentation Skills
A high-tech client found their presentation time was constantly being cut short because their customers were bored. The slides were overwhelming, their approach was static and rote, the focus was product-oriented, and they just weren't getting the response that their solutions deserved. They needed an Emergency Presentation Doctor.
Length: 2 days
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Style Awareness: "Know Yourself"
A non-profit organization with a relatively new leader wanted to address teamwork challenges and improve internal communications.
Length: 1/2 day
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Mastering Change
Employees in a non-profit organization were reeling from recent changes. Management asked for a series of workshops to provide skills to cope with the chaotic times. Internally, they were disoriented which produced thoughts of "where do I stand….who can I trust…what do we do….what will happen…." all of which stood in the way of productivity.
Length: 1/2 day
