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Nowadays, what organisations need are doers who can think and thinkers who can do. This is because organisations have de-layered, resulting in fewer, busier managers with a larger span of control managing employees who must be able to think for themselves. So no handholding there then. In order to keep the organisation running smoothly, we all need to be multi-skilled at multi-tasking, which is easier said than done.
Let’s break it down
A business is essentially a group of people who, through cumulative, small effects create a large effect: the successful enterprise. If managers, team leaders and team members are given structured opportunities in coaching sessions to think through their business issues, they are much more likely to do more focused, productive and intelligent work, which means better cumulative effects and better business results.
In creating those structured coaching opportunities, organisations must respond to two challenges:
Team leaders and managers succeed or fail on the basis of their ability to orchestrate the collective efforts of the diverse people they manage.
If you can reconcile the teeming multiplicity of ideas, opinions, knowledge, skills, perspectives and intelligences in your team and organisation, brilliant business solutions are there for the taking.
But we live in disruptive, fast-moving times full of discontinuous change, so to adapt, the cycle time for reconciling all this difference must be short. However, without the crucial facilitations skills for reaching consensus and without smart ways of analysing and addressing the challenges you face, your solutions either become irrelevant because they took so long to reach, or worse – they’re never found, with subsequent reputational damage to teams, managers and organisations.
We must find rapid approaches to reaching consensus that enable people to bring real attack to implementation. We have thought long and hard about how to help organisations cost effectively acquire depth and breadth in facilitation excellence. Here are our solutions packages…
The Facilitation Starter Pack
Your facilitators will develop the design skills to create efficient, highly productive meetings of 2-25 people that result in timely actions, decisions and solutions. They will develop their facilitation skills in specialist areas such as:
HR Professionals: from organisational servant to strategic partner
With the maturing of the HR outsourcing market, it’s now entirely feasible to outsource basic HR processes. So, the transactional, administrative core of the HR function in organisations is eroding and competent HR professionals are looking to become internal consultants to the business heads.
But the business heads face a number of pressing business imperatives, all of which have consequences for the skill sets of internal consultants:
By definition, ineffective Account Management Strategies fail to achieve sales, waste resources and carry significant opportunity costs: just a bunch of adults frittering away an expensive afternoon or worse, many afternoons.
But there is actually good evidence that structured approaches to Strategic Account Management yield productive long-term relationships and future business. More importantly, these approaches are teachable, and if carefully applied, they will increase your sales.
We can help you implement a system of account management that improves business results and is sustainable. These approaches enable your senior sales and marketing people to work together in agreeing on direction and the detailed actions in support of the direction.
What we offer
Account management is another organisational system that’s important, but hardly ever urgent. We’ll help you build a sustainable infrastructure that secures a system so effective that it becomes resilient against attempts to sideline it when the heat is on. We will help you:
Whether they're romantic, platonic or professional, relationships are complicated. Even those that are positive can eventually breakdown. That’s because when humans get involved, they bring an array of emotions, opinions and agendas, which don’t always play well together.
Woody Allen once described love as a virus with early symptoms of intense attraction and boundless goodwill towards the other. But in its chronic stage, the symptoms morph into irritation and an uncanny ability to row about everything…
In short, what was once a valuable relationship diminishes into something destructive.
Applying this to professional partnerships, the challenge is to build a solid foundation of goodwill from the start and then maintain it. With this robust and positive core – fuelled by mutual respect and understanding – any problems that arise can be dealt with diplomatically and effectively before they become detrimental.
The partnership dance…
Try to tango without learning the moves and you’ll step on your partner’s toes. Try to do business without building a good rapport, and you’ll do the same.
With a sea of different personalities and objectives to consider, you have to learn the partnership dance in order to win contracts and deliver on them. This ability to ‘dance’ painlessly through productive partnerships will propel your business forward positively and sustainably.
The death of competition…
The same goes for our competitors. Rather than butt heads, we need to cooperate and accommodate in order to create opportunities rather than conflicts. Thus, a new breed of partnering relationships for growth with our competitors is created: co-opetition.
We can help you turn competition into co-operation so that clashes of interests are converted into a mutually beneficial partnership. It’s all about shelving the ‘dog-eat-dog’ mentality and diplomatically managing the intricacies of our relationships, the negotiation process and ourselves.
It’s a fine balance, but successfully done it leaves the partnership, the businesses and the people intact and productive. Badly done, it feeds the lawyers.
We’ll help you to learn the techniques…
With our help, you will learn how to build high-trust relationships that will endure the test of time:
Luckily for the successful organisation, we now know what tactics and behaviours increase the chances of closing a high value sale, and what behaviours diminish them.
But there are certain questions that need to be raised…
Can others learn to use these behaviours correctly?
The answer is: yes they can – most of us already have them in our repertoire. The real challenge is to turn turgid science into compelling reasons why these behaviours are desirable, and then help people use them fluently in the emerging, complex sales conversation.
Do they improve sales outcomes?
Again, research shows that yes, they do improve sales outcomes, providing the systems are in place to ensure they are used, which leads us to the third question…
Is it possible to mainstream these behaviours until they are embedded in the culture?
Well, that depends. If you simply throw training at people and then hope it somehow embeds itself, almost certainly not. For many, the behaviours involve unlearning old habits and for some they can even be counterintuitive. If people are not supported in using these behaviours the day after a training programme ends, their chances of ever using them are slim indeed.
What we offer
This programme is carefully tailored to ensure best fit with your organisation:
In the de-layered, flattened organisational structures that are now commonplace, the bandwidth to micro-manage at any level is nonexistent. But if the opportunity to micro-manage is lost and face-to-face contact rare, how can we leave lasting motivational effects of loyalty, trust, admiration and respect that inspire people to serve and achieve more than they were considered capable of?
Transformational Leadership provides the answer to those leading their teams, departments and organisations through change.
What is Transformational Leadership?
What’s all the fuss about?
Since the 1993 publication of Kaplan and Norton's seminal journal article on Balanced Scorecards (BSC) in the Harvard Business Review, numerous case studies have made impressive claims for breakthrough performance in organisations that have implemented the methodology. Their later work on Strategy Mapping (SM) takes this further. Their approach poses two questions:
What is the need that BSC/SM is fulfilling?
Strategy is great in theory, but when competing with more urgent day-to-day operations, some stark facts emerge:
The successful introduction of a well-conceived change that brings business results is the pinnacle of management practice and job satisfaction. We love it.
But introducing a complex change into your organisation carries substantial, avoidable risks of failure (known to humorists everywhere as ‘mangling change’). These risks are not just to the organisation, but also to the reputations of the managers responsible for delivering the results.
However, whatever the risks of change, thriving organisations are dynamic systems, continually shaped by new demands that drive such changes as:
Only a few years ago the term was used exclusively to describe Buddhist meditative traditions. Now the corporate leadership world is taking a closer look. Recently neuroscience studies from Harvard University have shown that mindfulness training significantly increases brain grey matter concentrations in areas associated with Attention Control, Emotional Regulation and Self Awareness. Further evidence links mindfulness training to increased pre-frontal cortex activity, which is related to happiness and well-being. It has gained worldwide application as a distinctive method to handle emotions.
Currently, in the medical world, mindfulness programmes are used to help with physical problems such as stress, anxiety, hypertension, depression, heart disease and chronic pain. There are further connections, however, to how being mindful in our approach can help us to become more effective business leaders.
People who have trained in mindfulness have been shown to make more rational decisions. During times requiring pressurised decision-making, meditators activate a different network of brain areas compared with non-meditators and that enables them to uncouple negative emotional reactions from their behaviour.
Meditation has also been found to be a highly effective means of training managers in corporate social responsibility. The training significantly raises managers’ levels of care and concern.
Mindfulness programmes have also been shown to raise one’s level of emotional intelligence and improve relationships. Those completing a course of mindfulness show significant improvements with respect to emotional intelligence, perceived stress and mental health compared to others.
Whether you’re looking to develop yourself, or your company, OPDC provides a tailored programme to help unlock your potential leading to improved performance, growth and, ultimately, success.
What to do next...
All our programmes can be customised to fit your particular professional and personal objectives. For more information please contact us.
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