Collaborative

Much has been written about conflict management and the consequences of not dealing with major disagreements but few of us stop to think about the costs of bickering over matters of minor significance. Bickering and incivility can wreak havoc with organizations if left unchecked, contributing to low morale, decreased productivity, and staff turnover. In this topic, you will have the opportunity to investigate some issues which may be contributing to bickering within your workplace and to develop solutions to minimize them.

Discussion, debate, negotiation, and information exchange are the most common forms of communication in organizations, and although helpful in many ways, they rarely push us beyond our current paradigms of thought and action. This session is an introduction to dialogue, a more creative and collaborative mode of communication that increases our capacity to address complex organizational issues.

Stakeholder relationships are a fact of life for every manager and every organization. Managers need to take account of their stakeholders and deal with their differing, and sometimes competing, interests. The goal is to have relationships that support and sustain performance. Understanding stakeholders is one of the keys to developing effective relationships.

Why does coaching play such a prominent role in today’s complex business world?

In Coaching Others, Beverley Patwell explains how coaching can impact all levels of your organization and what qualities you need to coach effectively.

High performing teams increase the effectiveness of high performing individuals. Knowing how to create and sustain high performing teams often determines a manager’s success – and the inevitable success of the initiative or organization.

This session invites you to examine your team and compare it to characteristics of exemplary high performing teams. Determine how to make your team a more high performing team.

Managers generally spend as much time “managing on the edges” – in other words out of their unit, relating to the rest of the organization and to the outside world – as they do inside their unit. Here we consider various roles related to this important work, with the concentration on “buffering”: how to manage the delicate balance of outside forces coming into the unit.

In this session we will look at what different “deals” exist between an organization and its members and what the implications of these are. What do employees owe an organization and what do organizations owe an employee? Where do you see your organization and where would you like to see it going?

This CoachingOurselves session challenges you to diagnose and clarify your own talent "mindset". How can you best maximize the talent around you and build on your employees' strengths? Discuss and create strategies with your colleagues to bring the talent mindset into action.

The word “collaboration” has a very positive connotation these days. Collaboration helps us break out of our “hierarchy fix” as well as our “market fix”. It also helps us direct more attention to how people connect with each other, as capable adults. But we also have to appreciate the negative, as well as positive. So the four of us have collaborated on this topic to bring together a set of points that we have found surprising about collaboration.