Talent and Leadership Optimization

We are on a collision course between high levels of collective trauma, mental health challenges, and an ill-prepared leadership and workplace. Leaders and their workforce would benefit from operating with the universal expectation that everyone — including themselves — has experienced a traumatic event sometime in their lifetime and incorporate a "do no harm" philosophy throughout their workplace. Trauma-informed approaches can be implemented anywhere, by anyone — including you.

Trauma is defined as “an event or series of events that are experienced as physically or emotionally harmful and have lasting adverse effects on functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being” (SAMHSA, 2014). This module will review trauma concepts, their impacts, and implications for personal healing, leadership styles, and workplace culture.

Trauma-informed leaders acknowledge how their own unresolved traumatic events and experiences influence the way they lead, manage, interact, and communicate with their employees and peers. Healing and self-awareness are critical steps for leaders to identify their stress responses in the workplace and know how to respond in a way that doesn't cause further harm unintentionally to themselves or others.

According to Daniel Goleman, there are six distinct emotional leadership styles. Each of these styles has a different effect on people's emotions, and each has strengths and weaknesses in different situations. No one style should be used all the time but rather interchangeably, depending on the situation and the stress responses of the workforce.

Within a leader’s trauma-informed approach to advancing their organization’s mission and strategy, there are six trauma-informed leadership behaviors and principles (safety; trust; peer support and healing; collaboration; voice and choice; and culture, history, and gender) that are essential and applicable across the workplace.

This Employee Experiences questionnaire is for workplaces interested in assessing, benchmarking, and measuring their readiness for change, capacity, trust within/among leadership and their workforce, and trauma-informed characteristics.

Trauma breaks systems, whether the system is a family, a community, a justice system, a political system, or a business. Trauma-informed systems thinking is an approach that analyzes and zeros in on how the different parts of a system intersect and how systems work within the context of other, larger systems. In so doing, a set of standards and ethics are used to guide the systems change across the entire workplace.

Leading and managing dynamic organizations is already difficult but it’s even harder to launch an organizational-wide change effort when navigating through disclosed or undisclosed trauma experienced by leaders and staff. Asking organizations with high collective levels of personal trauma and burnout to take on high-stakes quality improvement or transformational change initiatives may increase staff resistance, dissension, further burnout, secondary and vicarious trauma, fight, flight, freeze and fawn stress reactions, resignations or overall disengagement and apathy to any organizational project.

Integrating trauma informed leadership principles into your company’s ESG priorities encourage Boards and c-suites to invest in, prioritize, and destigmatize evidence-based mental health resources for their workforce. Supporting employees' mental health may help organizations retain talent, increase economic impact, and bolster performance while keeping the workforce healthier and more satisfied.

Every effective leader needs a successful action plan to achieve his/her goals. This session will help you develop that plan by teaching you how to use power, and how to both situationally and strategically lead. You will gain insight into your personal leadership style and personality type through the DISC Assessment. You will learn:

• To describe the basic principles of leadership.
• The importance of understanding your own personality type.
• Your own leadership style through the DISC Assessment.
• How to use power and why it is important.
• To describe Situational Leadership principles.
• Characteristics of effective leaders.
• To describe strategic leadership strategies.
• How to delegate effectively.
• Your role as the team leader.
• How to apply leadership strategies to relevant case study scenarios.

One’s emotions should never get in the way of leading. Emotional intelligence is increasingly being recognized as a critical factor in the career success of leaders. Your level of emotional intelligence dictates how well you understand yourself and how well you interrelate with others. This session will teach you important practices of effective leaders, give you insight into EI, and provide tools you can implement during an emotionally-charged work situation. You will learn:

• What emotional intelligence is.
• The benefits of being emotionally intelligent.
• The core competencies of emotional intelligence.
• The best practices of emotional intelligence in the workplace.
• What the research says about emotional intelligence.
• How to assess your personal emotional intelligence.
• How to apply emotional intelligence in work-related situations.
• How to teach emotional intelligence to employees.

Change is often frightening, disheartening, and frustrating for everyone involved. It is disruptive and, at times, traumatic. Most people avoid change if they can. Change, though, is part of organizational life and essential for progress. This session is designed for you to learn specific strategies to help your employees work through change as best as possible. You will learn:

• How work, employees, and customers have changed.
• What change really is, from the perspective of an employee.
• The steps to the change process.
• How to help employees let go.
• Specific strategies to use/practice when change occurs in the workplace.
• How to help yourself, as a supervisor, deal with change.
• How to develop a “Change Management Action Plan”.

One of the most important roles of a supervisor or manager is that of coach and mentor. This session is designed to help you learn what you need to know about helping employees achieve their full potential. From defining performance targets to supporting staff as they progress, you will learn how to motivate employees to develop themselves, promoting initiative and self-responsibility. You will learn:

• The benefits of coaching and mentoring.
• How to coach and the coaching process.
• How to mentor and the mentoring process.
• To explain the differences between coaching and mentoring.
• To describe different coaching styles.
• How to deal with barriers to coaching.
• How to team coach successfully.
• How to assess personal coaching styles.

Training supervisors and employees on how to prevent harassment and other discriminatory practices at work has never been more important. Violations can result in costly litigation and negatively impact an organization’s culture, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and its ability to recruit and retain skilled workers. This session focuses on raising awareness of behaviors that can lead to unwanted and unlawful harassment and discriminatory conduct and equipping you with the skills to appropriately intervene, report and prevent misconduct you may encounter in the workplace. You will learn:

• What constitutes a hostile work environment.
• The basics of the Title VII Civil Rights Act of 1964, and what those protections are.
• What harassment is, including sexual harassment.
• What constitutes discriminatory conduct at work.
• How to prevent harassment and other discriminatory behavior.
• The roles and responsibilities of the supervisor regarding the prevention of harassment and discrimination.

Why is ethical conduct important? It’s important because it not only involves doing what is right and proper, but it’s also good for both external business and internal morale. Ethical conduct is absolutely the basis for long-term success in any organization.

Further, ethical conduct in the workplace (by supervisors and employees) is the major reason for:

• Promoting a strong public image for the organization. People respect an organization that makes ethical choices and customers like doing business with an organization they can trust.
• Causing the best use of resources. For example, money, time, and effort are put into productive activities rather than diverted for questionable purposes or personal gain.
• Helping maintain quality and productivity. When employees follow ethical standards, they don’t cut corners or short-change the organization or its customers.
• Greatly helping the organization to comply with laws and regulations. What is ethical is also legal.
• Protecting the organization’s privileged information as well as that of customers.
• Boosting morale and promoting teamwork. When employees can trust one another, they can work together more harmoniously and effectively.

You will learn:

• To explain the basic principles of ethics.
• How ethical considerations apply to workplace scenarios.
• To describe and apply the 6-point ethical test.
• To better understand ethical practices around the concepts of respect, responsibility, and results.
• How to apply ethical practices and principles to real-life work scenarios.

A primary responsibility of a manager is to help employees identify, understand, and correct workplace problems. Using discipline to correct or modify employee performance can be a positive management tool that actually motivates or enhances that performance. Learn how to approach problem employees in a professional, constructive, and supportive manner and how to apply discipline to employee non-performance. You will learn:

• How to conduct performance feedback conversations.
• Strategies regarding how to apply discipline.
• How to apply the corrective feedback technique through sample scenarios.
• When to apply discipline and what a progressive discipline process looks like.
• The basics of documenting employee performance and why it is important.

When people get together as a team to decide or accomplish a task, their egos, fears, biases, and agendas can all get in the way. At times, the emotional component is so dominant that the group’s purpose can get lost in the heat of the conflict. As conflict flares, it often affects others on the team. More importantly, the results of any unresolved conflict are significantly farther-reaching: decreased morale, productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. At best, the team merely gridlocks; at worst, its long-term relationships are destroyed. Learn how to identify conflict triggers, how to avoid them, and what techniques to use to alleviate conflicts when they occur in the workplace. You will learn:

• How to define/describe conflict in the workplace.
• To differentiate between different approaches to conflict.
• Describe common reasons for conflict in the workplace.
• Better understand the five stages of the actual conflict process.
• Identify and describe communication strategies that can be used to reduce conflict.
• Describe how to give effective corrective feedback.
• Describe various types of conflict management techniques and how to apply them.
• Describe strategies to avoid during conflict.
• How to apply corrective feedback and other conflict-handling strategies to workplace scenarios.

Team members must be flexible, trusting of each other, and wholeheartedly supportive of the group if they are to progress toward achieving their goals. Employees must work as a team to operate efficiently and productively. This session will show you how great teams function in an atmosphere that fosters morale, trust, communication, and productivity. You will learn:

• The benefits of working as a team.
• To describe synergy and why it is important.
• To describe the stages of team performance.
• How to team problem solve and make decisions.
• The characteristics of great teams.
• Strategies for resolving team conflict.
• To describe effective team communication practices.
• To describe the Five Team Dysfunctions.
• How to conduct effective meetings.
• How to diagnose current team functionality using an assessment tool.

Supervisors and managers are frequently responsible for solving problems and making decisions. Unfortunately, many are not familiar with the problem-solving process and how to use this process with their employees. This session will equip you with the tools to systematically resolve problems rather than by “gut instinct” and how to make objective, versus subjective, decisions, such as brainstorming and multi-voting. You will learn:

• To explain the benefits of using a process to solve problems.
• How most problems in today’s workplace are usually solved.
• To identify the six-step problem-solving process.
• How most decisions are made in today’s workplace.
• How to use various tools to make better decisions.
• The importance of effective communication within the problem-solving process.
• How to apply the problem-solving process to workplace scenarios.
• To explain what a consensus decision is and how to gain consensus.

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Most people think they know what accountability means and have strong opinions about the topic. Demands for accountability abound, but what does holding an entity or person accountable really mean? That people need to take on more responsibilities, or something else? The “state of accountability” exists for both supervisors and employees and can be explained through specific actions that must occur. This session will delve into what accountability means in the workplace, what it means to be personally accountable, what needs to be in place for accountability to exist, what are the specific supervisory roles and responsibilities, and as part of being accountable, how to become more efficient. You will learn:

• To better understand what it means to be accountable in the workplace.
• To differentiate between being accountable and/or responsible.
• To describe actions that must occur between supervisor and employee for accountability to exist.
• To describe specific roles and responsibilities of supervisors.
• How to apply specific tools to become more efficient at work.
• To use the basics of conducting a process analysis and apply it to a work-related scenario.

Effective performance reviews are an essential component of employee development. Setting performance-related goals and objectives gives both the supervisor and employee a mutual focus and is one of the key aspects of meeting overall organizational objectives. Learn strategies to effectively conduct a performance review and how to work through the process in an effective and legal manner. You will learn:

• To recognize the importance of having a performance review process for employees.
• The basics of performance management.
• Skills in observing, giving feedback, listening, and asking questions.
• How to conduct an effective performance interview and have the opportunity to practice the interview in a supportive atmosphere.
• How to make the performance review legally defensible.
• The basics of how and why to document performance.