People and Development Skills Courses

As organisations become increasingly global, the virtual team and remote management are becoming the norm. Those managing these teams need to be adept at welding the disparate resources at their disposal into a united and coherent whole, despite having limited or perhaps no opportunity to build relationships face to face.

In this course, you will gain the skills to allow your teams to deliver results across multisite and multinational environments. You will learn techniques to manage the collaboration of virtual teams and enhance productivity. You will also learn how to build bonds, trust and emotional connection within a group.

The course is designed for those that seek to improve their performance through relationships. Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important as IQ with technical skills. EI underpins successful people management and is more than 85% of what sets star performers apart from the average. This course will develop your capability to understand and work with Emotional Intelligence.

Personal resilience is arguably the most important resource for succeeding during challenging times - resilient people stay committed and proactive when the going gets tough. Learn how to increase your ability to respond positively to pressures you may encounter in today’s workplace. 

You can develop resilience. By doing so, you can improve your quality of life at work, as well as your productivity and performance. Resilient people are a vital asset for any business.

Communication is the “oil in the engine of organisational success.” It keeps things moving and the better the quality, the better the parts work together. Effectively communicating is a key responsibility for everyone in every role today without exception and with the challenges of modern technology and evolving language, getting your message across in a way that everyone understands becomes the biggest challenge.

This session explores the characteristics of the various communications styles, offering ideas and opportunities for you to “flex” their style of communication dependent on your audience.

Dealing with stakeholders can often be challenging, especially when there are many with different interests. The "secret" in dealing with them is to understand how to overcome conflict and to build and strengthen relationships. This is aimed at those of you who want to work on your relationship and communication with stakeholders, in order to improve efficiency and drive the business forward.

This course focuses on the three underlying and fundamental principles of successful decision-making: objectives, alternatives and risk. The purpose of the course is to equip you with an effective and straightforward decision-making methodology that will enhance rational thought processes, reduce risk and boost performance. 

This highly experiential course is designed to help you discover how to use both sides of the brain, to enhance your creative approach to key decisions you face. Mental dexterity is a powerful weapon in the pursuit of excellence. You will consider not only the linear but also the lateral and intuitive elements that make up the decision-making process.

This course develops the people skills needed to manage conflict effectively. In particular, it introduces techniques to make these skills an integral part of everyday business life and uses real situations to enable you to build confidence. Conflict can have a positive effect, but left unchecked it can result in reduced creativity and productivity, lost commitment, and wasted financial resources.

By taking a number of conflict management tools, techniques and theories and putting them into practical situations, this course aims to turn conflict into a productive force.

The quality of relationships at work is a key factor not only in the success of any organisation but in the well-being of its members. Understanding various personality types in the workplace is essential to ensure that there are effective communication and working practices. Conflict and difficulties can be diffused once individuals can identify their style of relating and how it fits with others. It is especially important for a manager or leader to grasp these key insights in order to be able to get the best out of their team by deploying flexible leadership styles.

This highly experiential course is designed to help you discover how to use your complete brain, not only the linear but also more particularly the lateral and intuitive elements and apply all this to business thinking. In doing so, you will be able to analyse how the use of innovation can enhance your current job role and future performance. You will think laterally by learning how to use a number of tools.

By attending the course, you will drive new ideas that will move the business towards success.

This course is aimed at anyone who management responsibilities. It will enable you to drive better performance from your team. But what turns a group of individuals working together into a team? And what turns that team into a high performing one that excels not merely accomplishes? These are key questions for any organisation wanting to boost performance.

The programme is aimed at anyone whose role involves delivering presentations. Being able to deliver presentations with confidence and clarity, which are well structured and achieve their objectives is an essential requirement for both business and career success. Often the wrong focus of attention in the preparation results in slide-led presentations and it is a common theme that presentation objectives are not clear.

According to research, presenting is one of the most feared tasks and the resulting poor performance leads to lost opportunities for organisations. However, the fear and anxiety associated with this crucial skill can be overcome, once the correct tools and techniques are understood and used. 

Change is inevitable, but that doesn’t always make it palatable. From small shifts to large cultural upheavals, few like it. This course acknowledges what we all know: that change and the pace of change is quickening. 

The problems faced by organisations and individuals undergoing change are usually multi-faceted and can include erosion of confidence and self-worth, emotional stress and demotivation associated with a loss of control, and fatigue associated with prolonged or continued amendments in a working environment. It is a practical course aimed at ensuring the delegate is personally prepared both as an employee and as a manager to deal with change and its implementation and consequences.

Coaching is a targeted, proven and powerful way of responding to unrelenting competitive business pressure and constant change. This course looks at the business case for coaching and uses a series of engaging tasks to identify current understanding of what coaching is and the delegates’ experiences of it.

High performance is no longer optional in today’s business arena.  Change is rapid and an approach is needed which enables leaders to respond to increasing demands for high performance and at the same time look after their most precious resource – the people in their organisations.  

This course enables leaders to learn and practise essential coaching skills, and allows them to enhance their own performance and fully experience the power of coaching.

Effective business writing leads to efficient decision-making and improved organisational performance. Ineffective business writing has the opposite result. Without strategic planning and professional writing, many valid and important written communications fail to achieve their objectives.

The aim of this course is to make the written word work smarter for the organisation. Good writing ensures that messages are communicated effectively and that they generate the response or action desired by the writer.

It is aimed at anyone whose role involves business writing and who wants to do so with more confidence. 

This course is designed for anyone who attends meetings and wants them to be a productive use of their time. Many say that meetings are one of the major time wasters in business. Outcomes are sometimes not qualified and the costs are significant.

This course will change that, giving step-by-step guidance on how to achieve effective business results from any meeting. The course deals with planning and conducting meetings, whether as chair or participant. Delegates will improve their ability to make a significant contribution to the effectiveness of any meeting they manage or attend.

Well-run meetings have clear agendas, are kept to time and chaired with discipline and fairness. In this way they ensure progress and improved business results.

Mentoring is a relationship between two people (mentor and mentee) which focuses on mentors acting as a facilitator and trusted advisor, with no agenda other than to support and challenge the mentee in their development, adding value and guidance by sharing experience, resources and networks.

The course is aimed at managers who are either already mentors or have an interest in becoming a mentor.

Having a professional and effective mentoring programme is an attractive incentive to prospective employees and can be a significant differentiator between you and your competitors, increasing employee motivation and overall retention. 

Managers have a significant impact on the morale of those they manage.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) highlights the importance of the manager as the key reason why people stay or go from organisations. Feeling valued by their manager at work affects employee motivation and morale. In fact, the employee manager relationship was one of the top two reasons for staying in a job in a recent survey demonstrating that this is an important motivator for many.

Understanding what motivates people requires a grasp of different personality types and how to get the best out of each individual. This knowledge is also key to developing the skill of effective delegation which, though often underused, is essential to successful business performance.

This course is for anyone who needs to recruit people as part of their job and wants to increase their ability to do this effectively. It will equip them to avoid common mistakes in interviewing and give them clear information and guidance on how to select the best candidate for the role.

This is a critical area for any business as selecting the wrong person can cost any organisation a great deal in time and money. In the same way, matching the right talent with the right roles, leading to successful placements, is an invaluable skill and essential for any business.

This course is for anyone who needs to manage themselves and maximise the use of their time.

What is the impact of poor time and priority management on UK organisations? Recent research covering 2,500 businesses over four years in 38 countries, indicates that wasted time costs UK companies £80bn per year, equivalent to 7% of GDP.

This makes it all the more important for individuals to think creatively about time and to make changes to improve their time management. Saving 5 minutes a day will increase productivity by 2.6 full days. This course will teach delegates how to achieve this and more.