Doing a Little Spring Cleaning in Your Office?

Posted on May 22, 2013 by HRDQ

What your workspace tells about your co-workers and your communication styles.

Throwing away old papers? Dusting off that top shelf? During your office spring cleaning, take a closer look around your workspace. Does your desk have an endless supply of papers strewn across it; or is it so clear of clutter that you can see every inch of the desk with charts and graphs on your wall? Are papers arranged in neat organized piles? Or mixed with personal photos and some clutter? Your work space can provide insight into your personality style.

Personal style is developed over time and revealed by the level of assertiveness and expressiveness you display. Assertiveness is the amount of effort you make to influence or control another’s thoughts or actions, and expressiveness is the amount of effort you make to control emotions when interacting with others. By measuring your levels of assertiveness and expressiveness, you can discover your preference for one of the four personality styles.

Identifying an individual’s preferred personality style as Direct, Spirited, Considerate, or Systematic enables us to develop better interpersonal connections while recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of each style. By understanding the strengths of each style, we can flex our own style to work with those strengths – communicating and interacting better.

The next time you enter into your or a co-worker’s space, take some time to look around - take mental notes about the space.

If you have a hard time finding their desk under all the papers, notes, books, or magazines, they are displaying a spirited personality style and you should turn on your listening ears because they like to talk.

Do you see family photos prominently displayed? Is there a comfy couch or chairs? This type of space reflects considerate personality styles. Create rapport by making small talk. You’ll build a solid relationship before jumping into projects.

If you see piles of papers nicely organized with personal photos discreetly placed in the corner, you are meeting with a direct personality style. Be direct and to the point with clear instructions.

When you pass by your co-worker’s workspace at night and all you see is the desk, they are displaying a systematic personality style. Provide and focus on the facts in an organized way.

Simple clues such as how a co-worker’s workspace looks help identify communication styles and enter into more effective relationships.

The HRDQ Style Series provides quick and accurate ways to identify personality styles and the impact they make in the workplace. Using self-assessments, participants can better understand how personality drives behavior, improve their people skills, and successfully create interpersonal relationships.

What’s My Communication Style? is the perfect place to start!

ASTD Goes Platinum

Posted on May 17, 2013 by HRDQ

A post from HRDQ President, Brad Glaser

Years before the majority of today’s training professionals were in grade school, 15 men from the petroleum industry gathered for the first meeting of the American Society of Training Directors. It was the beginning of the ASTD we know today. It was 1943 — a time when the world was in the midst of World War II. A time when training was emerging as a formal organizational function, corporate strategy, and necessity of a highly skilled workforce.

From chalkboards and whiteboards to smart boards, e-learning, and virtual classrooms, the face of training has experienced an amazing transformation since that first meeting 70 years ago. And ASTD has been a guiding influence every step of the way. Now the world’s largest association dedicated to the training and development field, ASTD represents every industry — and every sector — across 122 U.S. chapters, 100 countries, and 39,000 members. While its name has since changed to the American Society of Training & Development, its mission remains largely the same: to empower professionals to develop knowledge and skills successfully. ASTD’s goal is to raise the standards of the training profession and it accomplishes that through its publications, forums, education, research, resources, and conferences.

I attended my first ASTD conference when I joined HRDQ fresh out of college. I’ve been there nearly every year since, and I’ll attend the 2013 International Conference & Exposition next week when training professionals from around the world come together in Dallas, Texas. Frankly, there isn’t a better way to catch the latest trends, meet face-to-face with training colleagues, hear from industry leaders — and simply be inspired. Be sure to visit HRDQ in Booth #1053. We look forward to seeing you!

How has ASTD influenced your career? Post a comment and tell us.

HRDQ @ ASTD 2010

Team Emotional and Social Intelligence

Posted on May 15, 2013 by HRDQ

There are many measurable skills that contribute to individual high performance. Furthermore, there are essential soft skills that make possible the delivery of that performance to an organization.

A majority of these soft skills pertain to interpersonal relationships, and so are only visible in team settings. Working as part of a team is much more difficult than working on one’s own – it means having to rely on others, committing to a common set of objectives, and modifying one’s own behaviors to accommodate those of others and move everyone toward shared goals.

There are, however, simple choices that can improve overall team function, and allow individuals to contribute their individual best – unhindered by team discord. These choices amount to team emotional and social intelligence, which, in turn, enables sustainable productivity. Intelligence, here, s used in a non-traditional way – meaning something closer to awareness than ability. For everyone is able to choose “emotionally intelligent” behaviors, but we to be cognizant of their value and how to put them to use.

To develop this awareness, self-assessment couldn’t be more valuable in providing insight into current behaviors and tendencies as juxtaposed with statistically sound, effective behaviors. The Team Emotional and Social Intelligence (TESI) soft-skills training program is the perfect way to develop a practical picture of an entire team’s effectiveness.

Revealing a 360 degree evaluation of a team’s “Collaboration Skills,” the TESI shows common strengths and weaknesses in seven areas of teamwork. Stressing the idea that each member of a team needs a personal association with their team (a reason they have to continue working toward team goals), this program shows participants that it is possible for every team to possess excellent collaboration skills, achieve high performance, and feel emotionally and socially well while acting as part of their team.

An experiential learning program, the TESI will not only allow participants to learn from their self-assessments, but to participate in activities and action planning that will apply directly to their own experience – learning that can take effect immediately, and that will resonate with teams as they work together.

Try TESI today!

Free Webinar! How to Build Emotional Intelligence for Individuals and Teams: The Top 7 Skills

Posted on May 13, 2013 by HRDQ

FREE WEBINAR
Hosted by HRDQ
Presented by Marcia Hughes and James Bradford Terrell
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
2:00pm – 3:00pm eastern time

If your organization’s teams are lacking direction, control, or the desire to achieve, underdeveloped emotional intelligence could be the cause. A prerequisite for success, research shows that emotional intelligence is a key driver in team and interpersonal dynamics.

Join presenters Marcia Hughes and James Terrell for an informative free webinar that will help trainers, consultants, team leaders, and OD professionals navigate the road of emotional and social intelligence. They’ll explore the seven emotional competencies and discuss how each relates to team performance. Marcia and James will also present the Collaborative Growth Model, a practical framework that maps the route to emotional and social effectiveness at individual and team levels.

James Bradford Terrell and Marcia Hughes are co-authors of Team Emotional & Social Intelligence, which offers a unique set of tools for determining and developing a team’s emotional effectiveness in seven dimensions that are a prerequisite for high performance.

What You Will Learn

The biggest challenge to productive teamwork
How to identify and develop the seven core behaviors of emotional effectiveness
Techniques to spark candid team conversations about what does or doesn’t work
How to use emotional intelligence skills to integrate individual goals into team goals
Creating buy-in with team members

Who Should Attend

Trainers
Consultants
Team Leaders
Team Members
OD professionals

About the Presenters

The president of Collaborative Growth, LLC, Marcia Hughes serves as a strategic communications partner for teams and their leaders. She presents her expertise in emotional intelligence through her consulting, keynote sessions, and program facilitation. She is co-author of the Team Emotional & Social Intelligence, which includes the TESI® Short, A Coach’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence, The Emotionally Intelligent Team, and Emotional Intelligence in Action as well as the Team Emotional & Social Intelligence Survey™ (TESI®). Marcia is also the author of Life’s 2% Solution. She is a certified trainer in the Bar-On EQ-i ® and EQ 360® and provides train-the-trainer facilitation and coaching in powerful EQ delivery.

As the Vice President of Collaborative Growth, LLC, James Bradford Terrell applies his expertise in interpersonal communication to help a variety of public and private sector clients anticipate change and respond to it resiliently. He is co-author of the Team Emotional & Social Intelligence Facilitator Guide Package, which includes the TESI® Short, A Coach’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence, The Emotionally Intelligent Team, and Emotional Intelligence in Action. James also coaches leaders, teams in transition, and senior management using the Bar-On EQi®, EQ 360®, and other assessments. Terrell is co-creator of the Team Emotional and Social Intelligence Survey™ (TESI®), and he provides train-the-trainer workshops on how to develop the insightful interpretation and application of EQ results.

Register Here!

Disagree Without Being Disagreeable

Posted on May 8, 2013 by HRDQ

Although you may not think of yourself as a negotiator (like, with a capital N), negotiating is something we all do all the time. It’s communication aimed at mutual need satisfaction.

But even though we do it all the time, there’s a lot to negotiating – and by building the right interpersonal skills and modeling our behavior on a sound methodology, we can all reach positive outcomes. The key is knowing which skills are in need of building, and how to put them into practice.

Self-assessment is the first step toward improved performance. In order to progress, we first have to take stock of available resources and make note of deficiencies. By looking closely at our natural tendencies and current behaviors, we can make a plan to move toward more appropriate behaviors that will facilitate more effective negotiations.

The Negotiating Style Profile will frame this picture for you, and set out a model of effective negotiation skills to measure against and work toward. The basis for the Negotiating Style Profile assessment is that, in negotiations, the involved parties should have high concern for two things: the outcome of the discussion, and their relationship with the others involved.

By measuring these levels of concern as expressed by behavioral choices, the Negotiating Style Profile reveals your relative tendencies toward five negotiating styles. A collaborating style is put forth as the most effective approach to produce positive outcomes for all parties involved, and to maintain healthy relationships between them.

Simply understanding negotiation as a collaborative form of communication can be a major shift for a lot of people. And this shift can affect more than just negotiations. The set of skills needed to negotiate collaboratively can be extended to all aspects of worklife – improving performance and employee well-being.

Get started today with the Negotiating Style Profile today!

Renaissance Training

Posted on May 1, 2013 by HRDQ

It’s May Day! A day to celebrate rebirth and embrace new beginnings. With a parting nod to the difficulties of winter, we can begin sowing the seeds of our next harvest. And, since we’re not in the farming business (not full time, anyway), we’re thinking about renaissance training. A new kind of training that moves with you – through any topic, and into the future.

The Reproducible Training Library is more than a comprehensive bank of renewable resources. It’s something that can grow and develop with you and your organization. Making a place for the RTL in your organization is a guarantee of improved performance and life-long learning for every member.

Available as a set of editable MS Word and PowerPoint files, each title in the library is a full soft-skills training program, developed by subject-matter experts and formatted to allow for customization. All RTL materials can be reimagined, combined, edited, and implemented to the trainer’s specifications – becoming an extension of the trainer – an aid and an advantage. Because RTL materials are a one-time purchase that can be printed as needed, the trainer becomes the centerpiece of learning in their organization.

When you’re training for soft skills, it makes a huge difference for your audience to have a human resource to help them learn and grow. You can make learning a conversation – something that happens within and between people – something that benefits everyone. The RTL is your foundation for that conversation. Each of the 75 programs, covering everything from time management and team building to leadership and communication, is a beginning for your organization – starting new, starting better, every time.

Celebrate a new season with better training from the Reproducible Training Library!

Open with a Joke

Posted on April 24, 2013 by HRDQ

A few weeks from now, HRDQ will be at the ASTD International Conference and Exhibition (ahem), so we’re brushing up on our presentation skills.

It’s not at all uncommon to worry over public presentations – they come with a lot of challenges:

Presentations require a set of communication skills that don’t get as much practice as your everyday skills do.
You only have one chance to impress and influence your audience.
Presenting can make you feel isolated – unsupported and disconnected, left to close a gap between you and your audience (who sit in judgment).
They’re all going to laugh at you.
Failing to influence your audience can have far-reaching consequences, beyond the particular setting of your presentation – it can affect your business relationships, discourage you from making other presentations, or have negative outcomes for the organization you represent.

But, presentations are very important, and most of us are called upon to deliver one at some point. Presentations are given to initiate or influence a course of action, and so they are an invaluable tool. Having the best presentations skills you can puts you in the position to incite change, to foster understanding, to promote learning, to divide, to unite – in short, to lead.

But how do you know if your presentation skills are up to par? Sometimes, the outcomes of a presentation are clear, but it’s hard to determine why things turned out the way they did.

The Presentation Skills Profile provides a model, made up of specific behaviors, to compare with your existing practices. Proven to produce successful results, the presentations skills training model is revealed through self-assessment. Made up of six questions, the Presentation Skills Model addresses all aspects of planning a successful presentation. The questions are:

What is Your Objective?
Who is Your Audience?
How Will You Structure Your Presentation?
How Will You Create Impact?
How Will You Design and Display Visual Aids?
How Will You Stage Your Presentation?

When completing the Presentation Skills Profile soft skills training program, you will be presented with examples of behavior that demonstrate your awareness of each of the six questions while planning and delivering a presentation. Measuring the similarity between your behavior and the “model” behavior will indicate which areas you can improve to heighten your chances of success.

With presentations as a resource, rather than a chore, you’ll have the power to shape your future. Readiness and awareness can bring about a change in your disposition to group communication, self-confidence, and the control you have of your own outcomes.

Let the Presentation Skills Profile be your guide to better performance, and a better work life!

Don’t miss us at ASTD! We’ll be at booth 1053 with the HRDQ prize wheel! Click here to claim your FREE expo passes.

FREE Webinar! Breakthrough Creativity

Posted on April 15, 2013 by HRDQ

Breakthrough Creativity:

How to Use Your Talents to Gain a Competitive Advantage

Hosted by HRDQ

Presented by Lynne Levesque

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

2 – 3pm (Eastern Time)

Organizations that integrate creativity into their DNA achieve significant benefits, including better team performance, increased flexibility, greater retention rates, creative problem solving, and strategic decision making. Some say it’s the “secret sauce” that’s needed to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Lynne Levesque is the Author of the Breakthough Creativity Profile – a combination self-assessment and classroom workshop, that helps individuals and teams to leverage their creative strengths, improve their problem-solving skills, increase productivity, and achieve their creative best.

But creativity isn’t limited to artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The fact is everyone is creative. Just as there are multiple styles of intelligence, there are multiple styles of creativity that produce different yet equally valuable results. Variations in how individuals look at the world, gather information, and respond to challenges all have an impact on creative contributions. And the first step in realizing creative potential in individuals and teams is self-discovery.

Join creativity and leadership development expert Dr. Lynne Levesque for an hour-long exploration of creativity in the workplace. She’ll discuss how creative talents impact organizational performance, introduce eight creative talents, and offer a practical framework you can use to accelerate the growth of creative strengths in individuals, teams, and leaders.

What You Will Learn

What it means to be creative at work and why it’s critical to performance
Discover the different ways people can be creative
How to apply creativity to inventive problem solving, strategic decision making, and resilient change management
Understand the impact of different creative talents on teamwork
Identify steps for building creative competency in individuals, teams, and leaders

Who Should Attend

Trainers
Managers and Team Leaders
Human Resources Managers
OD Professionals
Consultants

About the Presenter

Lynne C. Levesque, Ed. D. is an expert in the field of creativity and leadership with over 20 years of experience consulting, training, and researching. She is the author of Breakthrough Creativity: Achieving Top Performance Using the Eight Creative Talents (Davies-Black: June, 2001), as well as numerous articles and Harvard Business School cases for the Harvard Business Review and the Sloan Management Review. Lynne holds an M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an Ed.D. in Creativity from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Click here to register!

Where Winners Live: Sell More, Earn More, Achieve More Through Personal Accountability

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Penny Purcell

A guest post from Linda Galindo, consultant, author, speaker and educator

Back in my days as a radio news personality a station consultant charged with improving our ratings told the morning team to produce our shows with “health, heart, and pocketbook” in mind. Health, heart and pocketbook were, according to the consultants, what gets and keeps listeners engaged. Their rationale: If you don’t have your health, not much else matters. Appealing to the “heart” with human interest stories that uplifted and informed would be talked about around the water cooler. And, pocketbook referred to money; one’s wealth and what may or may not be impacting it from bank failures to hot stocks and everything in between.

Fast forward 20 years and it would appear not much has changed except the way in which personal accountability for health, heart and pocket book have shifted. The specific shift my work as an accountability expert and author of The Accountability Experience has identified is this – not being personally accountable for one’s health, well-being and financial situation is rewarded more than being personally accountable for one’s results in these three areas. Time after time business leaders nod in agreement and disgust when I point this out. Leaders wish their work force was more personally accountable for selling more, earning more and achieving more so that all the” babysitting” managers have to do would go away. Managers blame it on the work ethic of the younger generation or government regulation or the pace of change and new technology. What these business people fail to see is the real source of the problem, themselves. Rescue, fixing and saving under-performance because “it is just easier to do it myself” is running rampant in organizations, at the highest levels! Personal accountability at the top is too often mandated not demonstrated. My newest book with co-author Dave Porter, Where Winners Live will show you over and over again that mandating accountability doesn’t work, demonstrating it does.

You would think in sales organizations that focus on financial services or insurance, personal accountability would be ingrained. Commission-based “eat what you kill” environments make personal accountability a given. Think again. More than ever, sustaining a thriving organization in the financial services and insurance industries requires everyone to personally own and be accountable for the results. Top producers must rely heavily on others to meet customer needs in today’s complex product offering, instant information world. Internal corporate relationships have to fire on all cylinders all the time to produce flawless customer service and realize the investment in corporate brand. The best and brightest really do have to be attracted and retained but more importantly developed.

Personal accountability at the top is too often mandated not demonstrated.

Sales organizations have an opportunity to utilize a power hiding in plain sight and pull far, far away from their competition if their up to the rigor of what is in this book. Leaders, you would do well to heed the call to transform your view of personal accountability and its impact on the results you claim you want. Individual contributors, this will arm you with a powerful lens from which to scope out the best working environment for you to sell more, earn more and achieve more. For the consumer, you are being handed the inside scoop on how to select the best provider for the financial and insurance services you need that align with your willingness to be totally personally accountable for your health, heart and pocketbook. Read Where Winners Live and enjoy your journey as you sell more, earn more and achieve more through personal accountability.

Read more from Linda Galindo on her blog lindagalindo.com/blog/

Bridging the Leadership Divide

Posted on March 20, 2013 by HRDQ

The last thing leadership relationships should do is stand in the way of productivity.

At HRDQ, we often make the assertion that leadership is pretty straightforward – it’s a specific set of skills that can be learned by anyone. (And we’re right.) But that doesn’t mean that every leader behaves the same way, or is regarded in the same way.

And when differing behaviors are perceived by others, they may come across as “incorrect” or non-beneficial. They may be dismissed altogether. Often, these differing behaviors are displayed by leaders of different generations – forming a rift in leadership teams.

With this in mind, it’s important to find ways of capitalizing on legacy strengths from incumbent leaders and new potential from emerging leaders without compromising one for the sake of the other.

It is possible to have the best of both worlds – it just takes effort from both sides.

Bridging the Leadership Divide is a self-assessment and soft-skills training program that addresses generational differences in leadership style to improve leadership practices within an organization. It offers two models for addressing leadership skills in a multi-generational workplace.

One model is about change (and transformation). Improvement doesn’t happen without change, and this model shows leaders how to make positive changes in themselves, between individuals, and as members of an organization. Transformation needs to occur within and between individuals to create new leaders – individuals need to “become” leaders and they need to establish leadership relationships with others. This three-part model helps leaders choose a stance (a set of behaviors to practice) and reach across the divide (acknowledge and accept the leadership of others).

The second model illustrates six patterns of problem behavior between incumbent and emerging leaders and offers an approach to managing each. With these problem patterns highlighted, leaders of any generation are able to recognize them in action, and replace them with productive behaviors – improving relationships between leaders and making strides in the overall quality of leadership in their organization.

Using one or both of the models presented by Bridging the Leadership Divide to create awareness of leadership behavior through experiential learning will place your leaders on level, common ground, and start them off on the best foot for leading – no matter how long they’ve been doing it. You’ll improve performance, relationships, and culture in your organization while helping each individual participant better their work-life.

Get started with Bridging the Leadership Divide today!

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Tag Archives: soft skills

Doing a Little Spring Cleaning in Your Office?

ASTD Goes Platinum

Disagree Without Being Disagreeable

Renaissance Training

Open with a Joke