Bespoke Skills and Capabilities Workshops
What are Bespoke Skills and Capabilities Workshops?
Bringing people together creates opportunities for catalytic change. Our workshops are energising and highly interactive. They generate actionable insights and teach specific skill sets that maximise individual and collective performance. They accelerate core prerequisites for effective leadership and high-functioning teams, such as building trust and cohesion.
Below are example workshop topics that we have delivered for clients, however, we bespoke our workshops to the specific needs of every client.
We give your people the right Skills to progress your Organisation
Resilience & Emotional Wellbeing
A transformative workshop that generates powerful self-awareness, builds resilience and promotes emotional wellbeing in individuals and teams. This workshop helps bring together crucial business demands: the desire for improved individual and team performance and the need to be successful with the responsibility to develop and support wellbeing. We consider simple, but highly effective concepts that help you gain clarity about your practical and emotional responses to people and situations in the workplace and at home, and to better understand and manage your behaviours, responses and feelings. The insights you gain will be a catalyst for improved performance, an increase in emotional well-being, better relationships and greater resilience.
Outcomes:
- Build resilience as self-awareness increases
- Creates a shared accessible language around wellbeing
- Helps colleagues support each other more effectively
- Helps people to recognise strengths and opportunities
- Tools to manage stress
- A common language that creates stronger bonds and greater understanding
within your team
Performing under pressure
We all feel pressure in our roles at certain times. In many businesses, the ability for individuals and teams to deal effectively with pressurised situations will be critical in success metrics both internally and with partners or stakeholders. This workshop attends to the reality that ALL of us feel under pressure in the workplace, at one time of the other. Whether it be a time-critical piece of work, a high stakes negotiation or a specific industry-related moment, one’s ability to deal with pressure will be telling. Bringing to life skills and strategies learned from elite sport and the military, this workshop will allow each individual to consider what their own personal pressure points are, and how they can develop strategies to be effective in the moments they want to be. A human-oriented, interactive session that will cover some serious topics, but in a playful, exploratory and engaging manner. Each person will leave the session with armed with an increased personal pressure toolkit.
Outcomes:
- To attend to the fact that we all feel the effects of pressure in our own way
- Two consider our current personal strategies for both identifying and dealing with perceived pressure
- To build upon personal pressure toolkits and take actionable ideas away from the session
Master your time & energy
In this workshop, you will learn how to use your time and energy more wisely – both at work and at home. You will understand how to put a stop to exhaustion, burnout, and chronic stress, and create a sustainable work-life balance that allows you to thrive.
In the last decade, burnout levels have seen a dramatic rise in workplaces all over the world. Together, we will look at the latest burnout science and the top ten reasons for people burning out in the workplace. You will learn its key causes and how to spot its symptoms in yourself and others.
Next, I will share a “battling burnout and thrive” tool-box with you. We will explore some powerful and directly applicable techniques such as the energy audit, the Stoic circle of control, and the 80/20 rule. We will explore the idea of smart working and what that might mean for you. In addition, we will look at what we can learn from “positive deviants” – high performers who do not burn out. You will also understand how to leverage your Insights profiles and your knowledge about your personality preferences to work more smartly and effectively
Coaching & mentoring skills
By encouraging leaders to consider the relative benefits to their team of short-term challenge and long-term education, we help them to identify the right times and situations to apply the most appropriate type of leadership support. When is it most suitable to coach, and when to mentor? We explain the differences between coaching and mentoring, teach powerful toolkits and cover topics such as emotional intelligence – the most important ingredient for rendering coaching effective in the workplace.
Outcomes:
Leaders will understand the benefits of coaching and mentoring and their key differences. They will be equipped with a toolbox of highly effective coaching techniques. Leaders will appreciate the importance of emotional intelligence and be able to practise its application. They will be able to apply these techniques in various settings, including in appraisal interviews.
“The interesting thing about coaching is you have to trouble the comfortable and comfort the troubled”
– Ric Charlesworth
Managing Difficult Conversations
A workshop that generates powerful self-awareness, developing the individual’s ability to address difficult conversations constructively. This workshop helps professional advisers achieve the holy grail of consulting: the capacity to bring opposing points of view in a converging way, switching on the light in the conversation while switching off the heat. We consider simple, but highly effective concepts that help you address your own response to difficult conversations as well as developing empathy towards views and responses held by others, and to better understand and manage your behaviours, responses and feelings. This will enable you to build more constructive, robust relationships. We help provide a framework that creates understanding of responses to difficult situations. This creates a common language that creates stronger bonds and greater understanding within your team. These learnings and mindset changes can be put into practice instantly, at all levels of your organisation.
Outcomes:
This workshop creates an approach to difficult conversations that empowers individuals by building self awareness of our own preferences, helping us focus on resolution. By self-regulating, and making conscious choices about how we react, we are able to understand and broaden our responses to difficult conversations and conflict while maintaining and building trust. This generates dynamism, builds strong enduring relationships among and between teams and encourages transparency. The simplicity and clarity of the concepts builds confidence in addressing difficult conversations. True professional adviser relationships require us to adopt an approach to difficult conversations that supports the relationship while resolving the issue. Whatever one’s age and responsibility, increased professional and personal insight in this area helps create a win-win for all.
Productivity Audit: Optimize your processes
In this workshop, we take an honest look at how you spend your time on an average day, week, and month. Together, we establish which activities are the ones that matter most, and what kinds of activities you may be able to automatise, outsource, drastically reduce, or else simply let go of completely. Our overriding questions will be: What is the wisest and most productive way to spend your time? What should you focus on, and what do you not need to do anymore? Which of your processes are holding you back? By the end of the workshop, you will have established which of your activities you should prioritise, how to work smarter, be more effective, and work less.
The Pareto law, also known as the 80/20 principle and the law of least effort, suggests that only 20% of our efforts generate 80% of our results. By implication, this principle also suggests that most of our efforts, time, and resources are wasted. The 80/20 principle applies to individuals, teams, organisations, and economies at large. For example, if a company knows that 80% of its income is the result of 20% of its products, clients, or specific activities, it would be wise to focus most resources and energy on these 20% that matter most. The same is true about how we work as individuals and teams. And yet most of us simply never take the time to identify the 20% of our efforts that result in 80% of our successes.
If we can understand and leverage this principle, we can learn to work significantly smarter and significantly less. Let us have an honest look at your processes and working habits so that we can explore novel ways to increase your productivity.
The Art of cross-cultural communication
In our globalised world, many of us have to interact with people from other cultures on a daily basis. And while we may have English as a shared business language, we don’t necessarily understand the finer differences in how others think, communicate, and act. Cultural misunderstandings can slow down, harm, and hinder business. How can we get better at understanding the subtler cultural codes? And how can we translate that knowledge into action?
This workshop starts with exploring how culture affects communication. What goes on, and what can go wrong, when people from different religious, social, ethnic, generational, and educational backgrounds interact? How do our beliefs, values, and customs shape how we perceive and relate to the world around us?
Next, you will learn some concrete tools to enhance your cultural agility – a set of psychological and behavioural competencies that allow you to thrive in cross- cultural situations. Cultural agility is a form of cultural intelligence, comparable to social and emotional intelligence. It enables us to build trust, gain credibility, communicate, and collaborate effectively across cultures. Cultural agility entails a combination of knowledge, skills, mindset, and practice. It requires openness, curiosity, and respect, psychological flexibility and the ability to mentalize.
You will walk away from this workshop with:
- a deeper understanding of how our cultures shape us and impact on the way we
- interact with others and
- an actionable toolkit for becoming a better cross-cultural communicator.
How to boost your impact & communicate more effectively
In this interactive workshop, you will learn how to dramatically increase your impact and influence. Did you know that how we are perceived by others is determined only 15% by what we say, and 85% by how we say it? The good news is that we can learn techniques for generating more enthusiasm and support for our ideas. We will share with you some powerful techniques from the actors’ toolkit which you can use immediately to become a more effective communicator. Together, you will explore how to use your voice, your posture, and your body language to achieve the effects you desire in your interactions with others. This workshop will use ‘deliberate play’ methods and is based on a fun and effective learning-by-doing approach, enabling you to walk away with concrete communication tools that you can implement immediately.
Outcomes:
- Be aware of the power of your voice.
- Understand how you can use your voice to achieve specific effects.
- Understand the importance of body language and posture as vital parts of the communication process.
- Be able to use your body language and posture to achieve desired effects in your interactions with others.
- Understand how to integrate basic storytelling into your communications to capture your audience’s attention and appeal to their emotions.
Creating Habits That Stick
What are habits and why do they matter? How are habits formed? Why is it better to focus on habits not goals? How can we change unhelpful habits and replace them with better ones in our personal and professional lives?
This session will help you to:
- Understand how habits are formed
- Explore the impact of focussing on habits not goals
- Develop approaches to break bad habits and create good habits in your personal and professional life
We will look at some theories and models, at individual habits, and at team and organizational habits. And we will do lots of activities and exercises to make these learnings stick.
Psychological Safety, trust & vulnerability
Psychological safety is of the essence for getting the best out of people. For teams, this means co-creating a space in which everyone is comfortable to share insights and to experiment. In a psychologically safe space, people are not afraid to own their mistakes, and teams can extract precious learnings from all experiences. A psychologically safe environment fosters continuous learning and genuine growth. It rests above all on vulnerability-based team interactions, on building trust, on role-modelling desired behaviours and on creating powerful team cohesion.
Outcomes:
Participants understand how to create psychologically safe environments by showing vulnerability, inspiring trust and by modelling behaviours that they wish to encourage in their teams. You will be able to apply strategies for building a culture that learns from failure and is committed to growth. You comprehend the importance of team dynamics and team cohesion, and together, you commit to developing team-player mindsets.
From Diversity to Collective Intelligence
What’s so great about diversity? Diversity in our organisations is desirable for many reasons, of course. But in order truly to harness its powers, we need to understand how we can turn different perspectives, thinking styles, and experiences into collective intelligence.
We can think of collective intelligence as an aligned and activated form of cognitive diversity. Only when we learn to harness and combine the powers of our different personalities, perceptions, and viewpoints can we generate true collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a form of team intelligence that is much larger than the sum of its parts. It is also the only antidote to silo-thinking, echo-chambers, and blind-spot cultures.
Our world is becoming ever more complex. Many of our challenges are now far too complex to be solved by individual thinkers alone – however brilliant they may be. The ability to activate the collective intelligence of our teams and organisations is therefore a vital skill in today’s globalised world. It can give us a serious competitive advantage, because it turbo-charges our abilities to problem solve, innovate, and find creative and original solutions to complex challenges.
What do our clients say about Bespoke Skills and Capabilities Workshops?
“I love the make-up of the sessions ran by Performance Catalyst – the balance of team building, interaction and insightful information is a rock solid combination. I couldn’t recommend it enough.”
“Will was engaging, authentic, and genuinely seemed to believe in the value of what he was sharing with us.”
“Very engaging without being distracting, professional without being unapproachable. Definitely provided an exceptional learning experience. One of the best facilitators I have ever encountered at a similar event.”
“Will has developed his relationship with us by taking opportunities and then weaving them together with the needs that he uncovers. Everything that he has done for us flows and develops, it isn’t formulaic. I’ll happily recommend working with Will.”
“Will did a great job! He kept the whole group engaged all of the time! He was interesting, engaging, calm and left everyone enough space to share their thoughts, feelings and impressions. Neverless, he left impressions of owning the content and knowing at every moment what the next steps are, what is expected and what is the result. I really enjoyed having Will as a facilitator and valued his contributions. I would reocmmend him ‘at every single door’ in the future. Thanks, Will for everything! It was a pleasure being in your room!”