For Leadership, Management & Supervisory Training

The Washington Firm has earned a reputation for delivering high-quality information in an entertaining and engaging way. We offer a comprehensive array of management and leadership training designed to be highly interactive and customized for the organization’s culture, strategies, current needs, and industry. All of our training modules include skill-building discussions and exercises, often conducted with targeted case studies that reflect your own ongoing organizational issues.

Individual modules can be offered on a stand-alone basis or as part of a continuing leadership development plan, and each module can be offered as a half-day or full day session, depending on the depth of content and amount of practice time desired.

The following are examples of the topics that we can offer; other training topics are available upon request.

Harassment & Discrimination Prevention Training

Most companies are committed to creating a respectful, harassment-free workplace for every employee. However, this is more complex than it sounds. Ground rules for appropriate conduct are not obvious to everyone and if you feel as if the rules keep changing, you’re right! In fact, in many states, managers can even be held personally liable for discrimination and harassment–making it especially important for them to understand the issues involved.

This important and highly entertaining module covers the most recent “rules of the road” and provides answers to questions including:

What exactly is harassment and what is management’s role in preventing it?
What are your responsibilities as an employee?
What if you are a manager? Do you have special responsibilities?
Can employees date each other?
What are the rules for social media? And off-work conduct?
Are jokes okay?
Aren’t we allowed to have fun in the workplace anymore?
What do you do if you feel uncomfortable?
When is an investigation necessary?

This is offered as either a stand-alone module or as part of Working with Differences, a more comprehensive program.

Change Management

Based on William Bridges’ model for managing transitions in organizations, this session takes people through the psychological stages of change, starting with the ending (of corporate life as they know it) and ending with the beginning (of a new way of organizational life). This session is highly valued by employees and managers because they find comfort in being “normal” in their conflicted reactions to change, and appreciate the opportunity it gives them to build practical strategies for moving forward.

Coaching for Development

Study after study shows that today’s employee is more engaged when he or she believes that their manager and the organization care about their personal and professional development.This module provides managers with tools and skills for helping employees prepare themselves for the next step in their career. This module is often conducted together with Coaching for Performance.

Coaching for Performance

This module is designed to teach managers how to coach for performance improvement while continuing to support and motivate employees. Essential for managing any workforce, these skills are especially important for working with highly intelligent, creative team members. Role-playing and peer feedback help participants develop and improve their coaching skills. This module is often conducted together with Coaching for Development.

Conflict Management

While conflict is often a natural outcome of differing opinions and styles, it can hide real issues and keep leaders from achieving optimal results. This module teaches leaders to identify issues at the source of conflict, determine alternatives, win support from others, get to win/win solutions, and give constructive feedback. We use a diagnostic instrument, Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, to provide a framework for participants to understand their style in dealing with conflict, which can help them to develop different approaches to effective communications in conflict resolution.

Cultural Collisions: The Challenges & Opportunities (Diversity Training)

This workshop focuses on increasing awareness of the kinds of issues that tend to be sensitive for people in today’s workplace, including stereotypes, cultural assumptions, and how easy it is to offend, even completely unintentionally. It also addresses how to communicate in situations where either you want someone to behave differently, or someone else is asking you to do so. There are several exercises that participants report as powerful and fun. This module is also part of Working with Differences.

Delegation

Sometimes what stands in the way of managers being truly effective is their ability to delegate appropriately. When employees are promoted because of their excellent technical skills, we shouldn’t be surprised when they keep exercising those skills. This module helps managers identify what they can and should delegate, and identifies tools and strategies to avoid feeling (or being) out of control.

Discipline & Discharge

This module identifies the stages at which it is appropriate and necessary to discipline and/or discharge an employee. Building on the skills developed in previous training, managers learn a variety of techniques to accomplish this most difficult of all managerial tasks while maintaining everyone’s personal dignity. We also review the legal issues involved in discipline and discharge. Role-playing is used to identify problem areas and give managers a chance to practice.

Diversity

See Cultural Collisions: The Challenges and the Opportunities

Employee Retention & Engagement Strategies

This session develops a framework for managers on what areas to prioritize for employee retention and engagement, especially following significant organizational change. It is based on theories and national data about the differences in priorities for individuals as they consider joining a company, staying with a company, and investing their full efforts into a company. Managers leave with practical tips and action items for maximizing employee retention and engagement.

Facilitating Effective Meetings

We spend our lives in meetings, but many of us have never been taught how to make them effective. This module teaches meeting leaders the principles of effective meetings and how to facilitate the difficult conversations that sometimes occur.

Hiring for High Performance

Hiring the right person can make many problems easier to solve, or never happen in the first place. This module identifies a process that greatly enhances the probability of hiring well. It includes steps of defining an open position, recruiting appropriate candidates, interviewing, assessing cultural and team fit, and negotiating an offer and acceptance. Legal issues, including appropriate interview questions, are also covered.

Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Using Daniel Goleman’s situational leadership model, this workshop provides leaders with a framework to evaluate their own leadership style and the style of those with whom they work. Participants identify their primary preferred style as well as styles that could help them become more effective in particular situations. This popular module is supplemented by a Harvard Business Review article, “Management that Gets Results.”

Leading Through Others: Leadership Training Modules for Mid-Managers

These mid-management leadership topics can be combined in any way that makes sense to fit the client’s particular needs.

Envisioning the Future: Leaders explore the critical need to articulate a vision and communicate it effectively over and over again.
Strategy Implementation: Managers learn a model for identifying key stakeholders for an initiative. Participants have an opportunity to analyze their real-life projects to see how they can enroll others in support of their projects more effectively.
Building Cross-Functional Partnerships: Principles of influence are discussed in this section, including when it is appropriate to use the techniques discussed. Depending on the objectives, various team simulations and games may be used.
Corporate Life Cycle: This session presents the Adizes corporate life cycle model, then leads participants in a discussion of their organization’s current status and its implications for leadership.

Managing within the Law

Managers can put a company at risk for claims by employees–or be the company’s best defense against expensive litigation. This module reviews the top five bases for employment claims: equal employment opportunity laws, wage and hour regulations, contractual rights, constitutional rights, and labor relations laws. Using a case study approach based on actual workplace scenarios, this session reviews the main laws governing the rights and responsibilities of employers and employees and helps managers understand how their own conduct can protect against claims or open the company to liability. Managers learn to recognize danger zones and identify early signs of potential trouble, and get practical advice on how to avoid problems and what to do first when things go wrong.

Managing Remote Employees

As companies expand their markets across states, country, and globe, their office locations and employees also become distributed across regions and countries. While technology has improved our ability to communicate across long distances, managing employees in different locations and time zones is not the same as managing them all in one place. How do you keep remote employees engaged and connected to the larger company? How do you ensure that they are productive? This session gives managers the tools and techniques to be effective in their unique situations.

Performance Management

This module provides a step-by-step overview of the performance management process, including developing performance expectations, writing effective performance reviews, and conducting the review conversation itself. Depending on the length of the module, customized case studies can be used to provide relevant examples for discussion and practice.

Strategic Staffing (Effective Workforce Planning)

In today’s financial times, it is critical to have the right workforce in place to meet your business goals. This means identifying the needs and gaps in your workforce, considering alternatives to hiring new staff, and understanding the costs for each alternative. When hiring new staff, it’s essential to understand the full financial burden of finding and hiring new employees. This session teaches your managers these key business management principles so they can reach their business targets without overstaffing for the future.

Team Building

Based on The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, this powerful module strives to build an intact work group into an effective, cohesive team, using tools, assessments, engaging exercises, and real world examples. Lencioni’s model focuses on trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results.

Working with Differences

A combination of two of our most popular modules (See Cultural Collisions - The Challenges and the Opportunities and Harassment and Discrimination Prevention), this program starts with increasing awareness of potential sensitivities in today's workplace ("caution signs"), and then helps participants understand the conduct that puts both them and the organization at risk of complaints and potential legal action ("stop signs").