ABS Personal Management Program

This quarter has seen Talent Solutions deliver a series of workshops for the Australian Bureau of Statistics in Canberra. The Personal Management Program is designed to provide emerging leaders with the foundational leadership skills needed for self and people management. The program focuses on developing emotional self-awareness and management as well as understanding the fundamentals of team effectiveness and individual difference.

The most recently completed workshop was delivered by one of our experienced facilitators for 16 participants over two days and received exceptional feedback. Some participant comments include:

• Really positive and encouraging.
• The course was very helpful and relevant to my work situation.
• I really enjoyed this course – I think I got a lot out of it and I should be able to implement a lot of it in the workplace.
• I thought the presenter was excellent. She made the two days very interesting and interactive (but not in an uncomfortable way). She did a really good job!
• Enjoyable and instructive, I learnt skills which I can hopefully apply in my work.

Intelligent Leadership™

We recently delivered a series of workshops for finance executives from a global resource company based on developing the key Emotional Intelligence (EI) abilities that underpin leadership effectiveness. Our Intelligent Leadership™ one-day workshops were extremely well received with several participants seeking opportunities to delve further into the topic and extend their knowledge of EI. This reinforces the continued demand for EI development in many large multi-national organisations as they address the need to equip their leaders to deal with the challenges of organisational change.

These workshops were facilitated by our Managing Director and received excellent feedback:

• 100 percent of participants believed that the program met their development needs.
• 88 percent of participants “strongly agreed” that the topic was relevant to their role.
• 100 percent of participants believed that the workshop was well worth attending and that they would recommend it to others.

Some participant comments included:

• Great tools/techniques to take back to the workplace.
• Very easy to understand, explained concepts with good context and examples.
• I would like to do more of this. Another day to further explore and do some more applied
• Techniques would be useful.
• Enjoyed the course, good mix of theory and practical application, enough time for all the content, good applicability to work.
• A worthwhile program. Opens your mind and provides useful tools.
  

Supervision and Coaching

Our ongoing work with a high profile NSW Government Department continues to develop as we now embark on the next stage of a major cultural transformation. We recently developed and delivered a series of two-day workshops designed to assist managers with the three types of conversations they have with their staff. These include the ‘business as usual’, coaching and performance improvement conversations that operational managers face on a daily basis.

This program was specifically tailored to meet the needs of a unique workforce that deals in a difficult and highly sensitive public service area. Our program has a practical focus with an emphasis on skills acquisition with real-life scenarios based on high quality research by our instructional design team.

The program supports and enhances a suite of operational programs that guide management decision making when faced with ethical leadership situations in the workplace. Talent Solutions also designed and delivered these programs as a precursor to the Supervision and Coaching workshops. In this instance we adopted a strategic design approach that involved engagement and involvement from a wide range of key stakeholders including senior executives within the Department. This process ensured consistency and agreement to communicating key operational processes that ensured ethical decision making and reporting occurred throughout the organisation.

Our results have proven so effective that we have been retained to continue rolling this suite of programs out to all operational managers within the Department throughout 2007.