Workplace Skills

HRD620 - Effective Meetings

How to manage meetings to make them more effective, more productive and more timely.

• Building effective agendas
• Handling challenging participants
• Dealing with conflict
• Alternatives to meetings

Please look for this workshop again in our Spring Quarter offerings. Registration opens February 1st.
Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD600 - Building Relationships I: Emotional Intelligence

This workshop teaches methods to gain cooperation and understanding from coworkers, supervisors, instructors, students, and others. It also provides coping strategies for interpersonal conflicts and stressful situations. Participants have the opportunity to analyze their own communication and preferred work styles using the DiSC Profile, and they acquire strategies to adapt their styles to the four primary styles encountered at work.

Key Points

• Use body language and tone of voice to defuse the intensity of an interaction
• Respond to ultimatums and emotional situations
• Deal with unfair criticism
• Use techniques that promote cooperation
• Avoid defensiveness in daily interactions
• Negotiate reasonable expectations

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD610 - Building Relationships II: Intercultural Communication

This customized and highly interactive workshop provides the insight and skills needed to communicate and work effectively in a multicultural university environment.

Key Points

• Impact of culture in the workplace
• Identifying assumptions and avoiding stereotypes
• Behavior and communication patterns that promote harmonious relationships

*$50 no-show/cancellation fee. Chart string (formerly CUFS) required to register.*
Workshop Locations		Back to top

HRD640 - Time Management Secrets

This workshop proves that managing one's time and one's life doesn't require expensive leather schedulers and electronic calendars. It offers secrets behind planning, selecting priorities, setting goals, and organizing the work environment.

Key Points

• Recognize the importance of developing goals, setting objectives, and prioritizing work
• Identify and eliminate personal and environmental time wasters
• Create and analyze a time-usage log
• Create an efficient work environment
• Create a personal facilitation list
• Use a daily activities schedule

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD680 - Recruiting and Hiring Great Staff for Northwestern

Organized around Northwestern's seven-step recruitment process, this workshop provides great tools and resources for expediting the hiring process and making good hiring decisions.

Key Points

• Navigating Northwestern's recruitment and hiring process
• Opening and posting a position
• Advertising and networking
• Screening candidate resumes
• Preparing for and conducting interviews and phone screening
• Hiring and onboarding new employees

*$50 no-show/cancellation fee. Chart string (formerly CUFS) required to register.*
Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD670 - Customer Service Techniques

This workshop teaches techniques for creating and maintaining positive work relationships with students, faculty, and staff.

Key Points

• Recognize and respond to unspoken customer expectations
• Develop processes that foster positive customer interactions
• Prepare form letters and customized documents that anticipate objections and prevent resentment
• Deal with irate clients in person and over the phone
• Improve questioning, listening, and nonverbal communication skills

Please look for this workshop again in our Spring Quarter offerings. Registration opens February 1st.

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD500 - Better Business Grammar and Usage

Their tone and content may be serious, but letters, memos, e-mail messages, proposals, and reports with grammatical or punctuation errors won't be taken seriously. In this two-part workshop, participants learn how to avoid embarrassing mistakes in everyday business correspondence by getting a comprehensive, confidence-building review of the basic rules of grammar, capitalization, word usage, sentence structure, and punctuation.

Key Points

• Identify and use the eight parts of speech correctly
• Write clear, complete sentences, fix sentence fragments and run-on sentences
• Spot and correct errors of agreement, consistency problems and pronoun mistakes, and misplaced or dangling modifiers
• Change passive voice to active voice
• Use that/which, who/whom appropriately
• Spot and correct missing or misplaced periods, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, apostrophes, hyphens, dashes
• Use colons, semicolons, parentheses, and ellipses correctly

**This two-part workshop meets once a week over two consecutive weeks; please plan to attend both dates.**

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD530 - Writing for Results: Effective Letters, Memos, and E-mail Messages

At the least, poorly written letters, memos, and e-mail message waste time and cause miscommunication. At worst, they are not read at all. This workshop will teach participants to organize and write strong, action-oriented business correspondence to get the reader's attention and the desired results.

Key Points

• Analyze your audience and define your purpose
• Effectively organize your ideas and information
• Choose the appropriate tone and style
• Write strong opening and closing paragraphs
• Reduce rambling and get to the point right away
• Use format and type to emphasize your main ideas
• Revise and edit for overall organization and coherence

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD520 - Writing Difficult Messages

Rejecting an applicant, denying a request, issuing an apology, or responding to a complaint can be delicate. A masterfully written letter or memo can build goodwill or, at the very least, minimize negative feelings. This workshop will teach successful ways to approach difficult correspondence and communicate bad news tactfully.

Key Points

• Decide what and how much to say
• Choose the appropriate tone and style
• Soften a negative message but get the point across
• Say no and still maintain goodwill
• Choose when and how to deliver the message
• Write five different types of difficult messages

Please look for this workshop in our Spring Quarter offerings. Registration opens February 1st.
Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD650 - Project Management Essentials

This workshop will help both new and experienced project managers review ways to produce a realistic and manageable project timeline. Participants learn the concepts and processes which can be applied to setting project goals, identifying project deliverables, and effectively estimating and measuring progress.

Key Points

• Identify the project management processes
• Create a Scope Document
• Schedule project activities
• Estimate and allocate resources
• Control project progress
• Conduct a post-project review

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD630 - Effective Presentation Skills

Participants learn to tailor and customize their presentations to meet the needs of the audience.

• Getting others to see your point of view
• Reducing nervousness and building confidence (No more shaky voice!)
• Keeping control of the group
• Improving content delivery
• Using PowerPoint and other tools effectively

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD660 - Grace under Pressure

It's that sort of day.

The phone is ringing off the hook. You're put on the spot in a meeting. All the problems are getting dumped in your lap.

You can feel yourself becoming reactive. You know you're not thinking clearly, that you're not being effective, but you don't know what to do. How can you turn a bad situation around?

“Grace Under Pressure” offers new tools for remaining calm, focused and open-minded during difficult encounters – real physical techniques that counteract what our bodies do during stress.

Many of these new approaches come from recent brain research.

In this lively, memorable half-day workshop, you'll go far beyond theory. You'll practice these techniques and make them your own, ready to put to use the next morning – or even on the way home that night.

Key Points

• Maintain composure in difficult situations
• Reduce stress on the spot
• Reverse the “fight or flight” reaction
• Think more clearly under pressure
• Be more present in difficult situations

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD665 - Maximize Your Strengths

According to a Gallup poll, only 37% on Americans felt that knowing your strengths versus your weaknesses would help them improve the most.   But due to the growing interest in positive psychology, we're increasing our awareness that a strengths-based approach to development and excellence is more powerful, and practical.   The key to developing your strengths is to first identify your natural talents.  This workshop will set you on the path to express and contribute your talents to help you achieve a higher level of performance and satisfaction at work.

Key Points

• What are strengths
• Understand your unique strengths profile
• Develop steps to leverage your strengths
• Gain understanding for the strengths of others

Bonus: You will receive Gallup's bestseller ‘StrengthsFinder 2.0'. It is recommended that the book be read before the workshop. The book provides you with a pin code which allows you to complete their on-line self-assessment.  This assessment must be done before the workshop in order to benefit fully from it.

You will also receive a private, one-on-one coaching session (via phone) with the facilitator.

Please look for this workshop in our Spring Quarter offerings. Registration opens February 1st.
Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD960 - Advanced Communication Skills: How to Hold Difficult Conversations with Your Staff, Peers or Manager

Crucial conversations take place every day in our work. You know the type -- conversations where there are high stakes, differences of opinion, and strong emotion. The difference between mediocre and top performance lies not in strategies, hardware, or even in processes, but in how people handle those difficult conversations. At the heart of all problems in a team or organization are conversations that are either not being handled, or not being handled well.

Key Points

• Identify the conversations that are keeping you from your desired results
• Speak persuasively not abrasively, no matter the topic
• Make it safe for others to share their honest opinions
• Deal with people who either clam up or blow up
• Gain control of your own emotional responses
• Disagree without being disagreeable
• Influence without exerting force

This is a practical and powerful 1.5 day workshop that is geared towards managers, though open to all staff.  This workshop typically costs $995 and is called Crucial Conversations , based on the book of the same name, one of the top 10 bestselling business books in 2005.

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD810 - Take the WORK out of Networking*

Effective Networking, Social Networking, Professional Networking... we know it's important, but sometimes it's just not that easy to do.  In fact, sometimes it all sounds like a lot of work.  Building our internal network can help us collaborate more effectively, find and connect with mentors, gain more influence in our organization, AND build our career.  Join Dale Carnegie Training - the originator of the concept of influenced-based results, to learn and apply some tools to make networking work for us!  

In this 90-minute workshop, Dale Carnegie Facilitator and Senior Consultant Amy Beck will lead us in building our ability to:

• See networking's role in our current environment
• Apply a specific process to networking conversations
• Make networking meaningful, easy and fun
• Leverage human relations principles to build trust
• Be deliberate in directed conversations that get results

*Continuing Education Units (CEUs) available for this course.

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD540 - Proofread Like a Pro

Proofreading is more than just rereading what has been written. Good proofreaders can identify mistakes and improve the quality of writing even under tight deadlines. By using numerous in-class exercises, this workshop will teach you proven tips and techniques to perfect your documents. You will learn how to:

• Use several successful proofreading strategies
• Proofread for overall coherence and organization
• Spot and correct the most common mechanical errors

Workshop Locations	Back to top

HRD615- Managing Up: A Partnership Involving Expectations, Success, and Continuous Improvement for You and Your Boss

A harmonious, productive workplace relationship with your manager is one of the most important factors in your job satisfaction and success. If you work well and communicate effectively with your boss, you’re more likely to remain at your organization and sustain your success there. This highly interactive workshop can help you learn how and why.

Key points

• Get expert tips on the best ways to approach your manager.
• Quickly determine and clarify your manager’s expectations.
• Learn to “give your boss feedback” about things that are sensitive.
• Bring your best to your workplace relationship with your supervisor (and get his/hers in return)

Workshop Locations	Back to top

For more information, please contact Learning & Organization Development at training@northwestern.edu or 847-467-5081.