SkillSoft

Overview: Imagine what your organization would be like if you and your colleagues were not motivated. Motivation is what drives people to accomplish things, whether it be small tasks or large undertakings. Without motivation, things simply would not get done. The ability to create an environment that encourages motivation takes both practice and skill as it’s not a quality inherent in most people. As a leader, your capacity for motivating plays a key element in the success of your organization.

Overview: Today’s leaders must be able to communicate vision in such a way that the audience is engaged and everyone understands and internalizes the message. Effective leadership communication gives purpose and meaning to the work that people do. Leaders should strive to communicate vision with a sense of integrity, building trust as an individual and as a leader.

Overview: Poised, outgoing, cheerful, having empathy for others, being able to express feelings directly but appropriately, and having the capacity for developing relationships. All of these abilities distinguish individuals with high emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a more reliable predictor of success than intellect! Leaders with a strong mixture of emotional awareness, self-management, and social skills navigate relationships more effectively and are more likely to be successful in their personal and professional lives. This course provides you with an understanding of why emotional intelligence abilities are important as a leader. It also provides you with practical, positive techniques for promoting and improving emotional intelligence as a leader within your business environment.

Overview: Are you reluctant to voice your opinions to your colleagues for fear they’ll be judged negatively? Do you find yourself avoiding awkward communication situations? Confident interpersonal communication skills are essential for healthy and successful relationships, whether personal or professional. Once you’ve learned how to apply them, these skills enhance your influence and help you achieve your goals. Communicators have an enormous advantage if their relationships are based on rapport-building trust and credibility. But trust and credibility are not the only essentials. You also need to use specific communication behaviors to project confidence in all your verbal and nonverbal interactions.

Overview: Author and communication expert Anthony Robbins once said, ’To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.’ In other words, understanding who you’re talking to is as important as understanding what you’re trying to communicate. Additionally, it is important to understand the role the medium, context, and other variables have on the communication process so you can optimize factors that are under your control. To confirm that your message got through, the final step in the communication process is asking for and reviewing feedback from your audience.

Overview: Sir Winston Churchill said ’Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.’ Effective listening takes more than just courage; it also takes constant learning and practice. To prepare for effective listening, you need to identify and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of effective listening. You also need to be an attentive, empathetic, and active listener. When you engage in the technique of active listening, you focus your attention completely on the speaker, listen carefully for meaning, then use feedback to verify that you’ve correctly understood the communication.

Overview: Effective communication in the workplace can be a balancing act. If you’re too passive, you may have trouble getting others to do what you want. If you’re too aggressive, you may turn people off. Getting what you want in the workplace requires a balance of assertiveness without aggressiveness.

Overview: Walking into a meeting surrounded by unknown faces, going to conferences, attending work events, starting a new job, and even going to social gatherings can be daunting, especially if you don’t know anybody who will be there. Perhaps you worry about being ignored or not connecting with anyone and dread that awkward feeling of standing alone, off to the side. Do you wonder why people seem to be drawn to certain individuals in the room? Those individuals probably faced the same feelings of uncertainty entering the room as you did, but the difference may be that they appear to be more approachable than you do. Approachability involves conveying your willingness to reach out and invite others in by initiating contact, making yourself available, and building rapport.

Overview: The performance of any business depends upon the performance of everyone within the organization. To ensure that all staff are meeting their potential it is essential that there is a culture which enables feedback to be given and received. This course enables you to become familiar with the key aspects of giving candid, constructive feedback about performance. The purpose of this course is to enable you to enhance your skills in giving feedback. The course starts by exploring the nature of feedback, and it then develops a practical approach to the feedback process. Giving feedback is not always straightforward however, and so the final part of this course looks at barriers to giving feedback and strategies for dealing with situations where your feedback is challenged.

Overview: We all need feedback so that we can learn and improve. What we often get is criticism, or feedback given to us in such a way that we feel defensive or angry. When your emotions get involved, it is difficult to be objective and to use the feedback effectively. This course links the concept of emotional intelligence, and EQ, to the practice of receiving feedback. By doing this, it provides you with a powerful approach that enables you to deal effectively with criticism and feedback. You will learn how to seek feedback from those best able to help you, and how to deal with feedback, regardless of how it is given. Finally, you will learn how to make positive use of the feedback you receive.

Overview: Everyone needs good quality feedback in order to improve performance at work. In this course, you will discover how to provide effective feedback to colleagues at the same level as yourself, and to those above you, in the hierarchy of the organization. You will also learn how to deal effectively with challenging situations. In addition to considering the effectiveness of feedback, you will learn a logical process for giving feedback.

Overview: Teamwork is playing an increasingly significant role in the majority of today’s top companies. This is based on the assumption that working in teams leads to better business performance. In that case, you must ensure that team performance is managed effectively--feedback being of crucial importance. Feedback about how the team is performing, how individuals are contributing to the team’s performance, and how the team is being managed, are all vital. Managing team performance is complex, because effective teams depend on synergy between individual and team factors. In this course, you will learn what makes teams successful, and how effective feedback at team level contributes to this success. You will work through a process for giving feedback in a team situation, and explore methods for communicating feedback. In addition, you will consider how the team can be motivated and inspired through feedback, discover how the role of the team leader can be developed using 360 degree feedback, and how feedback can help you to deal with team performance issues.

Overview: The performance of your business depends upon the performance of every member of your staff. Thus a key skill for all who manage staff is the ability to provide candid, constructive feedback about performance. The purpose of this course is to enable you to enhance your skills in giving feedback. The course starts by exploring the nature of feedback, and it then develops a practical approach to the feedback process, detailing five logical steps. However, in some situations it is not always sensible to use a standard approach and so the course concludes by considering how to cope with challenging situations, such as giving feedback to the staff member who is angry or upset.

Overview: Do you feel the need to better understand the basic meaning of a conversation, or a presentation given at the workplace? What about the need to identify what is being said to you in a more effective manner? Although relatively straightforward in theory, the process that transforms effective listening into successful communication requires great skill, awareness, and practice.

Overview: There are many factors and variables that influence the way we listen. Listening to understand and being able to truly identify what is being said to you is often easier said than done. Internal and external roadblocks can interfere with how we listen and interpret the information communicated to us.

Overview: Regardless of how talented the individual members of your team are, they can only get your team so far alone. To maximize their potential, teams rely on the participation, input, and opinions of all team members. Learning to speak up and encouraging others to open up are important to a team’s success. Effective communication is the fuel that will keep your team going to the finish line.

Overview: A crucial component of optimal team performance is the ability of all team members to openly express their ideas, goals, and needs, as well as share thoughts about each other’s performance both positive and negative. The same principle applies when it comes to receiving feedback. It’s far better to hear the truth directly than to assume your performance is the best it can be.

Overview: To write effective and appropriate business messages, you need to know your readers. Are you addressing multiple readers or a single reader? How much knowledge do your readers have of your subject, and what issues concern them most? These are just some of the questions to consider before you start writing your message. Closely tied with knowing your readers is knowing your purpose for writing. Do you need to inform customers about a new policy, or do you need to persuade employees to adopt a new business practice? Knowing your purpose will focus your message, making it clear to readers why it is important to them.

Overview: People who have no problem communicating clearly when they speak sometimes struggle to make themselves understood when they write. That’s because the ability to write clearly and concisely is a skill that requires effort to master. Acquiring this skill gives you the tools to create effective business documents for readers who lack the time or the patience to search for essential information buried in long, rambling e-mails or reports.

Overview: When it comes to business writing, most individuals don’t really appreciate the importance of editing and proofreading a document before sending it. But have you ever distributed a document or message only to find later that you forgot to include a key point or correct an embarrassing spelling error? Reviewing is a crucial stage in the writing process. It entails editing for clarity, tone, accuracy, and completeness, and also proofreading for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Carelessness reflects badly on you, your work, and your organization. Taking the time to edit and proofread your writing will help you produce more focused, polished, and effective business documents.

Overview: There are a number of basic types of presentations, but all presentations have four things in common: a presenter, an audience, a venue, and a message. This course concentrates on showing how each of these vital elements has to be taken into account when preparing a presentation. Presenting is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced, starting with how you prepare, and you will be shown a simple but powerful method for selecting the right content, and then structuring it. Controlling nerves is an important part of preparing, and this course helps you to remove anxieties in the presentation environment by making sure that the venue is set up correctly, and ensuring that you rehearse appropriately.

Overview: So, the presentation is prepared and practiced. Great. But this means nothing to the audience. When you stand there in front of them, all that matters to them is what you look like and what you say.

Overview: This course is about making effective use of resources that can take the pressure off you--visual aids, questions, and making a team presentation.

Overview: Advancements in communication technology have given us instant access to boundless information, but the gains in efficiency and productivity have come at a cost. This Business Impact explores the causes of information overload and explores some practical ways to cope with it.

Overview: Regardless of how talented the individual members of your team are, they can only get your team so far alone. To maximize their potential, teams rely on the participation, input, and opinions of all team members. Learning to speak up and encouraging others to open up are important to a team’s success. Effective communication is the fuel that will keep your team going to the finish line.

Overview: You have a team established and everyone is committed to the team goals. However, a common focus is not always enough to help your team achieve success. You must ensure that team members can communicate with you and with one another, and that they will work as a team rather than as individuals.

Overview: As teams mature, they’re able to perform more independently. Accordingly, team leaders must shift their role to one of maintaining motivation and optimizing team member performance. This ensures that their teams continue to perform at peak levels. The early stages of team development are about establishing the purpose of the team and its key goals, but once the team is up and running, the leader has a prominent role to play in guiding the team to success.

Overview: Successful teams are characterized by having a clear direction, trust among team members, effective communication, and the ability to quickly resolve conflict. In the early stages of team development, leaders must set up structures and processes that support the development of these team characteristics. Effective leadership is particularly required during the Storming stage of team development when conflict tends to be at its highest. The survival of the team depends on a team leader who can quickly recognize conflict, diagnose its cause, and use strategies to resolve the issue. In doing so, the leader restores trust and positive working relationships among team members.