Preconference Workshops

Workshop 1
Nine Methods for Needs Assessment
Jean Barbazette, The Training Clinic

Practice using 9 types of needs assessment to gather information about the training needs in an organization and learn how to translate those needs into training plans and training programs. Assessments include performance analysis, goal analysis, needs versus wants analysis, target population analysis, task analysis, contextual analysis and three tools to use appropriate training methods. Special emphasis is given to developing questionnaire and surveys and interpreting survey data, and presenting training plans to management.

Learning Objectives:
  • Measure your organization's training needs using 9 types of needs assessments and interpret assessment data
  • Develop a specific training plan that is based on data, achievable and cost justified
  • Find sources for assessment instruments or design assessment tools and write effective questionnaires.

Workshop 2
Turning Classroom Trainers Into Online Facilitators
Jennifer Hofmann, InSync Training, Inc.

Just as moving content from the traditional classroom to the online environment is not a simple transition, moving to the live virtual classroom requires that facilitators develop skills that maximize engagement and learning for their participants.

After discussing the changing roles of the training team, and creating a job description for the online facilitator, you will learn about the many roles you may fill as an online facilitator, and how to work with a production team to ensure the transfer of learning.

We will give special attention to creating effective learning environments for your participants and maximizing the engagement level of your audience using facilitation techniques specific to the online environment. You will take away templates that will assist you in preparing to deliver online learning events.

Learning Objectives:

  • Examine the changing roles of the training team and the new knowledge, skills and abilities necessary for online facilitator success
  • Determine the appropriate online event type based on desired outcomes, resources and time available
  • Engage remote participants by creating effective learning environments and utilizing facilitation techniques specific to the online environment

Workshop 3
Large Group Scenario Planning
Gilbert Steil, Gil Steil Associates and Michelle Gibbons-Carr, Phoenix Consulting

What if China's economy collapses? What if bird flu jumps to dogs? What if a new fuel cell can power a home cheaper than Green Mountain Power?

The future of the global economy, global health and global technology are just three areas of future uncertainty. Many planning situations need to look this uncertainty in the eye - not all uncertainties, just the critical uncertainties for an organization's strategy and operation. The Large Group Scenario Planning one-day workshop will cover a method of designing and facilitating planning sessions that look at more than one possible future world. You will leave the workshop with the skills to do this for your client or for your organization.

The focus of the morning will be the creation and experience of four plausible and different future worlds that an organizational system may encounter. The focus of the afternoon will be strategy development, first within four separate worlds and then integrated into a single strategy.

You will learn to design strategy sessions wherein organizational systems create scenarios, examine the implications of alternative futures, and move from the scenarios to strategy development. Pre-work will be sent to you after you register.

Learning Objectives:
  • Apply the key elements of a large-group scenario planning session to your own programs
  • Create large-group scenario planning sessions for your organization
  • Use the core principles of large-group interventions in a new way

Workshop 4
Preparing Global Leaders: Intercultural Skills for Increased Competence
Heather Keller, Successfully Communicating

By exploring the differences of workplace behaviors across cultures, this pre-conference workshop is designed to provide you with an understanding of how culture impacts organizations and the people who comprise them. During this workshop, you will learn effective practices for communicating across cultures and managing multicultural teams both within the U.S. and abroad. The strategies that successful managers employ when interacting with people from a wide range of cultures, including Asia, Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, will be examined. By increasing your awareness and understanding of cultural differences in motivation, negotiation, and decision-making practices, you will learn how to successfully lead across cultures.

Learning Objectives:

  • Communicate and lead effectively in a variety of cross-cultural contexts
  • Analyze your work behavior and adapt it accordingly when working across cultures
  • Create cultural synergy among multicultural and international team members.

Workshop 5
The Power of Peer Mentoring Groups
Aly McNicoll, New Zealand Mentoring Center

This workshop introduces you to a unique approach to mentoring and coaching that doesn't rely on the presence of an identified expert in the room - a coach. Leadership mentoring groups are an effective way to spread core coaching skills throughout an entire organization and make best use of what is probably the most valuable learning resource the organization has—its own people.

This pre conference workshop shows you how to set up and run effective mentoring groups, introduces you to the peer mentoring toolkit - 7 tools for leadership mentoring groups, provides you with opportunities to experience the power of this simple yet effective technique by using the tools in small groups. The trick to mentoign groups lasting the distance is to ensure that they will be the meetings that people never want to miss.

Having evaluated this leading edge technology and having heard how organizations in New Zealand and Australia are using leadership mentoring groups to add value to their leadership programs, you will be able to identify how you might use it for yourself or your organisation to promote continuous learning as a way of being.

Learning Objectives:

  • Define peer mentoring
  • Set up and run effective leadership mentoring groups
  • Use a range of structured mentoring tools to learn from their own and others' experiences
  • Facilitate a leadership mentoring group
  • Evaluate peer mentoring as an approach for professional support and leadership development.

Workshop 6
Coaching Leadership: Essential Collaborative Skills
James Tamm, Business Consultants Network, Inc.

Participants from nine countries in a six year follow up study increased their ability to build and maintain climates of trust by 26%, their ability to get their interests met in conflict by 45% and reduced their defensiveness by 50% by focusing on five essential collaborative skills. All five skills are easily coachable. In this highly interactive session participants will learn practical and immediately useful information first developed in a Hewlett Foundation/State of California joint pilot project to teach collaborative skills in adversarial work environments. Participants will be guided through the skills and will dramatically improve their ability to both teach collaboration and build their own collaborative relationships. Using methods supported by research, the workshop will focus upon (1) Collaborative intention, (2) Creating truthful environments, (3) Developing self-accountability, (4) Increasing self-awareness, and (5) Negotiating though conflict.

Learning Objectives:

  • Reduce your defensiveness
  • Build and maintain climates of trust.

Workshop 7
Deliver Measurable Business Impact From Learning Investments
Robert Brinkerhoff, Western Michigan University

Today's learning leader is expected to deliver measurable business impact from the resources entrusted to the learning department. Yet frustration exists in how to do this and how to demonstrate the value delivered. In this session you can expect to learn a simple yet powerful process to consistently deliver business impact from learning investments, acquire a set of tools and methods to become a valued business partner in the their organizations, and learn how to demonstrate business impact in a clear and credible way that executive level leaders believe. All of this happens through a day-long case study that utilizes the tools, methods and processes needed to deliver business value.

Learning Objectives:

  • Partner with senior leaders to get their sponsorship and support for learning initiatives
  • Implement learning to get maximum support and coachiing from learners' managers
  • Demonstrate business impact and continually improve the value of training investments.

Workshop 8
Show Me the Money: Measuring ROI for People, Projects, and Programs
Jack Phillips, ROI Institute

This powerful workshop will teach learning and development managers how to show the impact of programs, projects, and initiatives. Using a proven methodology being used in over 2,000 organizations, this workshop will show participants how to measure the impact of programs including ROI, communicate data in a compelling way, and use data to drive improvement and build respect for programs.

Learning Objectives:

  • Make the business case for "showing the money" for a few select programs
  • Identify the steps, guiding principles, and issues involved in "showing the money"
  • Use impact and ROI data to drive improvement and change.

Workshop 9
Measure Business Impact: Micro and Macro Perspectives
Reza Sisakhti, Productivity Dynamics, Inc.

Learning executives and professionals are constantly challenged to demonstrate the value created by investment made in learning and performance improvement initiatives. Meeting this multifaceted challenge requires determining how to measure at both micro and macro levels:

  • The effectiveness and business impact of individual initiatives (micro perspective)
  • The integrated impact of multiple initiatives on a single audience, e.g., sales, services, or management (macro perspective)
  • The cumulative impact of learning investment over time on meta-variables, such as retention, employee morale, productivity, customer satisfaction, or partner loyalty (macro perspective).

This workshop introduces three measurement frameworks evolved from best practices to address these challenges. You will gain tools, processes, and lessons learned from implementation of frameworks in corporations such as Verizon, Cisco, and IBM. You will be challenged to analyze cases, apply criteria for selection of appropriate measurement frameworks, and collaborate on preparing measurement plans for collecting, analyzing, and reporting results.

Learning Objectives:

  • Prepare a "business value chain" for the initiatives that describes the desired behaviors on the job and business measures that are impacted by participants' behaviors on the job
  • Select the most appropriate measurement framework to meet the measurement challenges faced by the organization and prepare a measurement plan for assessing the effectiveness and impact within a selected framework.

Workshop 10
Tools for Transforming Our Work
Richard Bolles, What Color is Your Parachute; Warren Farrell, Warren Farrell

The Bolles-Porot Model (BPM), tested over a period of 30 years in 14 different countries, has three basic tenets: - To be effective leaders or trainers, we must master two basic skills above all others: how to move or how to stay. That is, how to move ourselves or others out of a draining work situation or how to transform our work or theirs, if we have to stay right where we are. - The primary problem in working with others is not lack of new program options but lack of clarity about our own abilities. - We must not adopt any process or program for training or developing others that we have not first run our own lives through. In this interactive workshop, the speakers will explore these BPM tenets in depth. The day will include presentations, research, music, fluorescent light, paper-and-pencil exercises, and games. The speakers have taught together for more than 20 years and will engage you in a productive and interesting journey.