Training Programs

INITIATE specializes in 3 core areas of human development – 1) Relationships, 2) Performance Management, and 3) Personal Transformation.  We offer innovative and personalized training programs under each of these 3 unique and important areas. Each program is tailored to your specific goals and development needs and therefore is designed to add value to your employees and organization. Our training programs use a combination of theory, case studies, games and activities, training videos, and films to appeal to participant’s unique learning styles. Please click on any one of the programs below to learn more.

Effective Communication

Communication is such an integral part of our lives. Our ability to communicate effectively with others determines the extent to which we can build good working relationships. While we learnt how to write or speak a language in school we did not get the opportunity to learn or practice how to communicate effectively with others. It is not surprising therefore to hear of people having challenges communicating with each other. INITIATE can design a communication skills program to promote increased mutual understanding, respect, and tolerance among employees. This creates a more productive working atmosphere in the work environment. An environment in which employees can remain more focused, work together more effectively, and ultimately contribute to the best of their ability. Contact us to discover how we can help make your employee’s more dynamic communicators.

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Meaningful Meetings

How many productive and fun meetings have you participated in the last while? How much time do you spend in meetings wishing you could be working on something else? Today most employees expect to participate in meetings that will be tedious, will give them little opportunity to contribute, and will take longer than expected. INITIATE can help your organization overcome the challenge of ineffective meetings by creating and delivering a program that will create a new and higher standard of meeting management. Our meetings skills programs encourage employees to take real ownership for the meetings they participate in – irrespective if they are the meeting organizer. Contact us to learn how we can help make meetings an organization’s meetings more purposeful, participative, interesting, timely, and meaningful.

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Powerful Presentations

One of the most challenging things for people to do is speak in front of an audience.  Presenters often spend so much time developing the content for their presentation they forget about the most important thing – practicing their presentation. During our presentation skills programs, participants focus on developing the fundamentals of a presentation - their voice and body language. We help our participants to become more powerful, confident, and dynamic presenters so that they can engage their audiences. We emphasize areas like developing voice intonation, improving posture, the significance of gesturing, and impromptu presentations. Our presentation skills courses are designed to provide a safe learning environment where participants practice presenting and receive tips, positive feedback, and encouragement. Contact us to find out how small changes in your presentation skills can make a big difference.

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Team development ^NEW

In today’s working environment, teams need to come together quickly and work effectively towards a common vision and goals. Unless a team experiences challenges and works to establish team norms, it will never perform as a collaborative, communicative, and cohesive unit. INITIATE’s Team Development workshop uses a variety of games and exercises that mirror the working world to help teams transition through the first 3 stages of team development – forming, storming, and norming. INITIATE’s Team Development program is tailored to the current issues a team is facing so it is focused on team improvement. Each game or exercise targets important team skills such as team planning, information sharing, and resolving conflicts. By the end of this team intervention any team will feel energized and prepared to tackle any challenge they face. Contact us if you want to discuss how we can help a team improve their performance.

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Inspiring Confidence ^NEW

Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Model suggests that in order for an employee to perform at a high level to complete any task they require 3 important ingredients – competence, motivation, and confidence. While managers often invest large sums of time on transferring their knowledge and skills, and motivating their employees, they underestimate the role of confidence when it comes to performance. During the program, we introduce and explain the concept of confidence and its role in performance. We share groundbreaking research on the importance of confidence to help employee’s perform closer to their full potential.  Finally, we educate managers on how to consistently build self-confidence so that their employee’s confidence grows exponentially. At the end of the program, managers will have a clear understanding and a plan on how they will increase their employees’ self-confidence and create step-change growth in their employees’ performance. Contact us to learn more about this unique program.

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Maximizing Performance

One of the greatest challenges managers face today is to meet their performance goals and objectives while managing the various development needs of their employees. A manager’s ability to get his or her work done through others positively influences his or her ability to be a success in any organization. While many managers possess strong business or functional skills, they often lack the skills to train, coach, and develop their employees. INITIATE can develop programs that transfer the necessary knowledge and skills to help your managers maximize the performance of their employees. Some of the key modules we can design for you include: how to give feedback, training employees on-the-job, the performance appraisal discussion, SMART objective setting, motivating employees, how to delegate effectively, managing employee expectations, and managing under performers. Contact us to find out how we can tailor this program to your specific managers’ needs.

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Performance Coaching

Coaching is one of the most powerful skills a manager can develop to increase the performance level of his/her direct reports. Yet it is one of the most challenging skills for a manager to learn and develop. Coaching is about helping employees learn (instead of telling them what to do) so that employees can perform to their true potential. This requires managers to change their behavior from constantly telling, to listening and asking insightful questions. When a manager invests the time to coach his/her employees, the results can be profound. They find their employees more motivated, creative, engaged, and take responsibility for their work. They perform at a higher level.

To make this program of real value to participants, an Executive Coach facilitates elements of the program to provide in-depth knowledge and expertise. Further, the Executive Coach coaches each participant after the program to foster and encourage participants to develop their coaching skills in the work environment.

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Personal Leadership

It is not uncommon to hear the statement “That person is a born leader”. The majority of people believe that leadership is something that cannot be taught – you are either born with it or not. At INITIATE, we believe that leadership is not a title in an organization, but a skill that can be taught and developed. Anyone can choose to be a leader irrespective of the position they hold. A leader is someone who can set of vision for the future, and then motivate and enable others in the organization to achieve that vision. Leadership is a key building block to instigate change in an organization. Every organization requires strong leadership at all levels of the organization if it wants to grow. They need people to take responsibility and lead to create and implement new products, systems, and processes. Contact us to discover more about our unique view of leadership for all levels within your organization.

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Time for Change ^NEW

Change is a fact of life in all organizations. And yet change is the one thing employees, as well as managers, have the most difficulty dealing with. Employees’ reactions to change can vary from mild resistance, to feeling threatened, to actively sabotaging the change. It is only when employees are fully supportive and committed that change will be successful. To do this the employee effectively has to change his/her mindset and behavior. During the program, we lead participants from identifying the challenges and feelings associated with change to looking at change as an opportunity to redefine oneself.

We share concepts such as common responses to change, how to deal with the stress associated with change, creating a self-supportive work environment, how to cope and build resilience, and recognizing and redefining one’s skills to benefit from change.  Time for Change is co-facilitated by a student of transpersonal psychology who leverages her own personal experience and learning from change to help others transform the way the look at and respond to change.

This unique program can make a real difference to organizations implementing new systems or work processes, restructuring, or downsizing. We can tailor this program to support leaders and managers responsible for implementing and supporting people through change and/or to those responsible for accepting, supporting, and implementing the change. Contact us to learn more about how we can support your organization through change.

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