Personal Skills for Professional Excellence (4 day)

Course Overview

Working in today's dynamic environment is increasingly challenging. Managing yourself effectively and working productively with others is critical to your professional success.

In this course, you gain a comprehensive and proven set of professional skills that help you stay focused, work effectively with colleagues, develop your networks and expertise, and build your reputation for delivering results.

Audience

This course is valuable for everybody involved in working with people, projects or information. It benefits those taking on responsibility for the first time, as well as experienced managers who want to maximise their personal effectiveness.

Skills Gained

• Achieve maximum productivity and effectiveness in your organisation
• Build and leverage your professional reputation
• Get results working with different and difficult personality types
• Maintain focus in pressure situations
• Work productively within the political environment of your organisation
• Build and present persuasive proposals
• Make a balanced choice between professional and personal commitments

Course Outline

Introduction

• What professionalism really means
• The components of personal effectiveness

Realising Your Strengths and Fulfilling Your Potential

Evaluating your aptitudes, styles and potential growth areas

• Applying the Multiple Intelligences Model
• Compiling a personal strengths inventory
• Uncovering the talent paradox

The core elements of professional excellence

• The three Rs of effectiveness
• Building your professional reputation

Developing your professional power

• Analysing sources of professional authority
• Strategies for building influence

Managing yourself effectively

• Setting goals to maintain focus
• The secret of productive relaxation
• Scheduling your time effectively
• A healthy balance of work and play
• Maximising your attention to tasks

Enhancing Your Thinking Toolset

Understanding thinking processes

• Refining your mental models
• Revealing limiting mental frameworks

The core of interpersonal effectiveness

• Recognising the core process of human interaction
• Enhancing your emotional intelligence
• Analysing language to identify and understand motives and intentions

Achieving Results in Pressure Situations

Working productively with colleagues

• Identifying important players in your work environment
• Working with difficult coworkers
• Handling corporate game playing
• Being assertive without aggression
• Building productive relationships with upper management

Making meetings work for you

• Determining when a meeting is needed
• Keeping your meetings productive and professional

Managing stress productively

• Effective stress management techniques
• Positive vs. negative stress

Building Your Professional Reputation

Amplifying your effectiveness by networking

• The benefits of networking
• Networking dos and don'ts
• Contributing to physical and virtual networks

Constructing an effective political approach

• Why being political is necessary
• Countering political manipulation
• Being political with integrity

Preparing and Presenting Winning Proposals

Secrets of successful proposal writing

• Identifying what your audience needs
• The psychology of successful proposals
• Structuring your points in a logical and compelling order

Compiling an effective business case

• Identifying your true target
• Distinguishing hard and soft benefits

Presenting your proposal

• Selecting the best medium for messages
• Matching your presentation approach to audience needs and mood

Creating the Results You Want

Assembling a personal success strategy

• Mapping and evaluating your situation
• Identifying your long-term choices and goals
• Achieving balance among the five components of life

Controlling your work environment

• Why desks get cluttered-and how to solve this
• Handling interruptions and time wasters
• Analysing the choke points in your personal processes
• Reducing e-mail domination

Personal Skills for Professional Excellence (4 day) / 297