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… of Program Design & Framing
Step 1:
Assessing Team Needs. Understanding the Present & Future Direction
We discuss, initially, with your administration or management
team where it is you are and where it is you want to go as a business.
Our focus in these conversations is clearly not to take on a business consulting role,
but rather to listen and understand the short and long term focuses of
the organization.
Understanding your culture and how it works in relation
to your business goals is important to us in creating the right developmental
opportunity.
Step 2: Understanding the Opportunities. Specific
Issues & Barriers
We
need to understand your specific concerns; what it is you feel may present
barriers to meeting and exceeding organizational goals. Seeing the opportunities
for improvement and development within your specific culture are key elements
to the design and framing of our programs.
 We may even use this step to research issues and barriers from an employee
perspective. Using written or verbal feedback tools, the option is there
to research what is it the employees feel represent the opportunities for
betterment… 'employee success planning''.
In meeting with your management team, we may define opportunities such
as, for example, the need to build stronger relationships within the team,
build respect and understanding for the roles of others or a focus on developing
more effective communication channels between departments within the organization.
Together we work to define the direction in which we focus our training
opportunities.
Below are just some of the areas of focus we tend to discuss in understanding
the specific issues and barriers as we move on to Step 3:
- communication concerns,
- understanding and respecting the roles of others,
- motivational issues,
- working together as a team,
- bridging the gap between management and work teams,
- effectively dealing with change,
- problem solving,
- meeting deadlines, goal setting,
- taking ownership,
- celebrating successes, handling work stress…
Step 3: Defining the Areas of Focus. Pulling Together the Information
Now we can pull together what we know about the
overall picture and the specific issues that are effecting the outcome.
We partner with your HR team, management team or decision-makers as necessary
to Define the Areas of Focus. That is, we define what issues we are going
to focus on as we
move on to the developmental process. This literally comes down to creating
3 to 5 short phrases that serve as our main focus for the training.
For example:
- Relationship building. Learning more about the individuals on our team.
- Enhancement of communication opportunities between the design team and the marketing team. Valuing those opportunities.
- At the source, taking ownership of customer concerns as they are presented.
- Celebrating our small successes as an organization. Appreciating others.
Step 4: Creating Program Options and making a Choice that Fits
Our team can now go to work in creating options that are specifically
designed to meet the needs of your team.  We can utilize a wide array
of experiences,indoors or outdoors, in-house or externally, that
will provide maximum benefit and a clear opportunity to transfer the learning
back to
the workplace. Usually 2 or 3 options will be presented and discussed
as we, together, make a choice that fits.
By isomorphically framing many of the experiences, we set up a clear path to ensuring that the delivery offers powerful results.
Step 5: The Delivery and Follow-up; A Facilitation Team Focus
The success of program delivery is based primarily on two factors:
- the time and commitment that we put in to the program development process and,
- the skills and abilities of our Facilitators. This makes up our foundation
as a business. Using an experiential-based approach coupled with in-depth
debriefs, our team works during delivery to facilitate powerful learnings
and make effective transfers back to the workplace.
How we frame the learnings
is something that remains flexible. Some teams like to leave with formal
commitments, others prefer to let participants
digest the information and come back with ideas and commitments at future
meetings. Either way, the participants on the team, as an effectively
facilitated approach would suggest, are the ones who provide the answer
to: 'what does
this all mean to the organization and what will I do to make it happen?"
A follow-up with the organization, in some format, is important. We use
this to debrief the program, to evaluate the
process and to make decisions
on the next step. This helps us to ensure that we have clearly been able
to harness the opportunities that were created during program delivery.
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