Workshops 

Innovative Creative Solutions presents High Performance workshops in many different formats

• Public Workshops - Attend one of our many half-day workshops delivered monthly. 

• In-House workshops - Let Innovative Creative Solutions bring the workshops to you! We can deliver any of our half-day workshops at your location.

• Have Innovative Creative Solutions help you set up a company getaway.  We can deliver multiple workshops over a one, two or three day period of time. Let us help you take your employee performance to the next level! 

Workshops

• Building Your Team for Success - Proven Strategies for Superior Work Teams
  Create a powerful team and build it for success using proven strategies that really work. Tips include establishing a charter to give the team vision, implementing shared leadership to empower employees, setting goals and keeping score, and making decisions and solving problems as a team. Point of interest: The group exercise in this workshop matches personality types with cartoon faces and encourages discussion on the variety of personalities on teams.

• Becoming Customer Focused - How to Make Stand-out Service Your Organization’s Finest Asset
  You will learn how to handle tough customers with panache, sensitivity, and skill. Present your best image to customers using body language, dispute resolution skills, and telephone etiquette. Motivate your employees to make customer service their #1 priority. Point of interest: Visual exercise challenges members to change their perspective using a simple black dot.

• Mastering the Art of Time Management - Proven Strategies for Raising Productivity
  Raise productivity using the art of time management. You’ll be given proven tips for organizing work space, creating a master list to prioritize work, using a daily planner to track projects, and controlling time-stealing appointments. Point of interest: Using a pegboard as a backdrop, participants will discuss inefficiency vs. efficiency in a group exercise.

• Conflict Resolution - Resolving Conflicts the Right Way
  Unhealthy conflict destroys good will and causes defensiveness, anger, blame, and resentment. The class will explore conflict resolution techniques like minimizing friction before it turns into a disagreement, approaching conflict situations using five resolution styles, and finding win-win solutions. Point of interest: The visual exercise in this workshop uses simple shapes to show how problems become exaggerated in our minds.

• Coaching Your Business Team - How to Inspire Effective Teamwork for Winning Performance
  Learn how to really coach, not just manage your employees by establishing a high-commitment environment, conducting coaching analysis to determine the cause of poor performance, and using the systematic coaching technique to change specific behavior. Point of interest: The group exercise uses question-and-answer interaction to reveal how work can be more like play.

• Becoming an Effective Leader
  You will learn the five practices of empowering leaders, the five roles leaders can play, the seven ways effective leaders communicate, both verbally and non-verbally, and the eight ways effective leaders influence others.

• Reaching Success Through Self-Mastery
  You will leave knowing how to live life through the paradigm of personal integrity vs. the paradigm of survival. You’ll know how to conquer life’s challenging moments, take responsibility for your experiences, define your life purpose, and live from your personal vision. Point of interest: In a group exercise, participants will walk through sequence of a key moment and discover choices available.

• Leading Through Trust - How to Empower Others to do Their Best
  Without trust realizing a vision is an uphill battle. You will learn how to help others grow and reach their full potential by following the six-step empowerment process, following the five-step listening process, affirming employees’ performance the right way, and asking valuing questions to help others achieve their desires.

• Making Meetings Work - How to Maximize Meeting Effectiveness and Efficiency
  You will learn how to maximize meeting effectiveness and efficiency using steps for measuring whether a meeting is successful, comprehensive steps for organizing a meeting, and directions for creating and utilizing an agenda and minutes.

• Welcome to Hiring for the 21st Century - A Seminar for Finding, Hiring, and Retaining Great People!
  Business owners and managers need to know how to attract the best job applicants, how to hire them, and how to avoid mistakes made in the hiring process. You will learn how to write a job description, choose and create the appropriate recruiting literature, and establish a process for conducting interviews.

• In Pursuit of Goals - Practical Steps to Go for the Gold in Life
  Setting goals is an integral part of living life to the fullest. Participants will learn how to make the most of goal setting by developing a personal mission statement, getting organized, putting an end to procrastination, and following the tried-and-true steps for successful goal setting. Point of interest: The visual exercise will show participants where their time goes during a typical workday and how to set priorities.

• Becoming a High-Performance Sales Professional
  Learn how to discover your clients’ true needs, make the most out of first impressions, ask smart questions that lead to the right answers, ask for a decision with confidence and skill, and exude confidence and sincerity with body language. Point of interest: In a group exercise, your participants will find out how well they listen regularly vs. when they have an incentive to listen well!

• The Art of Negotiation - Persuasion Techniques That Can Work For You
  Every businessperson should know how to skillfully work his or her way through the negotiation process. Your part is to demonstrate how to prepare for the negotiation process, equalize every point the opponent makes, make wise choices regarding offers, counteroffers, and concessions, and close the negotiation with skill.

• Speaking in Public - How to Present Your Best Performance Every Time
  Participants will learn how to tailor material to the audience’s needs and personalities, inspire, enthrall, and influence the audience, exude professionalism using body language and voice techniques, and erase fear by practicing strategies for proper breathing, planning, and mind control. Point of interest: The group exercise provides participants valuable experience giving a short presentation on simple subjects like cheese, cotton, and the Internet.

• Leading People Through Change
  The class will learn how change and leadership work together, as well as how to properly set the stage for a smooth transition, encourage unity and open communication, control opposition using persuasion techniques, and monitor progress against original goals. Point of interest: Using a visual exercise as simple as folding one arm over the other, the class will discuss how resistant people are to change.

• How to Manage Projects and Meet Deadlines
  Every business professional can benefit from project management strategies. In this workshop, Participants will study how to form a work group, set a reasonable timetable, decide which tools they need, recognize their limitations, and gain support from the people who have a vested interest.

• Effective Delegation Skills - How to Raise Productivity and Develop Your Staff
  For managers who desire to free up more of their time, raise productivity at the office, and further develop their employees, this workshop is excellent. Participants will learn how to strengthen relationships with employees, decide which projects to delegate, select the best delegate, and oversee a delegated task. Point of interest: When participants are given office in-trays to sort through in the visual exercise, they’ll learn firsthand about good self-management techniques.

• Communicating With Skill - Tips for Getting Your Message Across Every Time
  In this workshop, you’ll discover verbal and nonverbal language techniques, tips for managing conversations, e-mail, written documents, and public speaking, and guidelines for effective listening. You will learn how to make clarity your top concern and how to meet your audiences’ unique communication needs. Point of interest: In one of the visual exercises, the "Three-Minute Test," you will discover how well you follow written communication.

• Discovering Excellence as a Supervisor
  This material takes a comprehensive look at how to supervise as a leader, not just as a manager. Participants will discover how to cultivate morale among their staff, increase productivity, manage others’ behavior, and lead wisely while keeping their organizations’ interests at heart.

• New Employee Orientation - How to Reduce Turnover and Save Money With a Superb Introductory Program
  By implementing a superb orientation program, human resource professionals will reduce their companies’ turnover rates and save thousands of dollars. Participants will walk through the process, including how to give a new employee a warm reception, avoid overwhelming a new hire, and conduct an operations orientation and staff orientation. Point of interest: In the visual exercise, participants will be challenged to expand their minds beyond the mental "box," using three rows of dots.

• Learning to Control Stress So Stress Doesn’t Control You
  Participants will be able to apply this tried-and-true material to their own lives as well as their co-workers’ lives. Learn how to calm down extreme anxiety, promote a relaxing workplace, take the right steps toward being organized at the office, and train yourself to accentuate the positive at work. Point of interest: The visual exercise forces participants to pinpoint the main sources of stress in their lives and compare their lives to an electric circuit board.

• Winning the Battle Against Negativity
  In this workshop you will learn how to spot signals in order to prevent negativity at the office, keep your composure when dealing with a negative person, help the pessimist see the positive side of things, and address their own needs in order to stay positive.

• Handling Problem People Successfully
  Being a strong leader and an ideal employee is more important than taking care of problem people. That’s why the time spent in this workshop is well worth the valuable information participants will receive. They’ll learn how to respond to difficult people, prevent future problem behavior, and more. Point of interest: In this visual exercise, participants will learn how something as simple as the way they put on a coat may require unlearning before learning can occur.

• How to Give and Receive Feedback With Skill
  These fine-tuned communication skills can help any business professional work more closely with employees, team members, and supervisors at the office. Participants will discover how to give effective feedback, receive feedback effectively, conduct regular performance reviews, and implement a system for employees to evaluate supervisors.

• Preventing Workplace Procrastination
  Procrastination is a struggle most everyone can relate to, and in this workshop participants will be shown how postponing responsibilities can become a destructive addiction. Participants will learn to kick habits in order to relieve stress, improve health, boost reliability, protect the quality of their work, and save their sanity.

• Learning for Life - How to Enrich your Career with Lifelong Learning
  Because the business society has changed so drastically in recent years, the only way to keep up with the business world and remain qualified is to continue to learn along the way. The class will learn how to stretch their minds and enrich their careers in a variety of ways. Point of interest: Each student will write down the goals they commit to reach in this area, and they will receive the letter in the mail later to see how they've done.
   

• Making Work Fun - How to Creatively Boost Productivity and Employee Morale
  Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to reach serious goals in the workplace and have fun at the same time. In fact, it's the best way to boost morale, resist turnover, and improve productivity. Learn how to creatively make professional relationships more personal, establish team
  identity, evaluate company culture, and celebrate success as a team.
   

• Mentoring - How it brings out the Potential in Others
  Learning is a lifelong process; learn the value of mentoring in today's world. An experienced and trusted "coach" helps a protégé learn new skills, sharpen current skills, and grow in learning and development, resulting in a dramatic improvement in job performance. Point of interest: The class observes how feedback during a toothpick-arranging exercise shows the value of support and encouragement.
   

• Creative Thinking and You - How to cultivate the Innovative Ability You Didn't Know You Had
  In many workplaces today, employees are not encouraged to express their creativity on a regular basis. Over time, they grow stale and trudge through the same old routine with less and less flair every day. Participants will learn they can have more from their jobs than boring mechanical work, and will learn to use powerful mental techniques and simple ways to stimulate the senses.
   

• Performance Reviews that Really Work - How to Prevent Appraisals From Becoming a Waste of Time
  Unfortunately, far too many performance reviews today are not the positive, constructive goal-setting sessions they are meant to be. Participants will learn what makes a review successful, how to prepare for the review, how to communicate on performance, how to set goals and make commitments, and much more. Point of interest: A group exercise uses building blocks to demonstrate the importance of two-way communication, especially in performance reviews.