Professional effectiveness
Our effectiveness courses focus on the key skills and approaches which compliment the contemporary professional’s technical skills. We avoid references to ‘soft skills’, as these interpersonal skills are key to thriving in an interdependent workplace. These are the qualities that help professional get along while also getting ahead.
When we reference Effectiveness, we’re highlighting the skills that support collaboration and cooperation, effective communication, goal-setting and goal attainment and everything that supports the effective management and leadership of others.
What is professional effectiveness training?
These training courses focus on the skills that support performance, collaboration and connection with others. They enable employees to balance the pull of ‘getting ahead’ when we’re all required to also ‘get along’. These can sometimes like they exist in tension: “How can I reach my targets if I have to keep helping others?”
But this view neglects the fact that the vast majority of employees are to some extent interdependent with others. Getting along with them, being proactive about relationship management, and acknowledging and leveraging interpersonal differences in strengths and experience contribute to individual and collective success.
Our courses cover the skills of relationship management, communication, developing others – all the skills professionals need to create the kind of working environment where people can thrive.
How can employees become more effective at work?
Using the above definition of effectiveness, employees can work on this sustainably by:
- Clarifying what really matters to them
- Cultivating habits and set goals in alignment with this
- Engaging intentionally in relationship formation and management
- Having difficult conversations as they arise
- Bringing values to life to navigate challenges
- Relating to others with the long term in mind
What skills improve workplace effectiveness?
As our training courses below illustrate, we focus on the skills that bring clarity of purpose, clarity of direction and the ability to persist through challenges. The key skills here include:
- Having clarity of mission and purpose, translating both into everyday decisions and behaviours.
- Clarity and use of personal values in everyday life.
- Developing the people around you, formally and informally.
- Persistence through challenges and setbacks.
- Building and maintaining authentic relationships.
- Effective goal-setting, making progress through sustainable habits.
- Role-modelling the behaviours you want to see in others.
Developing others
Our ‘Developing others’ workshops give managers (new and more experienced) the skills required to maintain a development focus in their team and to contribute to a coaching culture in their organisation. Whether it’s coaching with a ‘big’ or ‘small’ C, it represents an invaluable addition to the managerial toolkit.
‘Dialogues’ – Introducing coaching conversations
The ‘Dialogues’ workshop is perfect for managers who don’t need to operate as fully-fledged workplace coaches, but who recognise the value that a coaching- style approach can have. Highly practical and interactive, this workshop includes a significant amount of practice coaching.
‘Flourish’ – Developing others at work
This one-day workshop covers the essentials of developing team members, including identifying development needs, having development conversations and providing performance feedback. The workshop includes introductory coaching skills to support these crucial conversations.
Introduction to Workplace Coaching
This two-day course has been developed for managers, team leaders and HR professionals who wish to learn the basics of workplace coaching. No prior experience is assumed and a pre-reading pack brings delegates to a level playing field in terms of concepts. We cover practical coaching skills, ethics and professionalism and the particular challenges and benefits of being an in-house coaching professional.
Advanced Workplace Coaching
This two-day course is a follow-up to our introductory course and equips delegates with an introduction to the more advanced ‘cognitive-behavioural’ approach to coaching. This is particularly useful for challenges that are more about beliefs than behaviour or skills. With plenty of in-course practice, workplace coaches will leave with the addition of some significant tools to their coaching toolkit.
Coaching Masterclasses
Our coaching masterclass series is a collection of one-day in-depth sessions, focusing on a single theme. They are suitable for workplace coaches with significant training and experience and cover topics like, workplace stress, productivity, transition and change and preparation for retirement. They represent excellent CPD opportunities for experienced in-houses coaches.
Leading Others
Our ‘Leading others’ workshops are all about key managerial and leadership skills required of professionals in the modern workplace. Delegates learn how to bring the best of themselves to a variety of organisational challenges and contexts.
'Getting along vs getting ahead' - relationships at work
This workshop is focused on practice relationship management and strategic stakeholder management. Rather than allowing our workplace relationships to develop in a haphazard way, delegates will learn how to plan this crucial activity, learn more about their key stakeholder and what they need. The course also covers interpersonal challenges such as conflict in the workplace, the importance of personal brand and values and the role of organisational politics.
‘Speak up and speak out’ – developing psychological safety in teams
Psychological safety is all about feeling comfortable in speaking up – highlighting errors, making suggestions or calling attention to risks. Teams with high levels of psychological safety are higher performing teams, but it needs to be nurtured and developed. This course outlines the ingredients required for team members to feel truly psychological safe and the role the team leader has in shaping this.
‘Let’s talk’ – difficult conversations at work
Discomfort with difficult conversations can mean we procrastinate about them or we sugar-coat them to avoid being the ‘bad guy’. ‘Difficult’ is a relative term, but can include feedback about performance and development needs, as well as career planning and trajectory. The workshop focuses on minimising the role of discomfort, while maximising authenticity, planning and empathy to get the best result.
‘Transitions’ – leading others through change
With workplace change a virtual constant, we can either sit back and allow change to be ‘done to us’, or as managers and leaders we can lead our team members through it successfully. This workshop explores how people respond to change, how to communicate change authentically and the management techniques to harness resistance and support.
Effectiveness essentials
These 90 minute workshops represent an interactive and impactful way to introduce key effectiveness concepts to your employees. Designed to fit in with ‘learn at lunch’ or offsite gatherings, the sessions are designed to capture delegates’ attention and cover skills they can put into use immediately. When operational arrangements mean day-long workshops aren’t practical, our Effectiveness Essentials sessions are a fantastic alternative. And for geographically-distributed teams, all of our Essentials sessions can be delivered remotely via webinar.
Feedback Essentials
Timely and well-constructed feedback is an essential ingredient for any team, yet many people shy away from it – for a variety of reasons. This impactful session covers the core components of quality feedback and gives delegates the chance to action-plan their next feedback conversation.
Developing Psychological Safety
Psychological Safety is all about a shared perspective that it’s safe to speak up, speak out and deviate from the group perspective. This session introduces team leaders and managers to the critical factors they need to build to ensure team members feel psychologically safe to highlight errors, potential improvements and risks they identify.
The Power of Conversation
This session explores the importance of conversation in the workplace. From brief social chats, through to formal appraisals and interviews – conversation sits at the heart of our interpersonal experiences and our feelings of connectedness with others. In this workshop, we explore the factors that contribute to good quality conversation, the benefits it brings to the individual and the team, and the common pitfalls to avoid along the way.
The Value of Values
This session explores our ‘inner compass’, the set of beliefs that guide our behaviour: our values. Often neglected or misunderstood, we can use our values to navigate challenges, make important decisions and persist towards our most valued goals. This session will help delegates clarify what really matters and show them how to make values a daily habit, not an aspiration ‘maybe someday’ experience.
Delegation Essentials
A core skill for team leaders and managers, delegation isn’t always approached with the correct mindset. A lack of clarity, poor communication and assumptions can combine to create disappointment and frustrations. This workshop outlines some of the major delegation pitfalls to avoid and describes how to overcome the challenges the delegating manager can face.
Goal-setting for Success
Goal-setting is one of the few psychological principles that works in all contexts, yet it’s still misunderstood in many organisations. This session takes delegates through the psychology of goal-setting and illustrates the importance of personality, values, behaviour change and organisational context when goals are being formulated.
Managing Difficult Conversations
Putting off or avoiding a seemingly ‘difficult’ conversation is rarely a helpful course of action. This session explores what constitutes a difficult conversation, why we can tend to avoid them and how to address the discomfort they invoke. Essential for managers and team leaders who want to discuss performance and give effective feedback on behaviour at work.
The Power of Habit
When we want to make changes to our routines and behaviours, we can often over-reach, aim too high and then look back with disappointment when the changes fail to materialise. This workshop unlocks the power of habits and how they can shape our days, but also progress towards landmark goals and the representation of our personal values.
Managing Boundaries
Effective professionals occupy a number of roles in life and a simple focus on work vs life over-simplifies things. Understanding how we can proactively manage and navigate our boundaries helps avoid overwhelm in one domain and neglect in another. Get clear on your roles, your focus and how you’ll be the kind of person you really want to be by learning how to manage your boundaries.
There is a before and an after working with Richard. Once you embark on the coaching journey, be prepared for a tremendous positive change in your daily life. Thanks to his strong experience, focus, kindness and skills, Richard successfully and gently steers you towards personal breakthroughs and discoveries. The impact of having Richard as a coach has influenced me to sign up my leadership team for the same programme
Alvaro Duarte
Voodoo
WorkLifePsych have helped us successfully design from scratch a leadership programme which has been deployed across the Group which is now in its fourth year of delivery. It has been received extremely well, resulting in delegates making measurable change in their approach to leadership in their role and deployment into their teams.
Tammy Lillie
Spirax Sarco
We asked Richard and the WorkLifePsych team to assist in the start-up phase of our new business. As a new talent-based creative business, unencumbered from legacy ways of working we were determined to put in place the most contemporary and relevant people strategy. Richard worked closely with us to develop our people strategy, including how to clarify and communicate our organisation’s values, how to identify and nurture talent and how to create a sustainable people development strategy. Richard continues to support Untold Studios. He is insightful, attentive and challenging in all the right ways. He has been instrumental in our launch and remains a supportive and trusted advisor. I have no hesitation in recommending Richard to other startups - I’ve no doubt Richard and his team will have a huge positive impact on any new business.
Darren O’Kelly
Untold Studios
I worked with Richard as my coach across 2016/17 with my goal of being an “intrapreneur" who makes the business I’m taking care of sustainable. I want to innovate to surprise our audiences, foster people around a vision and multiply others’ talent. And in my business, there is a lot of passion and emotions, everything moves very fast and things change constantly. As I was gaining seniority, it was hard for me sometimes to keep a “cool head" when taking decisions. Thanks to Richard, I got way closer to achieving this goal! I became a better leader by clarifying my innate talent, managing my emotions better, understanding the complex system I’m working within and multiplying others to get their best. Richard provided me with tips and frameworks that help me navigate through this system better every day . There has been a before and after Richard for sure!
Delphine Sassi
King
We recently invited Richard to our first learning festival, to deliver a keynote as well as a workshop on the topic of psychological flexibility. Working in the public sector brings its own challenges and this is why it was really important to us to offer personal development opportunities centred on wellbeing, and practical tools for us to use on a daily basis when we may be feeling overwhelmed or experiencing anxiety. Feedback from those taking part was extremely positive and we are already looking at working with Richard on other initiatives.
Ruxandra Stewart
Essex Country Council
Richard has worked with DCC Group for over eight years within a variety of organisational contexts so we were delighted to invite him recently to present on the topic of “Coping with Change” to our employees in DCC Vital. Richard has a unique mix of broad experience, an ability to appropriately adapt a message to suit different audiences and is very practical. The feedback from our employees on his session was excellent and they appreciated the tools and techniques he shared through the session. Presenting virtually is a challenge to the best of us, but Richard makes it look easy! There was such a logical flow in his messaging that he hit the right note with our diverse workforce. We couldn’t recommend working with him more highly and we look forward to working with him on other projects going forward.