Training & development
People are more effective and productive if they are equipped with the skills, behaviours and attitudes that their role requires. This applies to both their work and their private lives. Although specific knowledge, technical skills and formal qualifications are important, there is increasing evidence to suggest that so-called “soft skills” make an enormous difference.
People often underestimate the extent to which good working relationships are important. In fact, problems with interpersonal relationships have been shown to be the most common negative issue that people experience in their careers.
Effective training goes beyond just teaching people a few useful skills and behaviours – it needs to include the beliefs, attitudes and values that underlie surface behaviours. These need to be understood and aligned in order for the behaviours and skills to become really congruent and powerful. This is why self-awareness and self-management are the most important first steps in the development of interpersonal effectiveness.
Another aspect of effective training is working out how it will be practiced day to day after the training has taken place – how will people put their new skills and behaviours into practice and how will the organisation or group encourage and enable this? Importantly, will the new beliefs, values and attitudes be actively supported and will they fit with organisational cultures?
Campbell Parkes Consulting can provide the following training and development to individuals and groups:
Increasing self-awareness
Understanding personal style and personality
The single most important way to increase your personal effectiveness is by understanding how you tick, i.e. what your thinking and behaviour patterns and preferences are. Given that the most important resource you have at work or at home is yourself, it is extraordinary that most people know more about the specifications of their car or computer than they do about what they are like inside their heads!
I am an experienced user of the world’s most used, respected and researched tool for understanding what you are like – the Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This personality test has been used internationally for over 60 years and is based on personality theory as proposed by Carl Jung.
It covers four important aspects of personality:
- what energises you
- what do you notice most – how do you like to take in information?
- how do you make decisions?
- how much structure or spontaneity do you need in your life?
Self-knowledge is real power and if you can see how you are similar to or different from others then it really helps you build better, more successful relationships with others at work and at home. It is easier then to see that in the most part people are just different rather than wrong or difficult.
I am qualified to use both the Step I (which looks at the four dimensions overall) and Step II (which also looks in further depth at subscales within the four dimensions).
Emotional Intelligence
People are now recognising that emotional intelligence is just as (and if not, more) important than IQ. It enables people to operate more effectively in the world and build productive, respectful relationships with others, be this at work or at home. The foundations of emotional intelligence are:
- self awareness
- self-management
- awareness of others
- management of relationships
I use an excellent and well-researched questionnaire tool that assesses these four areas and includes important aspects such as self regard, regard for others, goal directedness, flexibility, trustworthiness and conflict handling.
It can be used for individuals or with a team. Careful, constructive feedback is given and as well as helpful development guidance.
Self management skills
Motivating yourself to achieve your goals
It is not enough to have wishes and desires – if you really want to make things happen in your life, then you need to turn these into more specific, actionable goals. There is good evidence that setting goals carefully according to certain specific criteria will increase the chances of achieving them. One of the criteria (often forgotten) is that goals must be written down.
Having a very desirable goal is an essential first step but you also need to examine the beliefs you have about the process of achieving them. Do you believe that you have the skills and abilities to do whatever it is that is necessary to achieve your goal? Do you really believe you will make the effort to perform these actions? Do you really believe that taking action will really lead to a personally satisfying outcome? Do you believe that a personally satisfying outcome is available to you? People often don’t realise the extent to which their beliefs in each of these stages affect their motivation. It is vital to examine your beliefs at each of these stages. This model of motivation has been the subject of extensive research over the last 50 years and has been shown time and again to be valid and useful.
I incorporate this model into my one to one coaching and also offer specific workshops for people who want to explore ways of increasing their motivation to move forwards with their plans.
Life planning – see Time and Space Navigation
Time management – see Time and Space Navigation
Working successfully with others
Communicating and influencing people
I provide interactive, challenging and enjoyable training in how to build respectful rapport with other people and how to increase your chances of being listened to and understood. I base my approach to communication training mainly on personality theory and NLP - both of which have shown that people communicate in very different ways. It is possible to be aware of how people like to communicate and “flex” your communication to increase rapport, understanding and influence. Influencing others is not about “manipulating” them, it is about respectfully getting on their wavelength and communicating in a way that makes sense to them. I give people an easily remembered model of understanding different communication styles and after practising this, they find it immensely helpful in producing effective communication.
Making the most of difference in groups and team building training
Understanding how people are different – not just in how they communicate but also in how they approach their work, their time, how they make decisions, how they plan, how much they need to interact with others and how they like to relax – is the foundation of building better, more fruitful working relationships with people you work with in groups or teams. Tolerance, understanding and respect for difference amongst people in a group can make the difference between the group functioning well or badly. This then paves the way for further understanding of how groups or teams function – and getting teams to perform well is one of the most important determinants of business success. I can provide training on how to work effectively in a team to mixed groups of people or to intact teams. Working with intact teams helps them put the training into practice straight away during the training by working on real issues for their team and this can be very powerful.
Presentation and public speaking
It is said that fear of public speaking is many people’s number one fear in life. It is difficult to avoid confronting this fear especially if your work demands that you speak to others on a fairly regular basis – even if this is only to small numbers of people. Some people say they would rather speak to a large mass of people they don’t know than give a presentation to a group of people who know them well. Other people may not be particularly fearful about speaking in front of others but always worry that they don’t do it well enough and beat themselves up afterwards. It appears that issues around presentation and public speaking are varied but nonetheless are common, even in the most surprising of people.
The approach I take to dealing with this is to start with the underlying beliefs and values about speaking to others. I find that this is often where the problems and the solutions lie. No amount of clever “surface behaviour” techniques for public speaking will overcome these underlying beliefs and fears. The tricks and techniques for public speaking are often what people get taught on presentation skills courses – and I agree they are important (and fairly easy to learn), but are not sufficient on their own. My more holistic approach is able to produce better, sustainable results for people. I can train groups of people in this approach using lively, interactive and informative sessions. Participants get the chance to start to put in practice their new learning with each other in a safe, supportive environment. I am also able to provide 1:1 individual sessions for people who would rather learn privately.
NLP skills made easy
A lot of people have heard about NLP (neurolinguistic programming) and are curious about it. NLP is a distillation of various tools and techniques that examine how people use language (in communicating with others and also what they say to themselves in their own head), how they build and use hidden mental programmes for interpreting what happens to them and making meaning out of it, and how they can learn to build better, more useful language patterns and mental programmes.
I take a very grounded approach to NLP - like many other things, it is simply a tool and it is up to the practitioner to make sure they are trained properly to use it well for the benefit of their client. Using NLP techniques can produce excellent results for a lot of people. For example, I particularly find it extremely useful to use NLP methods to question and examine limiting beliefs when helping people move forwards with their goals.
I give basic workshops and training sessions on what NLP is and how it can be used, allowing people to try out some of the techniques themselves. This gives people a taster of what it is all about. Of course if people want to go on and train themselves in NLP, then I would recommend that they research the many different training programmes very carefully first and pick one that really suits their own learning styles and needs.
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