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Accent Reduction

May 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

From time to time I have the pleasure of introducing my alliance partner who specializes in accent reduction to an organization.  Often the organization will have one or more high potential employees who lack the confidence they need to move into a leadership role.  One of the reasons for this is the employee has an accent and they lack confidence in their communications skills and are unable to project themselves in the most powerful way.

I find it very rewarding to be able to introduce our alliance partner to such organizations and consistently receive positive feedback on the progress of their employees.  In several situations after working with our alliance partner the employee has been promoted.

Filed Under: Coaching, Leadership, Miscellaneous, Specialty Topics

The “Ultimate” Training Challenge

April 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Athena partnered with a financial organization to support them with several training initiatives for their annual offsite. They decided they would run a leadership program, a True Colors assessment program and the third offering proved to be a little more challenging.  In fact, our client called it the “Ultimate” training challenge.  They had one group in the organization that had been included in many training programs in the past and the results always came back the same. This group found training a waste of their time.

Our client wanted to continue to include them in their offsite since the rest of the company was also participating.  She shared with me some of the programs and exercises that had been done in the past.  I explained to her we have some very seasoned and creative facilitators in the Athena Alliance and I was pretty confident one of them would be able to come up with something that would work.

One of our senior facilitators proposed a very dynamic program that involved a lot of interaction, problem solving and creative expression. It was a huge success (The group actually coloured using crayons).  In fact, one of the comments on the evaluation form was “finally a program worthwhile.”

Initially a program may appear to be a challenge and with the creative expertise of an experienced facilitator, a program that is a perfect fit for any audience can be designed.

Filed Under: Leadership, Miscellaneous, Specialty Topics, Team Development

Breaking Down Silos on an Executive Team

March 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Breaking Down Silos on an Executive Team

I received a call from a client requesting an introduction to a facilitator who could work with his senior executive team.  This client had been hired as the President of a financial organization that recently gone through a merger.  He very quickly saw there were some major problems with communication, trust and leadership.  He knew he had to address these issues with his leadership team if the company was going to be successful.  I spent an hour with him discussing what was happening and not happening that was causing him concern.  He had experienced a lot of his senior team operating in silos, very little trust, no sharing of information, and in some cases out and out anger.  He was planning a three day strategic planning session to set the vision for his team. The first day was to be a day of breaking down the silos, opening the doors for honest communication and start the process of rebuilding a powerful executive team.  This would set the foundation for the next two days of planning.
When I left his office I had a clear understanding of his objectives, outcomes and his vision for the future.  I also had good understanding that I needed to connect him with a very strong and experienced facilitator to support our client in meeting his goals.  I connected him to one of our most powerful facilitators in the Athena Alliance the next day and they proceeded to map out their strategy.
During the first day of the program the facilitator asked some extremely tough questions and conducted many challenging exercises. There was a lot of emotion and discussions got a little heated at times. By the end of the day, progress was made and the foundation was set for moving forward into the next two days of planning.  This team still had a lot of work to do and at the time of my last follow up they were definitely moving in the right direction.

Our client left me a voice message at the end of the first day telling me that he could have looked for weeks on the internet and never found a perfect facilitator as I had provided.  I also received a voice message from the facilitator telling me while the day was challenging, progress was made.

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