The 12-week Essentials of Effective Supervision course provides a strong knowledge base for first-line supervisors, managers and team leaders. This series is designed to provide new supervisors, and those aspiring to become supervisors, with a unique blend of knowledge, skills and strategies in the areas needed to effectively and efficiently supervise others. Participants will immediately put their new skills into practice. The topics covered each week are core issues proven to be the keys for supervisory success. Supervisors at all levels need to handle these areas with confidence and authority to effectively deal with and manage the employees they supervise.

1. The Changing Role of the First-Line Supervisor – What happened to motivation and the “work ethic?” Don’t worry it’s still here! How to enrich jobs, deal with organizational change and how to manage employees through it for positive performance. A comparison of the traditional role to contemporary demands for supervising today’s worker.

2. Managing Diversity in the Workplace –Understanding the changes of the American workforce will provide awareness for increased communication and a more cohesive work team.

3. Leadership and Motivation – What is leadership vs. management? Review your leadership style and how to apply leadership in today’s workplace to increase and maintain employee motivation.

4. Legal Responsibilities of the Supervisor – State and federal laws pertaining to employment, sexual harassment, workers’ compensation, discrimination and the supervisor’s role in preventing adverse consequences.

5. Effective Communication –Learn how to communicate to build trust, teamwork, consensus and meet performance objectives. Self assessments will help you uncover your communication style and potential barriers your style may be creating.

6. Orienting & Training New Workers – What to include in the orientation of new workers, how to structure OJT to achieve maximum results.

7. The Supervisors Role in Performance Appraisals – Gain specific steps and guidelines in developing and using job-related work performance objectives, standards and performance plans. Understand how you can positively impact your employee’s formal appraisals.

8. Dealing with Conflict & Disciplinary Procedures – Understand the positives and negatives of conflict, how to work effectively within both and steps to defuse. Uncover your personal conflict style. Also learn the keys to conducting proper discipline and documentation.

9. Planning for Results & Problem Solving – Establishing a vision, setting goals, overcoming obstacles, developing an action plan, controlling and evaluating.

10. Dealing with Stress, Time Management & Delegation – Learn how to manage interruptions, set clear goals, eliminate the 7 most deadly time-wasters and the cure to procrastination.

11. Safety and Security Issues – The supervisor’s responsibility in OSHA, record keeping, and safety and security issues for the new millennium; ergonomics and work place violence.

12. Creating High-Performance Teams – Identify strategies in teambuilding skills and maintaining effective team communications.

Already using QuickBooks® Online and interested in utilizing the features more efficiently? In this hands-on training you will learn how to make QBO work for your business through form customization, recurring transactions, account reconciliation, inventory management, payroll processing, and utilizing financial reports.

Topics Include:
• Understanding matching
• Customizing forms
• Working with asset and liability accounts
• Setting up recurring transactions
• Reconciling accounts
• Managing inventory
• Managing and processing payroll
• Analyzing financial data through customized reports

Successful retention and succession planning requires a development plan for your people. Especially early in someone’s career it is important to have a plan for how they will grow. Many leave this to chance and take a strategy of hope when it comes to skill development. Join us to learn how to take an intentional approach to identifying competencies and a plan to develop them.

Objectives
After completing this course participants will be able to:
• Understand the principles of rapid skill development
• Learn the process of career mapping
• Recognize the link between generalized knowledge and specific skills
• Take ownership for their own skill development
• Understand how development can lead to greater engagement and retention

Does conflict sometimes interfere with the day-to-day operations of your organization? Actually, conflict is a natural and even beneficial fact of life in the business environment. However, when not managed well it can result in low morale, decreased productivity, high stress levels, and the loss of good employees, all of which detract from the organization’s performance. The inability to deal with conflict can undermine a supervisor’s or manager’s effectiveness. Learn how to manage conflict situations to produce positive outcomes.

Key Information:
The Nature of Interpersonal Communication

•Learn how you can tell when someone is displaying confidence, awareness, defensiveness, or insecurity through body language

•Dealing with interpersonal conflict constructively while seeking solutions to problems

•Communicate more effectively by listening for understanding

Factors influencing conflict at work (structural and personal)

•Learn the nature of emotional reactions and the mindset for managing emotions

•Understand the levels of conflict and how to prevent escalation

•Complete the “Conflict Style Inventory” to identify your style

Communication skills for successfully addressing conflict

•Learn the role of listening in conflict resolution and how to do it

•Develop a more accurate vocabulary of words that express feelings

•Understand how to listen and reflect to gain understanding

Approaches to dealing with conflict and when they apply

•Learn why no conflict is as unhealthy as too much

•Discover the eight-step procedure for confronting conflict

•Learn how to identify your own real needs

Benefits of Attending: You will be able to identify the source of a conflict and know the most appropriate corrective action for that source. You will understand the different approaches for dealing with difficult people and which is the most effective approach for a given situation. You also will learn communication skills that will enable you to confront conflict constructively, and you will recognize and be able to address factors in your organization that may be contributing to unproductive conflict.

Business owners, managers, accountants, bankers, and consultants need to know how to turn financial statements into useful management tools. After attending this financial management series, you will be able to make better business decisions based on good financial information.

In this first class in our financial series, participants will identify key financial information on a Profit and Loss Statement and on the Balance Sheet. Participants will also learn how to calculate several financial ratios and will understand what those ratios indicate in terms of business productivity and success. Overall, participants will gain a greater understanding of how to read and interpret financial documents, and use that information to drive business decisions.

Topics include:
• Financial Management
• Cycle Accrual vs. cash accounting
• How to document past performance
• Case study introduction
• Income statements
• Net income formula
• Percentage size statements
• Balance sheets
• Ratio analysis

The second class in the series is Cash Matters Most – Improving Your Cash Flow on October 11, 2022, followed by the third and final topic, Planning and Predicting Your Financial Path on October 18, 2022.

This seminar examines the team building skills needed to manage and lead in today’s workforce. Emphasis is placed on understanding the intricacies of team development and identifying strategies for forming and maintaining effective teams. Participants will be given the opportunity to practice and assess their skills as a team member and team leader.

Key Information:
•Assess your own skills as a team member/leader
•Create & articulate team direction & vision
•Diagnose team development
•Utilize appropriate intervention techniques
•Manage relationships within the team
•Determine the most effective problem-solving strategies
•Strategies to motivate your team

This seminar features an action learning structure that combines discussions, case studies and activities.

In this second class of our financial management series, we’ll take a close look at where cash comes from in a small business, where it’s used in day-to-day operations and how to identify and correct cash flow problems. You’ll be able to identify key information on cash flow statements and be able to follow the path of cash as it travels through your company. You’ll identify cash flow strategies to use in your organization. You’ll become familiar with the sources and uses of cash, ratios and the most common “gobblers” of cash in any business. This isn’t theory – it’s practical application for real businesses – like yours!

Topics include:
• Description of the cash flow statement
• Three types of cash flow
• Creating a cash flow statement
• Sources and uses of cash
• Identifying problems with cash flow
• Interpreting and controlling cash flow
• Understanding the difference between profit and cash
• Tips for improving cash flow

The third and final course in this series is the Planning & Predicting Your Financial Path on October 18, 2022.

Every day employees are spending more and more time working in team and group situations. But few of them have ever received any training in how to succeed in these situations. Many employees are even threatened by the process.

During this program, you will learn and practice the fundamentals of building effective and productive work groups. You will walk away from this program with tools and techniques that can help you turn low-performance groups into high-performance teams.

You will take a self-assessment in advance of this training to learn your top 34 strengths and how you can work better and more productively in a team environment.

Key Information:
• Discover and identify your personal talents and strengths through a self-assessment and guidance from a certified coach
• Learn how to leverage and aim your talents and strengths effectively and successfully on any task
• Identify your unique and valuable contribution to the team and learn to lead others in doing the same
• Learn to identify what your need from the team and the workplace and lead others to do the same • Learn how to better understand yourself and others in a team environment
• Discover how you gather information and come to conclusions, and how that may differ from others
• Discover how your strengths may also be your greatest liabilities under certain conditions
• Tap into the quantum power of learning styles, intelligence, personality types, and emotional intelligence
• How to use personality styles to your group’s advantages
• Put your group to work solving problems
• Explore why teams succeed and why they fail

Complete your financial education with this third course in our seminar series. This class is designed to teach you how to create and use a cash budget to prepare for future business performance. During this course, you will learn to estimate future sources and uses of cash. You will also learn how to analyze your predictions to make more informed decisions. You should leave this session feeling more comfortable about decisions related to preparing for growth, realistic loan and financing requests, how much cash you can safely take out of the business, and how to make affordable purchases for your business. At its conclusion, you should be able to: forecast sales, receivables and expenses, use a cash budget to create a month-by-month view and calculate Break-Even, as it relates to business expansions, workforce additions or capital expenditures.

Topics include:
• What is cash planning
• Preparing the cash budget
• Forecasting cash in
• Estimating cash out
• Making informed decisions
• Dealing with cash budgeting problems
• Break – even analysis

As more companies reorganize along horizontal rather than vertical lines, the need emerges for those in non-authoritative positions to encourage action from others to achieve business objectives and manage projects. Cultivating positive influence, cooperation and negotiation skills are essential for anyone who needs to get work done though others. This seminar examines principles, strategies, and techniques essential to influencing through persuasion and negotiation to achieve positive results.

Key Topic Areas:

Persuasion Power:
•Gaining credibility in your current role as it pertains to influencing others
•Identify obstacles you face in influencing others
•Achieving credibility
•Develop listening and assertiveness skills vital to the process of influencing
•Clarify your own goals and priorities and those of your potential allies
•Identify the forms of resistance people might have and how to deal with that resistance.
•Know your audience and learn how to read the motivations of others
•Practice working though each step of the influencing process using your own situation as a model.

Negotiating for Action:
•Basic objective and definition for success
•The three secrets to becoming an excellent negotiator
•Characteristics of an excellent negotiator
•Your filter mechanism
•Types of bargaining and when and when not to negotiate

How You Will Benefit:
•Develop influencing as a core competency
•Gain confidence in persuading others to listen and act favorably on your ideas and requests.
•Build support for change up, down, and across
•Achieve consensus from others on projects and change efforts
•Strengthen your ability to build strategic alliances.

Increasingly, organizations are realizing the need for leadership at all levels. Because people want to be led, not managed, managers need to develop as leaders in addition to being highly competent in functional management areas. There is an impressive body of knowledge regarding leadership, and the skills needed to be an effective leader. The Effective Leader/Manager will address the following 5 key areas of managerial effectiveness.

This course is designed around the Management Competency Model based on The Leadership Challenge model by Kouzes and Posner.

Key Information:

Model the Way
• Find your voice by clarifying your personal values
• Set the example by aligning actions with shared values
• Improving Communication (written, verbal, electronic, web, PR)
Inspire a Shared Vision
• Envision the Future by imagining exciting ennobling possibilities
• Enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations

Challenge the Process
• Search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow and improve
• Experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from mistakes
• Keep the Lines Open – Practice “engaged listening” to ensure two-way communication throughout your team and the organization.
• Exude Competence – Generate a personal development plan based on the four lessons of self-knowledge to continually increase your competence as a leader/manager.

Enable Others to Act
• Foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust
• Strengthen others by sharing power and discretion
• Building Collaboration / Delegation / Trust

Encouraging the Heart
• Recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence
• Celebrate the values and victories by creating a spirit of community

Managers are constantly called upon to manage projects or to be part of a project team. The effective management of projects – completion within a deadline and a budget, subject to performance criteria – is the cornerstone for business success. All projects are undertaken to achieve specific results and need a framework to help accomplish an important new objective; face new challenges and organizational structures, define objectives, communicate and instruct.

Day 1
What is a “Project”?
What is a “successful” project?
Why do projects fail?

The Project Lifecycle
•Initiation
•Planning
•Execution
•Closeout

The Triple Constraints to Projects—Scope, Time, Cost

Processes and Practices
•Scope, Time, Cost, Quality Management
•Risk management
•Communications management

Managing the Scope
•Defining the objectives of the project
•Defining the work to be done
•Work Breakdown Structure
•Managing scope changes

Managing Project Time
•Estimating time to complete project tasks
•Resource loading and leveling
•Controlling project costs

Day 2
Managing Project Quality
•Project specifications
•Quality assurance and control

Managing Risk Management
•Risk identification
•Planning for risks
•Responding to risks

Managing Project Communications
•Who needs what, when, how, etc.?
•Reporting project status
•Measurement metrics
•Earned Value

Managing Multiple Small Concurrent Projects
•Managing multiple independent projects
•Small concurrent projects

Organizing for Project Management
•Traditional and matrix organizations
•Project office

The Successful Project Manager
•Roles and responsibilities
•Qualities for success

Project Infrastructure
•Change management system
•Project management information system

The Project Team
•Reasons teams fail
•Situational leadership
•Creating shared commitment
•Instilling team values
•Stages of team development

Project Closeout
•Overcoming the “90% complete” phenomenon
•Exit reviews

Methodology – Putting it all together