Investing in your people is one of the best things you can do for your business. We work with companies to identify their up-and-coming leaders and provide them coaching they need (and deserve) to succeed in that role.
Read MoreBy Wendy O. Lydon, LPBC
At ThistleSea Business Development, we believe that interpersonal and communication skills are some of the most fundamental building blocks to support the relationships that grow businesses and build strong communities. Understanding human behavior has always been an important part of our coaching relationships. We're very excited to offer our clients new and more in-depth tools for human behavior training and understanding personal and business relationships.
ThistleSea Business Development now has the expanded ability to assist you, your team and your organization to gain a deeper and broader understanding of human behavior and relations. Using a research-validated learning model, each solution provides in-depth information including tips, strategies, and action plans to help you become more effective in the workplace.
We have become an authorized partner of Everything DISC®. Our ThistleSea coaches have been thoroughly trained and certified on these tools, and these new solutions provide rich, versatile learning programs that offer personal insights for individuals at every level of your organization, using a consistent language of DiSC.
Below is a brief overview of the new solutions we can provide to you and your employees:
Everything DiSC Workplace® can be used with everyone in an organization, regardless of title or role, to improve the quality of the workplace. This tool focuses on gaining an understanding of both yours and other’s DISC style and building more effective relationships.
Note: This behavior assessment serves as a replacement for the reports and training we have worked with so many of you and your teams with.
Everything DiSC® Productive Conflict explores workplace conflict. Clearly one of the most stressful, awkward and inevitable experiences in the workplace is inter-personal conflict. Now we have a tool and training focused on workplace conflict using the language of DISC. With all the attention placed on conflict resolution, it's to change our view of conflict and resolve to use it in a positive way in the workplace.
Note: We can certainly work with you and your teams in understanding conflict. Please stay tuned for future workshops and trainings focused just on resolving conflict – which is a perfect education for everyone, regardless of position and area of business or career path.
Everything DiSC® Work of Leaders helps you discover your DiSC leadership style and learn a simple three-step process to help you approach the fundamental work of leaders: crafting a Vision, building Alignment and championing Execution. Work of Leaders connects to real-world demands, generating powerful conversations that provide a clear path of action.
Everything DiSC® Management provides you with an understanding of how to manage more effectively by learning about your own management preferences and priorities, better motivate your staff and yourself and get more comfortable with delegation. We're excited that this tool also helps you gain insight into how to develop your employees – something that is so important to employee engagement and understanding how others might view you and your style.
Everything DiSC® Sales expands communication with your customers and reveals how to match your style to theirs. By helping people discover their unique strengths and limitations, this tool can convince even experienced salespeople that they can become more effective.
Everything DiSC 363® for Leaders combines the best of 360 feedback with the simplicity and power of DiSC, plus three strategies for improving leadership effectiveness. The result is a 360 experience that’s more productive and satisfying.
With these deeper and more powerful tools, ThistleSea can now provide you with a broader understanding of DISC and human behavior.
We have always valued the work of Patrick Lencioni and use many of his books as coaching tools. His book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, has always been one of the most important readings as we work through team building and understanding.
We are also excited to share with you that ThistleSea coaches have been trained and certified to work with organizations and teams through a new program and curriculum, The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team™. The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team™ Powered by Everything DiSC® helps teams understand how to apply The Five Behaviors™ model of Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results to their work culture. By using Everything DiSC®, a tool that helps build effective team communication and relationships, this program allows participants to learn about their own DiSC style and discover how each style brings value to the team.
We look forward to continuing our work with you, and your teams and colleagues to learn, develop and build personal and professional effectiveness through better communication and relations.
Please reach out to us if you would like to learn more how we can use these tools to help support your continued success. And watch for information for future workshops and trainings!
The start of a new year, growth in your business, increasing complexity, new federal tax legislation, increasing competition, the introduction of new products or services… They’re just a few examples of business complexity that require strong leadership to chart a new destination and clarity to define success.
The answers to, “What direction are you heading?” and “Why are you heading that direction?” require leadership. In almost all cases, you will need to work with others and clearly communicate to inspire them to your vision of success.
What can we do to more quickly build a framework that engages our team members, outsiders, and other stakeholders and propels everyone’s actions to reach our desired level of success? Let’s consider focusing in 2018 on better and stronger agreements.
Agreements can be oral or written, simple or complex. The understanding on when and how to use an agreement in business is critically important to gaining trust, honoring relationships and putting dignity (“the state of being worthy of honor and respect”) into relationships, to create value and build a more profitable business model. Gaining agreement is not always easy, but it’s essential to any ongoing relationship.
Here are 6 items to help build strong agreements:
Without strong agreement, we operate from a position of unconscious and often conflicting set of assumptions. In that position, relationships are fragile at best and most of the time the relationships are far less successful than desired.
When should you worry that your agreements might be weak? Consider these 3 warning signs:
When the people involved in the company struggle to see eye to eye on an issue, their implicit vague agreement causes a misalignment. Misalignment creates greater risk and destroys value.
Most importantly, without clear agreements, our decision-making is clouded, and we fail to honor our own values. Leaders struggle to make timely and appropriate decisions, ultimately operating at a level far less than their potential.
The same applies to employees. In the absence of strong agreements, we set them up for poor performance and failure. Questions left unanswered in the culture include: “How do we interact to achieve the desired results?” “What are the unwritten rules of the game?” “What level of autonomy and resource do I use to make an impact?”
Clarity for both the supervisor and employee on responsibilities, accountabilities, duties and performance levels through strong agreement relieves the pressure and tension allowing for personal expression, business growth and the ability for the team to create value for the customer.
The use of agreements (both formal and informal) guides companies to make good decisions, and supports organizational capacity-building and maturity.
If you would like to learn more about building strong and better agreements with your employees and stakeholders, contact a ThistleSea Team member. We would be glad to help you and your organization.
It's not an accident that "leadership" is our Abundance newsletter topic more often than any other. But we don't often discuss that "leading yourself first" can make the difference between a life of abundance... and not. In fact, we estimate that 95% of our clients list personal goals - ways they'd like to lead themselves better - when they're considering the futures of their businesses.
From eating more healthily to spending quality time with loved ones, it seems that leading yourself first isn't part of business school curricula or a requirement of funding pitches. It's multi-faceted, and some things are likely to come more easily to you than others. We divide it into a few arenas, and for the sake of brevity, we'll list just a few items under each:
Oh, man. Go to sleep.
As with any changes, it's best not to do too much at once. If you've been working hard to lead yourself and you're not gaining traction, try to do a little less. And contact us for assistance.
This advanced program is designed to strengthen the competencies of business owners and executives, set a baseline for both individuals and organizational current leadership, review benchmarks for the current state and help establish goals and priorities for future leadership development and coaching.
This program will help you self-discover, reflect upon and identify the strength of your leadership competencies and skills in ten core areas. These core areas are a unique compilation of knowledge and insights gleaned from top leaders, executives, educators and mentors from around the world.
The 10 core areas include:
Some employees who are great at their technical work may be emerging as potential leaders for the future. As the company grows and retirement of the baby boomer generation accelerates, what are you doing to avoid the high cost of turnover? Are you training your high potential employees to successfully take on new roles in supervision and leadership positions?
The Emerging Leadership Coaching Program is designed for the high potential employees who are part of a company’s transition plans to move into supervision, management and executive leadership roles in the future and for those leaders who want to refresh their own leadership skills.
This program focuses on strengthening leadership through application of best practices in the following 15 areas:
Both programs are designed to provide you with the tools for a leadership journey that will inspire and excite, strengthen the business, and apply leadership best practices. Organizations can use these programs in a group, one-on-one, or customized for their specific needs.
To learn more, contact one of our ThistleSea business coaches at 724-935-1930 or info@thistlesea.com.
ThistleSea Business Development
301 Smith Drive, Suite 5
Cranberry Township, PA 16066
724-935-1930
info@thistlesea.com
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