Workshops // Organizational Development // Coaching // Assessments
Personal Coaching
TopPriorityYou believes leadership, culture and strategy are three key components of executive and organization success. In fact, leading culture might be the most critical component. As well known leadership development guru, Peter Drucker says “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Furthemore, Edgar Schein, author of Organizational Culture and Leadership, says leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin. Our Executive Series begins where the Leadership Series ends with a key focus on Vision, Values, Purpose and of course Leading Culture all within the context of delivering consistent, predictable top and bottom line results.
Middle Management Development
In this series, we transform managers into leaders. In our middle manager development program, we will train middle managers to not only handle the daily challenges of the work environment, but also provide them with tools to influence those with whom they work, identify their culture, explore communication styles, and introduce team dynamics. Beyond management, we will prepare them to understand that middle management is critical to the success of an organization and these front line managers need the tools to build teams, influence, and motivate. We will also discuss how to communicate on manager to employee level, manager to manager, and manager to supervisor in order to function best in you organization.
Senior Leadership Counsel
Every Organization has an ongoing need for effective leadership with management. Organizations need some leaders to grow, who will take on the increased demands of higher-level Management positions. Leader development builds performance improvement, succession planning, prepares the organization for change and moves an organization to a learning organization. Let me for a moment focus on bench strength of your organization.
How many successors have been identified for key leadership positions?
Do you have an adequate number of leaders being prepared for higher management positions?
How diverse is your pool of candidates in term of gender, ethnicity, and functional expertise?
What leadership competencies are needed to execute business strategy?
What values and belief’s will you need for executing your business strategy?
If you do not have adequate answers and this is what keeps you up at night as a senior leader Top Priority You will your partner in developing your integrated talent management system.
Talent Planning
“No company can grow revenues consistently faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company.” David Packard.
The battlefield has changed for businesses everywhere. How prepared are you to win the war? How will you have enough of the right people? Are you confident that you have the right tactics in place to grow, retain, engage your employees and leaders? If you are not certain or want to explore those nagging questions let us make you our Top Priority and together we can create a designed alliance that helps you win the war on talent.
Executive Coaching
Executive coaching supports all levels of executives and the organization in their quest to achieve greater effectiveness.
You are our Top Priority. Our coaches are certified with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and are certified Co-Active coaches from the coaches training institute. (CPCC-Coaches Training Institute). Our method is to provide recognized assessments regular coaching sessions, and competencies’ improvement plans which develops new applied skills leading to self-mastery with positive employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and improved financial results for the organization.
Team Coaching
Teams are everywhere. Teams are collections of people usually not more than 12 people who must rely on each other if each member is to experience optimal success and goal achievement. All team leaders need to agree on what top priorities items are needed for the team to address. All teams set goals and priorities, analyze and allocate the way work will be done, debrief the way the team is working by reviewing goals, norms, values decision making, conflict management and communication’s, and finally examine the relationships among the people doing the team work. Through team coaching you will learn that all teams have certain key needs. For a team to have success they will need common goals, supported leadership, member interaction satisfaction, team member growth, open communication, team group stickiness around decisions, attention to process, and discussion on the right content, mutual trust, effective conflict resolution, and commitment of each other. In combination our considerable team development and team coaching is your resource to assure your growth and achievement of the team you participate on. We will become your partners and use our considerable team coaching for the benefit of your leadership and the achievement of your team.
Life Coaching
Life Coaching is a relationship between client and coach that focuses on the whole person: values, life-purpose, goals, balance, and fulfillment. We are trained in the Co-active coaching model and believe that each person is naturally, creative, resourceful, and whole. Through asking powerful questions, exploring different perspectives, and looking deeply into values, coaches create a space for clients to understand themselves. The Co-active technique of coaching developed from the human potential movement and we all have trained and are certified as CPCC by the most rigorous Coaches Training Institute.
While coaches help clients with reaching goals, growing, and finding solutions, we, as co-active coaches, believe that we do not “fix” anything because our clients are not broken. Change and growth occur as our clients come to better understand what motivates them, their values, and realize is possible.
Leadership Effectiveness Assessment
Leadership Effectiveness: Measuring 22 leadership behaviors, the Leadership Effectiveness model gives rich and practical insight to expand both individual and organizational development
Identify specific leadership practices needed to achieve your organization’s strategic goals
Identify leadership behaviors currently in practice within an organization
Create selection criteria that help predict the success of candidates for leadership positions
Provide relevant, insightful feedback to leaders
Build action and accountability into the leadership development process
Provide constructive coaching suggestions for key areas of leadership development
Individual assessment
Leadership Circle Profile™
The Leadership Circle Profile is the only competency based 360° profile that measures two primary leadership domains—Creative leadership competencies and Reactive tendencies. It then integrates the information so that the key opportunities for development immediately rise to the surface. Unlike most assessments that measure only competencies, Leadership Circle Profile reveals to leaders and managers what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what actions they can take to lift their leadership to a higher level.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®)
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a widely-used personality inventory, or test, employed in work, vocational, educational, and psychotherapy settings to evaluate personality type in adults. It creates a coomon language for other people at work to please understand me.
The Myers-Briggs inventory is based on Carl Jung’s theory of types, outlined in his 1921 work Psychological Types. Jung’s theory holds that human beings are either introverts or extraverts, and their behavior follows from these inborn psychological types. He also believed that people take in and process information different ways, based on their personality traits.
The Myers-Briggs evaluates personality type and preference based on the four Jungian psychological types:
extraversion (E) or introversion (I)
sensing (S) or intuition (N)
thinking (T) or feeling (F)
judging (J) or perceiving (P)
Various combinations of these attributes result in a total of sixteen different personality types.
Used by 89 of Fortune 100 companies to maximize individual and team effectiveness from entry to executive levels.
Individual assessment
YOU GET: a full hour of feedback from our coach
Top Priority You maximizes your experience with the MBTI instrument by including a one-hour personal feedback session delivered by a certified Myers-Briggs®professional with years of experience in helping others understand and interpret their results. During the session your feedback provider will explain your results in detail, helping you discover your “best-fit” personality type, and suggesting ways to use this information to help you reach your personal goals. After your telephone feedback is complete a personalized interpretive report detailing your results and reported type will be e-mailed to you.
Leadership Series
As leaders grow within an organization they often transition through a series of stages with corresponding increases in roles and responsibilities. Ram Charan in his book, “The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company” identifies six specific passages. The Leadership Series at TopPriorityYou is focused on providing practical programming designed to meet your leaders where they are now. Our programs assist your leaders in navigating the challenges associated with their current stage while also beginning to discuss strategies for succeeding to the next level. Our four stages of focus within the Leadership Series are as follows: Lead Self / Lead Others / Lead Function / Lead Business
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® Signature Edition 4.0
Based on the proven principles found in Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s best-selling business book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® Signature Edition 4.0 is training that helps your organization achieve sustained superior results by focusing on making individuals and leaders more effective. Participants gain hands-on experience, applying timeless principles that yield greater productivity, improved communication, strengthened relationships, increased influence, and laser-like focus on critical priorities. The course also includes over 30 award-winning videos.
What You Receive:
The 7 Habits Assessment is personal and/or 360° assessment helps you gauge your effectiveness from your own viewpoint and from the viewpoints of others.
Participant Guidebook that is a 182-page manual is beautifully designed with examples and exercises that continue to enhance the learning process after the workshop is over.
7-week Contract that focuses on daily activities instead of weekly activities.
Living the 7 Habits Mobile App developed to support ongoing learning and implementation of the 7 Habits. Features include reminders to help live the 7 Habits, habit, practice and skill cards, mission statement builder, 7 X 7 Contract, a 7 Habits community, Big Rocks Planning and more.
Reference, Practice & Skills Cards that focuses on practicing and apply materials.
Experiential training featuring over 30 award winning videos.
Pre-work required: The 7 Habits Assessment-A questionnaire to help you consider your own effectiveness and give you the opportunity to see the viewpoints of others. This question assessment is an opportunity to assess yourself and to gather feedback from your manager, direct reports and peers who work closely enough with you to accurately assess your individual effectiveness.
Culture Shift
What is culture?
Culture refers to the cumulative results of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, structures, notions of time, roles, goals, relations, additional concepts of the company, acquired by a group of people over time through individual and group striving.
Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by the people at all levels of the company.
Culture is learned behavior through social learning.
A culture is a way of work life of a group of people–the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation over the history of the company. This implies you may have toxic cultures or empowering cultures.
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by work through relationships, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups.
Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered who we are and what we do and are communicated throughout the people in the company.
Why change culture?
As Steve Ballmer, now former CEO of Microsoft, said: “Everything I do is a reinforcement or not of what we want to have happen culturally.”
Cultures in companies for us is defined by how the organization runs, how the people, leadership within the organization interact with each other and also how strategy, structure, systems, coupled with the people elements; shared values, skills, staff, and style of the company is set out as the some total of experiences for others to align with while at work. Our believe is for an organization to perform well, these seven elements need to be aligned and mutually reinforcing. So, these elements can be used to help identify what needs to be realigned to improve performance, or to maintain alignment (and performance) during any types of transformation. Four good leverage points to consider are behavioral changes in top leadership, new people, bring new ideas, and strategies. This in turns brings new behavior and new performance changes that, in turn, can affect new ways of thinking and culture change, change your incentive because incentives create new behavior and finally increase feedback, evaluate performance, and fix things when needed. It’s vital to learn from performance, including mistakes, and use the lessons learned to change incentives, resources, people, methods and processes.
But changing an entrenched culture is the toughest task you will face. To do so, you must win the hearts and minds of the people you work with, and you must attain buy in and alignment at all levels of organization.
Shifts: Over our working lives out team has experienced significant cultural shifts within companies. Let us use our expertise to help you navigate your culture shift.
Individual Directions Inventory
The Individual Directions Inventory explores hidden drivers and untapped sources of energy, connecting motivation and behavior in innovative new ways to empower individuals and organizations to make unprecedented progress toward their goals.
A flexible assessment for use in:
Executive coaching
Selection
Development and retention of high potential leaders
Outplacement, retirement and transitions
Mergers, acquisitions, and culture shifts
Team development
EQ-i 2.0® measures emotional intelligence (EI)
Research has demonstrated that an individual’s Emotional Intelligence is often a more accurate predictor of success than the individual’s IQ.
Emotional intelligence is a set of emotional and social skills that collectively establish how well we:
Perceive and express ourselves #Develop and maintain social relationships#Cope with challenges#Use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way
It is a predictor of success in life and work.
Sales Performance Assessment
A sales strategy that focuses solely on results without considering behaviors could be missing the big picture.
You need sales people who can help grow your business and today’s customers want a value-based relationship with their vendors. The performance of sales professionals has a direct impact on an organization’s bottom line, yet most companies know surprisingly little about the blend of behaviors and motivations that drive sales success.
The Sales Performance Assessment unlocks unique insights that support the holistic development of a high-performance sales team.
The SPA measures 18 Sales Behaviors and 6 Sales Drivers to provide insight into individual performers and collective teams. These dimensions provide a clear and objective framework for identifying commonalities among your top performers, developing high potential sales professionals, and creating alignment between your organization’s strategic goals and your team’s behaviors and practices.
Use the SPA to:
Identify specific behaviors and practices needed to achieve your organization’s sales goals
Set expectations for sales behaviors that are clear and consistent
Build accountability into the sales development process
Create selection criteria that help predict the success of sales job candidates
Develop reward and recognition programs that improve retention
Conflict Dynamics Profile
Workplace conflict is inevitable—successful organizations must find ways to resolve it.
The model underlying the Conflict Dynamics Profile (CDP) also encourages people to engage rather than avoid conflict. The CDP puts a lot of emphasis on the emotional elements of conflict. It measures hot buttons – behaviors in others that cause us to become upset. The CDP also looks at ways that people respond to emotional upset. It measures the degree to which they hide, express, or act out emotions. The CDP helps people understand what triggers them in the first place, as well as how they manage the emotions once they occur.
What steps can a person take to be able manage anger in conflict situations so that it doesn’t get the best of you?
Understand Your Conflict Hot Buttons
Recognize Early Signs of Anger
Don’t Suppress Your Anger
Regulate Your Emotions
Express Your Emotions Constructively
Facilitator Series
At the heart of great facilitation, you must know what makes effective teams. We will help you create a team effectiveness model where you will apply that model to your organization and team. Increasing ones effectiveness is not just about learning new techniques but an exploration of your theories in action. Through this workshop you will learn from watching your actual behavior. You will know what your core behaviors and assumptions are, the strategies that follow from what you believe, and the consequence of your interactions with others. You will learn a practical approach to increase the quality of team decisions, how to group solve issues, how to increase commitment to decisions and team members, reduced implementation time, improved working relationships, and improved satisfaction of within the team.
Key things, which will be covered in this workshop:
What is the group effectiveness model you will use for analysis
Teams are about improved performance not group hugs
How to charter effective teams
How do you get sponsors to help in the team process
What is a clearly defined facilitator role look like in facilitation
How to establish group norms, vales, mission and vision
How to identify Ground rules for effective teams
How to facilitate performance, process and member satisfaction
How to diagnose what is going on in the team
How are good decisions made in teams
What are ways to effectively resolve conflict
How the group exchanges information which helps team process
How to develop group culture, the set of fundamental beliefs and values shared by the team members
Clearly defined roles, including the most important leadership of the team
Accelerated Leadership
How many times in our lives have we said if I only knew then what I now know would my decisions be better! The accelerated leadership program is built on this premise. When we go back and think about our first supervisory job or our first leadership position of substance; when we transport ourselves back into that first role what do we remember? I still remember the uneasiness, the awkwardness of that first time leader’s role. I still remember asking where do I turn to get help? Who has done this before well? How do I learn from them? I wanted to be successful, to achieve, and ultimately to be the kind of leader that people chose to follow. Really… but how to do that? Now look at your organization and is it like most organizations today- the predominate way you receive support is swim with the sharks, in the pool, swim baby swim, just win! How invaluable would it have been to us if we had support from our own support team? (a mentor, a coach, a teacher, and leader who has traveled the same journey!) If you had that support would someone think you had high potential? You would have enjoyed your journey! Accelerated leadership is our way of taking 30+ years of senior executive experience, mentoring, coaching, teaching, managing and leading and passing it on in the accelerate leadership program. Our aim to accelerate the development of business leaders at all levels so they will become much more powerful and stronger leaders. Stronger leaders create stronger results in engagement, improved morale and profitability. Please contact us for our one on one accelerated leadership program details or to attend one of our public workshops.
Ask HR
We become your HR department engaged in Human Resource strategy consulting. For companies that do not have an HR department or one of limited size, we are available to help with your HR daily issues: strategic planning, talent management, succession planning, team building, progressive discipline, terminations, training, developing culture, performance objectives planning, compensation analysis, workforce management, and goal setting. We have been senior business executives so we approach our proposed solutions as realistic managers applying practical non nonsense counsel. We are your strategic HR business partner, your HR solutions department, or we can become the HR function you need in order to be successful. We can be contracted for a specific function or are available for retainer. Our ask HR department can train front line supervisors, managers, executives, high potential leadership, and develop leaders at all levels. We offer a variety of assessments and team building seminars. Our HR advisors have been in Human Resources for over 40 years and maintain certifications as senior professionals in Human Resources; SPHR-CA, and Senior Certified Professional SHRM-CP.
Personal Coaching
One way to improve your career is to find someone who has improved his or her life and career. You seek the positive deviance and replicate the same process. You often hear that one of the keys to the kingdom was coaching or mentoring from another person. There is a paradigm shift within organizations today where the leader as coach is replacing the leader commander. Coaching is job one in the age of talent development. Therefore, we coach people based on these principles; we will bring about an impossible future, a fulfilled life, and the big gulp beyond the compelling call. That desirable future represents wining as defined by you. You will pursue great talent within yourself and master the secrets of great group relationships, we believe you are naturally creative resourceful and whole and coaching is the ultimate self developing experience, and finally you create record breaking financial results for the organization you practice in while leading as coach. Do you inspire people and unchain people to realize an impossible dream and win? Is it an obsession for you to help make the best people exist within your company? How many talented people would say working for you is great for their self-development? Do people say you coach them to do the absolute best? We want you to achieve your impossible dream that is the juice from the squeeze. That push to be more is why you are more likely to achieve than if you did it on your own. Let us make you our Top Priority.
Personal Directions
The professional is personal.
Trying to encourage individual professional development without acknowledging personal motivations and desires leaves the person out of a uniquely personal process. Taking a limited, workplace-only view of key motivational factors leaves you without critical insights. These are the knowledge gaps that can leave you frustrated and puzzled when success fails to materialize.
Personal Directions goes beyond the workplace and into the world, providing people with life-changing insights.
Personal Directions measures 18 life architecture and 11 quality of life variables to provide individuals with clear, powerful feedback on how they see themselves in significant areas of their lives. Capitalizing on the insights this feedback brings, Personal Directions lays a deep, robust foundation for both career development and personal growth to foster individual success at work and in life.
Use Personal Directions to reveal:
What individuals want from their world
Areas of life where individuals have chosen (both intentionally and unintentionally) to invest their energy and resources
Unique insights into how individuals feel about the investments and choices they have made
Actions to consider, based on what they now know about themselves, as they look into the future
An especially powerful tool for coaching, Personal Directions also provides important insights during transitions such as high potential development, readiness for new assignments, and pre-retirement planning.
DiSC
DiSC is a behavior assessment tool based on the DISC theory of psychologistWilliam Moulton Marston, which centers on four different behavioral traits: dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance. It is not a personality assessment. DiSC shows your behavior when the person is in a particular environment. For example, most people would say they do not behave the same at home and at work – but they are the same single personality.
Hogan
The Hogan Development Survey is a proven assessment tool that uses 11 personality scales to help leaders recognize shortcomings, maximize strengths, and build successful teams. The HDS measures a person’s tendencies when under stress. It answers the question: What tendencies could derail this individual’s career or performance?
Primary Scales:
Excitable: moody, easily annoyed, hard to please, emotionally volatile
Skeptical: distrustful, cynical, sensitive to criticism, focused on the negative
Cautious: unassertive, resistant to change, slow to make decisions
Reserved: aloof, indifferent to the feeling of others, uncommunicative
Leisurely: overtly cooperative, but privately irritable, stubborn, uncooperative
Bold: overly self-confident, arrogant, inflated feelings of self-worth
Mischievous: charming, risk-taking, limit-testing and excitement-seeking
Colorful: dramatic, attention-seeking, interruptive, poor listening skills
Imaginative: creative, but thinking and acting in unusual or eccentric ways
Diligent: meticulous, precise, hard to please, tends to micromanage
Dutiful: eager to please and reluctant to act independently