Backpack to Briefcase: 25 Business Skills to Develop Now!
This fun, interactive program helps new employees and associates begin the transition from students to professionals. They will learn practical skills to turn them into immediate contributors to the company.
Topics include:
- Transitioning from student to professional including learning how to set professional goals, identify mentors, recognize human dynamics in the workplace, seek out professional growth opportunities and develop a personal network.
- Managing Time including learning how to set priorities, effectively delegate tasks, give and receive feedback and understand work interruptions and how to avoid them.
- Building the Foundations to Become a Rainmaker including networking and lunching with purpose, seeking out opportunities to speak and write and leveraging organizational involvement.
- Developing a Business Profile including creating a professional persona, developing interests outside work and celebrating successes.
BlackBerries to Business Letters
When The New York Times prints a front page article noting that students graduating from some of America’s best colleges and universities can’t write effective business letters, we knew there was a problem. It’s not that today’s graduates aren’t smart. They have simply grown up in a world of instant messaging, with its culture of strange spellings and little to no punctuation. Young professionals find the transition to more formal business communications a troublesome task.
Because inevitably, an employee will send an inappropriate e-mail, this program emphasizes netiquette in the workplace.
Topics include:
- Business writing skills including organization formulas, using active voice, avoiding professional exclusionary language, checking for misunderstandings and ruthless editing.
- Company letterhead including formatting business letters and memos, identifying subject matters clearly and concisely and closing personally and professionally.
- E-mail including swiftly answering e-mail, using proper grammar, spelling and punctuation, avoiding emoticons and alternative communication for confidential information.
- Communications technology including special concerns related to the use of fax machines, cell phones and PDAs.
Communicating Effectively with Internal & External Clients
Some studies suggest that fully 85% of any professional service provider’s success is directly linked to their ability to effectively communicate. Yet, few professionals receive any formal training in basic communication skills.
This highly interactive, two-hour program is an introduction to communication styles. Because communication style is based in part on individual behavioral style preferences, the program initially helps participants identify their individual behavioral style preferences. We then assist participants in identifying the style preferences of the internal and external clients with whom they work daily. Highlighting points of commonality and potential conflict, we describe adjustments participants can make in order to facilitate communications with co-workers and clients.
Topics include:
- Gaining a greater understanding of behavioral style preference, including assets and liabilities
- Acquiring an understanding of other behavioral style preferences
- Learning clues to help identify others’ preferences, flexing to those preferences as well as key flexing techniques
- Recognizing the impact of behavioral style preferences on project management styles.
Giving & Receiving Feedback
As we advance in our careers, we must often provide feedback to clients as well as to co-workers and support staff. This program addresses feedback in the context of its fundamental role in the learning organization. This program is especially important for those who participate in the performance appraisal process. For best results, supplement this seminar with our Communicating Effectively With Internal and External Clients seminar.
Topics include:
- Guidelines for giving and receiving feedback.
- The importance of being specific and general, nonjudgmental, correct and verifiable and well-timed
- Learning how to recognize and respond to defensive routines used by some feedback recipients
Introduction to Business Development
This program addresses four major types of client development opportunities and four major types of client development activities. We discuss which opportunities provide the best return on investment. And, we will suggest specific strategies participants can use. Targeted at the sales organization and prospect development process, we focus both on lead generation and developing additional business from existing clients.
Topics include:
- Learning to identify key prospective client groups and which of the four potential client groups yields the highest return on investment
- Specific client development activities appropriate for each of the four groups including identifying key success factors in converting prospects to clients
- Specific key buyers in organizational structures, the impact of behavioral style on buying and selling and flexing preferred behavioral styles in order to facilitate marketing efforts.
Popcorn & Principles
This training series was created by Mary Crane & Associates specifically for our law firm and in-house legal department clients. Each session introduces your lawyers to a cinematic legal thriller. The fact patterns created by some of Hollywood’s best writers and producers then serve as the basis for us to discuss specific ethical concerns. Each of our four programs fulfills US and Canadian state bar continuing legal education ethics requirements.
A Popcorn & Principles seminar incorporates an examination of your state bar association’s code of ethics and is conducted in your office thereby minimizing the amount of time your lawyers must take away from billable and company work.
We can even transform a Popcorn & Principles seminar into a marketing event for your firm. Just invite a group of your corporate counsel clients to attend a Popcorn & Principles seminar. By doing so, you help those clients acquire needed CLE credits. At the same time, your firm’s lawyers gain the opportunity to network with those clients both before and after the event.
Rules of Engagement
Important business relationships are formed and cemented in social settings. Yet, many professionals feel uncomfortable in these environments. Working a crowded room and managing the more formal dining setting—these and other business entertainment opportunities challenge many of us. This program is specifically designed to help your employees, executives and partners feel competent and comfortable in any business-social setting. Participants will learn ten specific rules for working a reception and ten more rules for managing a business lunch or dinner. We also cover rules for electronic communications and personal presentation.
Topics include:
- How to work social business engagements including pre-event preparation, introductions, and remembering names and business card etiquette. We also include breaking and entering into conversations, transforming small talk into new business and becoming memorable to new contacts.
- How to manage business lunches and dinners including selecting the appropriate restaurant, making seating and ordering decisions, timing business discussion, solving dining mysteries (including finger bowls, strange silverware, bread and butter plates, flying forks, flying foods, and inedible foods), mastering trick foods and managing wait staff.
- How to avoid e-mail disasters including evaluating e-mail content for appropriateness, appreciating others’ bandwidth, and correct use of "company-wide" e-mails.
Working Together 9 to 5: Gender Differences In The Workplace
It’s hard to believe that when Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor graduated second in her law school class the only job she could secure within a law firm was a secretarial position. Today, women fill the ranks of business and law throughout the country, and as a result, increasingly professional women have the ability to learn from each other’s experiences.
This session provides participants with the opportunity to learn about themselves and from each other. Participants leave the program with a Personal Career Plan that identifies personal and professional goals as well as the people who may help accomplish those goals.
Topics include:
- Understanding work style including behavioral style identification, assets and liabilities of each style, flexing to style preferences to promote successful interactions in the workplace.
- Recognizing the impact of gender on communication style including negotiating work assignments, expressing certainty, requesting feedback, apologizing.
- Taking charge of one’s career, including understanding the meritocracy myth, recognizing the discomfort associated with self-promotion and emphasizing the importance of asking.
Working With People Who Are Not Like Me
Just a generation or two ago, the business and legal landscape looked about the same—both were predominantly male and white. Today, our workforce, customers and clients come from very diverse backgrounds. To respond to this, businesses recognize that they must build a multicultural workforce. And, for such a workforce to be effective, members must be prepared to engage in open, cross-cultural communications. Members of your company should be prepared to listen and understand unspoken nuances in order to promote cooperative interactions, produce innovation, and ultimately to create win-win scenarios. This seminar fulfills the requirements for supervisor diversity training for the State of California.
Topics include:
- Legal and ethical reasons for promoting a multicultural workforce.
- The business case for promoting a multicultural workforce.
- Specific issues that may arise as a result of generation, gender, and ethnic differences.
- Microinequities, what they are and how to address them.
- Special international cultural issues and their impact on internal and external business relations.
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Bridging the Generation Gap
One hundred years ago, virtually every business and law firm in the Unites States looked pretty much alike. Most law firms were filled with white men. And because the average life expectancy of a man at that time was 47 years, most professionals were fairly close in age.
Today, four separate generations are found in most workplaces. Each of these generations brings to the office very unique expectations about work. Older generations expect Gen X and Gen Y to stay quiet and learn while earning their stripes. Gen X and Y expect immediate involvement as equals. In order to succeed, businesses and law firms must bridge the generation gap.
This program reviews the research regarding generational cohorts, focusing primarily on Traditionalists (born before 1946), Boomers (born between 1946 and 1962), Gen X (born between 1962 and 1982) and Gen Y (born after 1982). We’ll examine key events and people that influenced each generation and the impact these events had on values, attitudes and outlooks. Importantly, we’ll note that the generations share key core values, though how they express those values will likely differ.
Topics include:
- Generations now found in the workplace, including key events, people and values.
- A special emphasis on understanding Gen Y, the generation now entering today’s workplace.
- Unique generational expectations regarding work.
- Strategies for bridging the generation gap.
- Core values shared by all generations.
