Strategic Thinking
This strategic thinking seminar is about the psychological foundations of behavioral finance. It will show how people can exert more leverage in their careers and thus contribute to their company's as well as their own long-term success.
Emphasis will be placed on how individuals can help their organization stay ahead of a changing psychographic environment by moving their organization beyond what they already know, into the more uncertain realm of innovation.
Do you need to effect client retention, expansion into new markets or higher dollar sales volume per prospect or client? Certainly, much good can come from knowing ahead of time that people in certain positions might be predisposed to scientifically analyzed behavioral patterns. Knowing these patterns ahead of time would prove instrumental in decreasing closing ratios.
Many companies focus on topics first and end up training the same topics over and over with little result. Do you want to just train, or do you want to effect sales and service performance and outcomes? The issue that one needs to ask is, "What should training do?" At the end of the training session, what should happen that isn't happening now? What should your people do differently than they have done in the past?
Only a handful of managers are approaching their training with a clear clinical understanding and psychological perspective. When we understand this, we will reach an important landmark in investing our training time and dollars.
This strategic thinking seminar is based on proven psychological and business protocols. The well-formed outcome is vertical growth to the bottom line.
Systematic Management
The Systematic Management Model
1.) Introduce the Systematic Management Model
2.) Train prospective managers to implement the Systematic Management Model
3.) Assist managers in using this model to accrue the awareness and knowledge requisite to demonstrating the following skills:
a.) consistently provide quality management procedures when managing employees or clients
b.) Develop the ability to train others to provide standardized, objective, reliable and valid management procedures
4.) Demonstrate how the model may be used to replicate quality services in other operational areas within the organization
5.) To establish an ongoing, automated capability thru which required changes in management and evaluation strategies may be effectively and efficiently achieved
Stress Management
The concept of stress and, indeed, research on stress has reached an all-time peak in popularity during the past decade. An ever increasing number of books and journals devoted exclusively to stress are being published, courses and seminars are being offered in this area, and references to stress in the mass media abound. With this heightened awareness of stress--meaning here essentially all that is unpleasant, noxious or excessively demanding--an interest in stress reducing techniques, or stress management, has given birth to a new specialty in the health sciences.
The techniques in this course represent twenty-five years of cumulative experience in the fields of stress management and behavioral medicine. As a researcher, teacher and author, I have been frustrated by existing stress courses that describe only one technique--which may or may not work for a participant's particular stress problems.
This seminar is different, and I hope it meets your needs. It contains the best of the brief, clinically proven techniques for relieving stress that we have developed in our lives. It will explore various stress reducing techniques for each source of stress in your professional and/or personal life.
Creativity Training
If you continue to do what you have always done, you will continue to get what you have always gotten. This creativity training seminar is based on the four fundamental aspects of creativity and "truly" stepping out of the box. Idea generation while deferring judgment is the cornerstone of this training seminar. Changing perspective and critical thinking processes will be explored to increase both the practical and the theoretical understanding of the creative process. Various ways you can present your service or product and the development of niche marketing strategies for higher sales and more effective closing opportunities.
Behaviors (ideas, thoughts, and actions) are in constant competition in our nervous systems, and a number of simple processes operate simultaneously on all of these behaviors, causing a variety of interactions. One inevitable outcome of this dynamic process is a steady stream of new behaviors. The entire process is orderly and predictable--good news for those of us who care about enhancing creativity and innovation. By changing the number and type of behaviors that compete, we can accelerate the creative flow and direct it in desired ways. When I teach people about creativity, I give them the tools they need to enhance and direct the creative process in the real world.
To simplify matters even further, new ideas emerge as old ideas compete with each other, and the process by which that happens is orderly. In the workplace, this means that we accelerate and direct the creative process. We can accelerate the creativity machine and even make it run down certain paths. If you want your agents and employees to design better marketing strategies or reduce closing ratios, there are specific ways in which you can train them, modify their work environment and change procedures to do just that.
Scientific research produces the axiom that a competition among different behaviors is essential to the creative process. How can we facilitate that competition, and how can we direct the process to achieve desired goals? In an organizational setting, how can we improve training, change the work environment and modify policies and procedures to boost creativity?
Generativity Theory suggests four strategies for enhancing and directing creativity (capturing, challenging, broadening, surrounding). The word strategy can mean different things in different contexts. In this seminar, it means a skill set--in other words, a set of skills that serve roughly the same function. A marketing strategy is a plan that directs a variety of actions toward one goal: to create an environment for selling a particular product or service.
Strategic Mentoring
Systematically analyzing, creating and implementing professional goal-orientated relationships that are profitable in every sense; both personally and bottom line.
How to win long-term in the corporate environment by planning and directing a program of strategic mentoring for both mentors and mentees.
Personal Style Analysis, program criteria for mentors and Attachment Theory will be explored.
Click on the links below to read Mark's articles on Mentoring
Strategic Mentoring for Profitable Relationships
Executive Coaching
The mark of leaders throughout history is their ability to understand themselves and others. Executive coaching is designed to help you understand yourself in relationship to your professional and personal surroundings. Analytical and critical thinking processes will be identified with concrete action plans for establishing a clear vision of the future with some rigor. Identifying core belief systems and well formed outcomes with strategies to achieve your desired outcome are the goals of executive coaching.Coaches help people set better goals and then reach those goals. They ask their clients to do more than they would have done on their own. Coaches help their client to focus better so as to produce results more quickly. They provide clients with the tools, support and structure to accomplish more. Clients get focused and produce faster because they have a coach.
Many people are tired of doing what they think they "should" do and are ready to do something special and meaningful for the rest of their lives. One problem is that many can't see what this is, or, if they can, they can't find a way to reorient their life around it. A coach can help them do both.
A coach challenges you and takes the time to find out what winning in life means to you. A coach is your partner in living the life you know you can accomplish, personally and professionally. A coach is someone to hold you accountable for your life, to make sure you really do live up to your potential.
Would you like to work with someone who listens very well, really hears what you say, wants you to succeed, endorses you, is constructive, suggests courses of action, makes requests and helps you stay focused? Together, you and I develop goals, make agreements for action and then discuss the resulting accomplishments or difficulties.
As your coach, I am your sounding board, facilitator, counselor and awareness raiser. In absolute confidentiality, I'll assist you to access and develop resources to facilitate your growth and overcome whatever obstacles block your path to clarity, prosperity, peace, success and fulfillment. Results include more energy and productivity, greater happiness, enthusiasm and deep satisfaction. These are key ingredients to achieve personal and organizational success.
Executive Coaching supports you to develop and hone the skills you need, and gives you the confidence to take on bigger challenges and greater responsibility. To lead others you must first lead yourself. Coaching is about self-discovery and unleashing your unrealized potential. I help establish specific, clear personal and professional outcomes that are aligned with your deepest values and purpose; outcomes that stretch you to actualize your potential and then create the life you want.
Tactical Planning
Critical to the successful setting of direction is the establishment of the starting point, the present condition of the organization. This is a multi-dimensional assessment of soundness, vitality and peer compatibility.
The assessment should look to the past to determine the nature of past efforts and successes. An appreciation of the firm's assets must be gained to determine the inventory of resources available. An understanding of the competitors, current and past, and of supporters must be developed to assess the operational environment of change.
The application of vision to the setting of goals is the least understood element of the tactical planning process. It requires a willingness to consider a broad range of potential "futures" and to examine the implications of each. Outcomes that represent both success and failure must be examined to determine the applicability and leveragability of available resources to achieve or avoid the consequences of each course of action. It is the exploration of "what could be", both good and bad, that will surface the bedrock issues of the agent's future.
Just as the tactical planning assessment seeks to answer the traditional question of strategy "who are we?" this process deals with the more compelling question of "who do we want to be?"
Here the resources of the agent are applied to the potential accomplishment of the tactical plan. Through scenario development we attempt to live the future. Issues relating to redeployment of the agent's assets such as office relocation, product focus, management development, marketing, and capital formation are likely to be central to the determination of a feasible tactical plan and acceptable course of action. We will stretch our planning horizon beyond a single year to determine the vitality and robustness of their vision.
At the conclusion of the process we will have examined the strengths and weaknesses and evaluated in that light, a range of outcomes. Finally, we will have drawn into focus a desired outcome and analyzed agent resources available for its accomplishment, highlighting strengths and voids. The stage will be set for the execution of a tactical business plan by the respective agents.
Team Building
This seminar is about creative collaboration. The harsh reality is that in order for organizations to be competitive and cost-effective, they must deliver consistently high quality services to their external as well as internal clients. The question is not whether to integrate quality improvement principles into the organization, but how to "enhance" the process.
Although the concept of teams is not new, the process of shaping effective teams is still evolutionary. Professionals need to understand the dynamics, issues and challenges of this form of accomplishing work. In order for teams to function effectively, they must be trained to do so, and as teams form, they need to pay attention to their processes as well as to procedures that help them function effectively. Effective teamwork does not happen naturally, it takes practice. Team building and team training includes making decisions about goals, roles, procedures and inter-personal functioning and the ability to specify the objectives the team is attempting to achieve. Periodically asking the question "What keeps us from being as effective as we might be?," strengthens the team and keeps it on target. Team members may need training in communication skills, problem identification, problem-solving strategies, and other skills. An integral part of team training is an understanding of how teams develop and the issues they face in each stage of development. As professionals become more aware of the positive correlation between teamwork and performance, their need increases for more knowledge about team development and about the factors that contribute to and detract from team effectiveness. This seminar will summarize the stages of team development and the team issued behaviors that occur in each.
Many problems arise simply because team members are not clear about what they expect of one another. A sense of unity and identification with the whole is more likely to exist in innovative, integrative organizations than in highly segmented ones because of the structure, smell and the culture that grows out of it. A shared philosophy, team building and family feeling cannot be simulated or imposed artificially; it has to derive from the way work is done. The objective of this seminar is to outline specific strategies and procedures to facilitate teamwork.
Learning how to break the structural barriers of communication, encourage the healthy exchange of ideas, and facilitating joint efforts to solve problems are but a few of the important components of this seminar.
Standing on a Whale Fishing for Minnows
Do you sometimes forget about your current clients in your zeal to get new ones?
If so, you're like most everyone else: You're Standing on a Whale Fishing for Minnows.
What?
Mark Hillman's "whale" represents your existing client base - a "ton" of additional sales and referrals that you are either ignoring or giving too little attention while you fish for minnows: scramble about in strange territory in quest of new business.
When you bring a girl to a dance, you're supposed to dance with her, not look all over the place. |
When I put my financial future in your hands, don't just send me boiler plate stuff from your company and a desktop calendar once a year. |
If I've just inherited a half-million, I'm not going back to someone I haven't heard from in a year. |
Dr. Hillman will show you specific ways to generate more business and referrals from your existing clients, and get deeper into marketing strategies and behavior patterns.
His presentation is not the typical sales speech. Rather, he focuses on the "clinical side of the sales cycle: relationship skills and the dynamics of interaction."
