Topic: Career Coaching: Using Career Growth to Motivate and Retain. HR Departments are great at creating and maintain organizational structures that employees can navigate as they build knowledge and experience. Career ladders, career paths, step and grade progressions all can be used to chart a path through the organizational maze. But getting managers to use these tools to coach their staff in charting their future can be a real daunting challenge. Managers will sometimes shun having open and honest career discussion with their staff in this era of salary increase restrictions and promotional paucity. To further complicate the situation, employees can take on a passive view toward their future, waiting for their managers or even HR to tell them what their next career move should be. The result is confusion around career growth and development that yields disengagement and key talent flight. What can HR professionals do to coach managers to have robust career discussion with their staff and to coach staff to take an active part in planning their career future?

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Topic: Coaching the Coach. Coaching is a powerful leadership tool for directing the performance to ensure that bottom line results are achieved. Coaching is more than simply telling people what to do. It’s a one-on-one, performance-oriented, on-going series of conversations between a leader and direct report that forms the foundation of a positive workplace relationship. How well and how often leaders provide feedback directly impacts the success of the organization’s mission. Don’t miss this exciting workshop!

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Topic: Delegation — Developing Others through Shared Work. Delegation is a critical foundation skill in managing the crushing workload most managers face today. “Doing more with less” requires managers to continuously make assignments, monitor progress, and coach for successful performance. Yet often managers adopt the attitude that they can do the work faster and better than those around them, the result being overload and burn out. What can HR professionals do to coach managers to delegate workload to their staff and other resources? When managers are overloaded and face burnout, HR leaders need to intercede and provide them with the guidance and training to be effective at delegating work.

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Topic: The Art of Feedback. Feedback is critical to any human endeavor. It is essential to answer the question: how well am I doing? Feedback, constant and continuous communication of evaluation information, helps us decide what to do more of, less of, or differently. Organizational leaders often suffer from a deficit of good feedback since those close to them may be reluctant to share this essential negative and personal information. Successful leaders know the art of giving and receiving high quality, actionable feedback. They build organizations that thrive on communicating openly, honestly and with respect. In this presentation I will challenge the participants to evaluate the quality of the feedback they give to others and to identify ways to improve on the feedback they both give and receive.

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Topic: Effective Hiring Practices. Hiring staff is the one job you perform as a business leader that will have the most impact on your success. When you fill a vacancy with a good hire, they add value immediately to the work group and the organization overall. A “bad” hire, on the other hand, can have far reaching negative effects and long-term impacts on your organization. And yet, as a business leader, has anyone ever taught you HOW to hire?

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Join Dr. Alice Waagen in two fascinating and informative discussions at this Kansas City event. “Lead People, Manage Performance,” which focuses on the evolution of management and leadership concepts and the difference between them; and “Leadership Styles – What is Mine?” which will help audience members develop valuable management skills and discuss the impact of different leadership styles on worker morale and workplace productivity.

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A steady climb up the corporate ladder has long been the traditional measure of career success. In many organizations, employees have an expectation for growth predicated on a “time in grade” mentality. For most corporations, continuous vertical progression for employees is both unrealistic and unfeasible. In this presentation, management experts Dr. Alice Waagen and Paul Siker teach professionals how to devise a career progression structure, called Job Families, which makes it easier to understand and accommodate both horizontal and vertical movement.

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In this fast-paced, informative keynote presentation, management experts Dr. Alice Waagen and Paul Siker share their lessons learned from implementing career progression systems. They will explain the 10 key strategies for designing career progression systems as well as the five biggest mistakes that, with a little guidance, you can learn to avoid.

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Most successful leaders have mastered the art of giving and receiving high quality, actionable feedback. They build organizations that thrive on communicating openly, honestly and with respect. In this presentation I will challenge the breakfast participants to evaluate the quality of the feedback they give to others and to identify ways to improve on the feedback they both give and receive.

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Leadership training expert Alice Waagen of Workforce Learning will lead a hands-on development program that provides employers with targeted skills.

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Join the Business Builder Webinar on January 26 at 3PM to hear Dr. Waagen discuss what the workforce will look like in the next 10 years and the importance of strong people skills in an organization’s leadership.

About Alice Waagen, PhD

The president and founder of WORKFORCE LEARNING LLC, a leadership development company, which since 1997 has provided managers and C-level executives with the skills and knowledge they need to build a more productive work environment.

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The single most important tool in a manager’s toolbox is the performance appraisal.

When used correctly, the appraisal is the capstone on a year of goal setting, coaching and continual feedback. And yet most managers see their performance management system as an onerous once a year headache. How can you breathe new life into your performance appraisal system?

In this presentation, Dr. Alice Waagen of the management training firm Workforce Learning, and author of “The Essential Performance Appraisal Handbook” Sharon Armstrong (pictured right), will reveal 10 strategies that will eliminate the stress and uncertainty of the performance review process.

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