Strategy

We offer the facilitation of the following strategic interventions and also assist with implementing and sustaining ongoing strategy programmes within organizations:

• Personal Strategy
• Networking Tactics
• Sustainable Customer Service Strategy
• Leading in Formation

Personal Strategy

We all need to have direction and clearly articulated destination. Do you know where you want to be in the future? Where are you going and what is necessary to shift from where you are now to where you want to be? What specific tactics do you need to develop, implement and sustain? We used to work on a five-year period but the world is now turbulent, ambiguous and very exciting. Everything happens much faster, too. So we usually work on a three-year or one-year personal strategy plan.

This unique one-day programme was first developed as part of ‘Networking Tactics’, and then answered the questions ‘where do I want to be in three years?’ and ‘how can I set up tactics to help me get there?’ Being continuously improved over the years, this is now incorporated in a number of our courses – ‘Communication Skills’, ‘Enhance Your Executive Skills’ and often forms part of coaching or mentoring programmes. However, it is also an excellent ‘stand-alone’ one-day course.

The facilitation of this programme can be done for individuals or groups of up to 14 people. Although 8 hours is usually required to cover the mission, vision, values, roles and tactics stemming from these, it has also worked very well as two half-day workshops.

This workshop helps you to define your dreams and make them a reality.

Networking Tactics

This workshop is one of the ‘all time’ favourites as it achieves exceptional results. It was originally developed because there seemed to be no networking literature that linked personal networking constructively to achieving goals. That was before the days of Face-book, LinkedIn and Twitter! So this workshop was developed to help people produce their own individual one-page plan showing personal strategy (originally for five-years – now we work on three years – or even one year.) And then there are specific tactics which we practice usually for one or two week periods in order to help us to use networking to achieve our major goals.

This workshop became the topic of Brenda’s first published book: ‘Networking Tactics: how to achieve success through personal networking’.

For organisations we have held this workshop ‘in house’ for their management teams for skills development and also for building stronger teams. Some have then continued with twelve week programmes where the entire organisation has worked on one tactic per week. Holding ‘report-backs’ each week in clusters increases the success of these programmes. A special emphasis is ‘catch some-one doing something right’ focusing on that week’s principle. So the initial workshop can be carried over into a sustainable programme with outstanding results. The whole culture of the organisation improves.

The second published book, ‘ABCs of Networking’ also forms an excellent base for developing a sustainable networking programme for the whole organisation.

The complete ‘Networking Tactics’ programme is included in the twelve-session programme, ‘Communication Skills’. But where clients want to ‘harness the power of collective networking’ in their organisations, we also run specially tailored workshops, mini-workshops or even keynotes on various aspects of networking.

Sustainable Customer Service Strategy

Often businesses and organisations can’t understand why their service is erratic. Training in customer service alone does not bring sustainability. But focusing on service as being a critical success factor in achieving the business’s overall strategy can bring significant results. So by having each department and individual work on the same principles at the same time benefits all aspects of the business.

This workshop is suitable for large or small organisations, businesses or professional offices. We usually work with the management team. However, we also run public one-day workshops where individual managers or business owners can participate.

How did this unique workshop originate? Having built a group of successful stores from scratch, I appreciate how important ‘service’ is. And by training the entire staff well, we are empowering others, too. As a family business we won many awards for our service and five years ago, in being audited for the Services Seta award (which we were awarded!) for service excellence, I realised the importance of incorporating Sustainable Customer Service Strategy into the way we work. Together, an associate, Leon Grove and I developed this programme both for public and ‘in house’ one-day workshops. Sometimes we present together or each of us individually presents the same content, too. There is usually a follow-up session to help firms or individuals fine-tune their plans.

Leading in Formation