Diana D. Williams, Learning Facilitator
MSc., aPHR, GCLC
Informal Chats
Informal Chats are introductory and slightly interactive lectures designed to introduce employees to subject matters. They can be structured anywhere from 1 to 2 hours, depending on desire.
Creating a Safe Emotional Climate
Audience: Managers/Leaders
Chat Objective: Introducing a new paradigm for emotions in the workplace
This chat is designed to introduce managers/leaders to their role and responsibility for creating and managing a safe emotional climate that empowers employees to maximize their skills. The basis for this Chat is research that shows a strong connection between an employee’s attitude towards their company and the emotional climate in which they work.
Managing Mental Models,
and Why They Matter
Audience: Managers/Leaders
Chat Objective: Increase awareness of the role of mental models at work
In this chat, attendees are introduced to the subject of Mental Models, which are assumptions that reside in the unconscious part of the brain, and that leaders bring to work and unknowingly use to make important decisions. One of the greatest thought leaders of our times, Harvard’s Chris Argyris says this about Mental Models: “Although people do not [always] behave congruently with their espoused theories [what they say], they do behave congruently with their theories-in-use [their mental models].
The assumptions we hold in our minds are powerful influences on what we see, and how we deal with work challenges. If decision-makers do not question the validity of their mental models, or the theories they are using, they will use outdated and incorrectly information to make important decisions.
Why Organizational Culture is Crucial to Company Vision
Audience: Managers/Leaders/Supervisors
Chat Objective: Help attendees understand the relationship between company culture and and company vision
Whenever a leader interacts with an employee, they are establishing the realities of the company’s culture, good or bad, right or wrong. Culture decides what people do, and is never based on what leaders say, but what the company actually does.
This chat explains the three levels of organizational culture which Edgar H. Schein defines as the accumulated shared learning that members of a group have learned as they have gone about the business of solving problems of external adaptation to a particular work environment, and internal integration into that environment. This shared learning once learned and accepted by the members of the group becomes their group identity, or who they are. It will be extremely difficult for a group to achieve a vision that is misaligned with its culture.