Since HSI is implemented within a larger context that includes individuals, relationships, teams, plus an all-inclusive organizational framework, training to support the implementation of new technology or changes in existing technology, Humanproof subject matter experts are available to provide a wide variety of training programs focusing on improving individual, team, project and organizational performance.

Improving Individual Performance

Communication and Listening Skills

Communicating with others is an essential skill in all relationships, whether business or personal.  Employees with good technical skills, but poor communication skills, will be held back from achieving their career potential.  They are often misunderstood by others, have difficulty getting their point across clearly, and have trouble reading other people’s intentions, and deciding what to say and what not to say.  Being an effective listener is also crucial to effective communication.  This program provides basic guidelines for effective communication and listening, allows you to assess your communication, and engage in exercises to practice newly-learned skills and receive feedback.

Facilitation Skills

Effective facilitation skills are the foundation for many workplace processes: executive coaching, collaboration, consensus-building, brainstorming, decision-making, problem-solving, conflict management, establishing rapport, building and maintaining trust, creating conditions conducive to synergy, and building a cohesive team.  This program presents the fundamentals of effective facilitation, and provides opportunities for participants to practice newly-learned skills and receive feedback.

Conflict Management

Managing interpersonal conflict in the workplace is a crucial skill, because differences of opinion between and among co-workers, managers, suppliers, customers, and others are inevitable. Some ways of responding to conflict allow people to resolve or manage disagreements, while others only serve to intensify them.  This program offers basic guidelines for managing conflict effectively, allows you to discover your conflict management style, and provides you with opportunities to broaden your range of responses to conflict situations.

Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback

Providing managers, co-workers, and subordinates with feedback, and being willing to receive feedback from them is essential to learning and career development.  There are two types of feedback: positive and corrective.  Some people withhold feedback due to awkwardness or fear of reprisal, while others become argumentative and defensive when someone offers them corrective feedback.  This program provides guidelines for giving and receiving effective feedback, and provides opportunities to practice these skills.

Negotiating Skills 

It's been said that all relationships are a matter of give and take, and that negotiating is often necessary to arrive at a mutually-acceptable agreement. People with effective negotiating skills know when to compromise and when to stand their ground, and they’re able to get effective results while building better relationships.  This program presents five basic negotiating strategies, the fundamentals of win-win negotiating, and a four-stages negotiating process that increases the chances of arriving at successful outcomes.

Dealing with Difficult Co-Workers

“Difficult co-workers” are individuals whose behavior interferes with other’s productivity and morale in the workplace.  It’s important to address the behavior of difficult co-workers when it distracts people from doing their job, creates additional barriers to be overcome, triggers conflict, or creates a hostile work environment. This program presents common types of difficult co-workers, the sometimes hidden goals of difficult behavior, and methods of dealing with difficult co-workers.

Presentation Skills

Effectiveness in the workplace requires competence in performing tasks, and communicating the results of your efforts to others.  The latter includes informal interactions with others, but also preparing and conducting formal briefings and presentations to teams and other groups of workers.  While most individuals possess competence and confidence in performing work-related tasks, many of them lack skill in making formal presentations.  This program provides an overview of effective presentation techniques, and opportunities to make presentations and receive feedback from other participants.  You will leave with greater skill and confidence in delivering effective presentations.

Decision-Making Skills

Decision-making is the process of considering alternatives and establishing criteria for determining a course of action.  Depending on the situation, decisions may be made by a leader independently, or as part of a process involving others.  There are a variety of decision-making models, and choosing a model appropriate to a particular situation is in itself an important decision.  Some familiar decision-making models include consensus-building, trade studies, and cost-benefit analysis.  This program provides an overview of several decision-making models and offers suggestions for selecting a model based on the circumstances involved.

Problem-Solving Skills

Problems in the workplace and the ability to solve problems effectively are key skills. There are two kinds of models for conducting enterprise-wide or company-specific problem-solving.  In the first model, management is charged with identifying problems, and implementing solutions. The second model is more participatory, because workers are trained to find, identify, and quantify problems. The workforce helps devise cost-effective solutions to problems uncovered and, in the process, develop skills in critical-thinking, identifying cause and effect relationships, conducting root-cause analyses, and proposing effective counter-measures.  These skills are essential to building a climate conducive to both preventing problems and fostering continuous improvement.  During this program the advantages and disadvantages of both methods will be reviewed, giving participants a wider range of options to consider when problems arise.

Removing Barriers to Peak Performance

A gap often exists between people's actual and potential performance, resulting in productivity problems, frustration, de-motivation, and lack of job fulfillment.  Performance is a function of four Cs: Commitment, Competence, Confidence, and Contingencies.  During this module, participants will identify performance barriers through the Peak Performance Inventory™ and leave with a plan of action for achieving their full potential.

Enhancing Emotional Intelligence: Overcoming Relationship Barriers

The capacity to build and maintain effective relationships is the single most important requirement for career success and personal fulfillment.  During this module participants will identify specific relationship barriers by completing the Interpersonal Motivation Scale™ and develop a plan of action for removing those barriers.

Psychological Type and Career Effectiveness

Psychological temperament shapes our preferences in four key areas: how we relate to other people, gather information, make decisions, and orient ourselves to the outer world.  Taken together these four factors define 16 psychological types, which explain many of the differences among people.  Every type has strengths and limitations, and affects our career choices and relationships with others.  Understanding your type can help guide your career choices, while understanding other people’s type allows you to relate to them more effectively.  This program provides you with an opportunity to understand your psychological type more fully, and the implications this has for your career and relationships.

Improving Team Performance

Removing Barriers to Team Effectiveness 

There are four personal and social needs in particular that teams must satisfy effectively in order to achieve their full potential: mastery, a sense of contribution, respect and acceptance.  This program provides participants with a greater understanding of the four key needs, and their impact on team morale and productivity.  In addition they will learn how to use the Team Effectiveness Inventoryto develop and maintain high-performance teams.

Building Team Trust

Interpersonal trust is based on the belief that another person has your best interests at heart; interpersonal mistrust is based on the belief that another person is trying to control or manipulate you.  Trust requires both consistency and sincerity; we not only need to believe that the other person will do the right thing (consistency), but will do it for the right reason (sincerity).  Mistrust is an insidious and pervasive problem, robbing organizations of much-needed commitment and performance.  This program provides participants with a deeper understanding of the dynamics of trust and mistrust.  They will also learn how to use the Trust Scaleto identify behaviors associated with mistrust, and how to increase the level of trust in teams.

Increasing Team Synergy 

Synergy has to do with the extent and depth of interaction, cooperation, and collaboration among team members.  Synergy produces “deep” team, while lack of synergy produces “shallow” teams. A shallow team keeps a lot of useful information hidden while a deep team brings this information out into the open and leverages it to increase team effectiveness.  Deep teams will out-perform shallow teams in terms of bottom-line results because they have access to a more complete range of relevant information.  During this program, participants will learn how to:

  • Identify the differences between deep and shallow teams

  • Distinguish three levels of team interaction

  • Identify the processes and outputs that create and maintain synergy

  • Describe how stress and coping strategies impact team interaction

  • Use the Deep Team Scale to assess team effectiveness

Improving Project and Organizational Performance

Decision Oriented Systems Engineering 

Decision Oriented Systems Engineering (DOSE) is a method for efficiently engineering large, complex systems. The method uses a uniquely defined decision model to lead the design effort by structuring and analyzing decision-making needs of the people who will use the system before any design efforts can constrain the solution. DOSE is particularly useful is situations where the objective is to devise revolutionary system improvements, or the development of an entirely new system.  This course is sub-divided into two parts:

  • Part I: Modeling Human Perception to Map the Decision Landscape of Tough Problems 
  • Part II: System Design Using the Operational Decisions of System User

Introduction to Set Based Design

Set-Based Design (SBD) is a method that requires a shift in how one thinks about and manages the design process.  The Set-Based Design paradigm replaces the more traditional point based design construction with design discovery through a systematic elimination of inferior or infeasible designs. SBD allows more of the design effort to proceed concurrently, and become more fully integrated, deferring detailed specification decisions until tradeoffs are understood more fully.  This training program describes (1) the principles of SBD, (2) the benefits of SBD over other approaches, and (3) SBD can be used to address current design issues.

Multi-Attribute Utility Analysis

For value-focused thinking and decision-making there are few methods that rival Multi-Attribute Utility Analysis (MAUA) in breadth of coverage and flexibility of application to decision-making challenges.  The method is an especially valuable technique for Human Factors-associated issues, because it is designed to accommodate a full mix of subjective and objective attributes.  Whenever highly supportive commercial tools are utilized, such analysis can be conducted in an efficient and timely manner.  By utilizing a case study relevant to participants, this training program provides a comprehensive overview of MAUA, addressing problem framing and formulation, goals hierarchy development, attribute derivation, development of attribute preferences, utility relationship development, evaluation and sensitivity analysis.

Systems Thinking

The discipline of systems thinking evolved from the field of systems dynamics and is both a set of tools and a way of thinking.  A systems thinker examines the whole rather than trying to break it down into its individual parts.  Thus it is proactive and circular in nature, as opposed to linear thinking, which tends to be one-directional and reactive. Thus a systems perspective allows us to see interrelationships and patterns more clearly. It also allows us to separate causes from symptoms of problems, and focus on identifying and dealing with root causes. This program provides an overview of systems thinking and tips for how it can be utilized in the work environment.

Building a High-Performing Organizational Culture

Research has shown consistently that high-performing organizations have different values from others, whether performance is measured by financial criteria, such as returns or revenue growth, or by corporate longevity or sustainability.  During this workshop, participants will learn the strong connection between values and performance and assess their own organization's values using the Organizational Values Scale.  They will also learn how to:

  • Close the gap between espoused and actual values
  • Bring about greater integration among individual, team and organizational values
  • Move away from low-performing values toward values that foster growth.
  • Embed values in management systems.

Participants will leave with the knowledge and skills required to build and maintain a high-performing organizational culture.

Managing Resistance to Change

One of the primary challenges for today’s leaders is to manage at the speed of change.  With the pace of technological advancement and the knowledge explosion, leaders face tremendous pressure as they attempt to gain support for change.  While resistance is always a problem, it is especially harmful during an economic downturn.  Regardless of how good or necessary a change may be, resistance should be expected.  While preventing resistance completely is unrealistic, the ability to manage resistance has emerged as an essential leadership skill.  This module gives participants the knowledge and skills necessary to assess and overcome resistance to change.  They will also learn to use a variety of tools and instruments, including the Change Opinion Survey.