Teamwork

To make a real, positive difference on a team, you must take on the challenging task of putting the team first. This course covers strategies and techniques to help you become a more effective and valued member of your team. You'll explore ways to adopt a positive mindset and take a proactive role on a team, so that you can make a significant contribution. Because your success on a team depends on pulling together with other people, you'll also learn constructive ways to acknowledge differences and show respect for team members, and specific strategies for working collaboratively.

Teamwork is essential to successful business practice. Permanent or temporary, workgroups need to function efficiently and effectively. In this course, you'll learn how to construct and lead teams, while avoiding and mitigating dysfunction.

Your boss can be the lifeline to your future. Typically, no one has more influence over your immediate and long-term success than the person to whom you report. Not only can you find enjoyment and reward in your current position, but your boss can be a source of support when you are ready to move ahead with your career. This course teaches strategies for building a strong professional relationship with your boss. It explains various ways you can become aligned with your boss -- even how to give your boss constructive feedback.

A key factor in advancing your career is using good communication skills to build strong professional relationships and maintain an effective business network of contacts. This course provides you with the essential communication skills required to establish a business network and includes strategies for building rapport with new contacts during networking opportunities. It also covers best practices for maintaining your network so that business contacts can help you achieve your career goals.

Developing and maintaining relationships with your peers at work can lead to success for both you as an individual, and for your organization. A supportive peer network can provide you with a wide variety of expertise and institutional knowledge, and enable you to leverage other people's networks. This course explores how you can identify the peers in your organization who are especially important in meeting your goals and how to develop and maintain solid, mutually beneficial relationships with these people.

Leaders must support a culture conducive to coaching and be capable of stepping into a coaching role at any time. In this course, you'll learn how to build dynamic and purposeful coaching relationships.

It would be easy to say that to deal with difficult people you should be tolerant and accept people's differences. This sounds nice, and might work in the short term, but if you are working with people you find difficult and you expect to be working with them for some period of time – you are better off learning how to respond and relate to them. The approach you use depends on the person, the situation, and your willingness to build and blend skills as needed. Dealing with difficult people requires that you first learn how to manage yourself with them. This means being self-aware and practicing self-management. It also means tuning into the feelings and emotions of others, however difficult it might be. When you know what triggers you and how you typically react, you can build skills to help make your interactions with others more productive. This is emotional intelligence, and if you build this capacity, you will be able to deal more effectively with many difficulties in life (including other people)!

While it's best to get personally fit for dealing with difficult people – that is, managing your own emotions and using self-management techniques, there are interpersonal strategies and skills you need when you engage and work with a difficult person.By learning how to focus on goals, give feedback, and manage conflict, you can work with difficult people more effectively.

Anything taken to an extreme can be a liability, and this is true of human behavior. While confident, cautious, or energetic people can be perfectly tolerable in small doses, they can also be annoying or problematic when their behavior is over-the-top. Then there are people who are just plain negative - their glass is always 'half empty.' While occasional griping is acceptable, negativity can wear you down.Certain situations trigger extreme behaviors that might be moderated otherwise. And, your own emotional state might be such that your tolerance for any extreme is low. All sorts of situational and personal circumstances can make a somewhat difficult person into an extremely difficult person in no time.

It's vital to maintain open, effective communication on a team. However, it's all too easy to adopt bad habits. Without realizing how badly it affects your team, you or another team member may communicate in ways that lead to misunderstandings, cause unnecessary conflict, keep others from having their say, and prevent the team from performing as well as it could. In this course, you'll learn about different verbal barriers to effective team communication and strategies for overcoming them. But speaking is only one part of communication; effective listening is vital too. So you'll also learn about specific active listening techniques that can help you be a better listener.

Effective networking is a leadership skill linked to stronger performance on the job. In this course, you’ll learn how to develop and expand your network to improve your own effectiveness, as well as that of others in your organization.

Team cohesion, or the strength of the links between team members, determines how effective a team will be, especially in responding to outside pressures. A team has to be cohesive if its members are to function as a unit, working closely and efficiently to achieve common goals. In this course, you'll learn how to build a more cohesive team by focusing on improvements in three areas: communication, cooperation, and trust. You'll learn specific strategies for improving communication and promoting cooperation among team members. You'll also learn what signs suggest a lack of trust on a team and what you can do about this, including specific techniques you can use to build trust.