Awareness Training for Associates: 4 to 6 hours in length
TWI has a standard program that can be offered to associates. Workshops are based on approximately 40-50 participants per session. TWI’s extended half-day awareness program focuses on diversity issues but also addresses concepts of inclusiveness. This program will take participants from a state of unawareness to awareness.

Objectives:

To increase overall awareness and scope of diversity as a business issue
To understand the benefits and importance of addressing diversity and inclusion at your organization
To identify how to disrupt the mechanics of discrimination

The Equitable Manager Skills Awareness Course

The Equitable Manager Skills Awareness Course is designed for leaders and other change agents responsible for the supervision or management of other people. The program is designed to help leaders understand some of the key external changes that are happening as we move out of the industrial age into the information age and how these changes demand a new leadership style with a new set of leadership attributes and behaviours.

The course can be customized based on your organization's specific quantitative and qualitative data gathered before the program and is personally focused, allowing a leader to position her/himself in relationship to the core competencies and behaviours of an equitable leader in the 21st century.

The objectives of the Equitable Manager Skills Awareness Course are as follows:

To identify the core competencies of a leader in diversity.
To identify strategies and tools that can foster and nurture a diverse and representative workplace.
To establish personal plans to develop required attributes for equitable leadership.

Materials that participants require include:

Their Equitable Leader Assessment - pre work
Their Diversity Attitude Profile - pre work
A Copy of Diversity at Work
The Course Manuals

Executive Coaching

There are six objectives of The Coaching Series:

Identify the Executive's existing opinions and feelings about workforce diversity.
Identify the Executive's instinctive behaviour and natural strengths.
Improve the Executive's personal and workplace effectiveness with diversity issues.
Expand the Executive's appreciation of differences in the workplace.
Identify potential areas of conflict and to gain insights to achieve positive resolution.
Identify critical areas of concern for the organization.

There are two phases of the Senior Executive Coaching:

Phase One:

Each Executive will complete TWI's Self Assessment and Attitude Profile prior to the meeting (other assessments may follow).
Initial contact with participants to set context for coaching and discuss assessments.
Private meetings to be held off site from the organization's offices.
Content of the first meeting involves the following:
- Feedback on initial results from assessments
- Committed listening and speaking to understand frame of reference
- Setting realistic goals and timetables
- Elicit specific follow-up commitments
- Discuss ideas and design the draft development plans
- Each meeting will be 1.5 hours in length

Phase Two:

Implement developmental plans:
- Present draft developmental plans to the organization's rep.
- Each development plan should include guiding ideas to initiate a fundamental shift in thinking and practices.
Create structure to assess incremental improvement.
Create structure for communication.
Determine accountability framework.

**All coaching sessions will be kept strictly confidential.

Agents of Change Course

This is a 2-day workshop targeted at people who are formally or informally accountable for implementing diversity and equity efforts in their company (i.e., diversity practitioners, leaders, steering committee members, task force members, human resource people, etc.), or, who are either self or organizationally defined as change agents. Participants can be new to their roles or people who have been in their roles for some time and are looking for new ways of working. The workshop can range in size from 20-50 people.

Overview of Change

Diversity Champions are typically employees who want to make a difference. They want to contribute to organizational change as well as grow personally and professionally from the experience.

The "Agents of Change" curriculum has provided an effective blueprint for individuals and groups to move forward. The workshop is designed for people who are truly committed to transforming their organization, especially in the areas of equity and inclusion. The program is rooted in the fundamental principle that real change originates within individuals who are willing to re-adjust their own perspectives in order to make a difference in the workplace and the world.

The workshop is not a modular explanation of why an organization should embrace diversity but rather a highly experiential workshop with powerful inquiry into the fundamental issues that have long been of interest and concern to us as diverse human beings. Using the techniques of personal inquiry, participants will reveal, dismantle, and transform barriers to diversity and culture change and dramatically shift their perspectives on equity and inclusion.

Key Learning Objectives

To examine assumptions that have gone unquestioned and unchallenged, which consciously or unconsciously drive your behaviours and rob you of your personal power and choice to effect change.
To establish strategies to confront prejudice and discrimination in the workplace.
To increase latitude to deal with issues of inequity in the workplace.
To identify and practice communication strategies to increase your effectiveness as an agent of change in relating to people both in and out of the workplace.
To take ownership for your role and power in being an agent of change, moving your organization towards its goals of equity and inclusion.

Organizational Benefits

When organizational change agents feel "stuck", disempowered, or disenfranchised, their capacity to produce peak performance results decreases. This is not a desirable reality. The business case for this workshop is linked to tapping into the power and productivity that people can bring to an organization when they believe in their ability to positively impact their environment.

The business objective:

To fully engage individuals who have both formal and informal responsibilities for diversity and inclusion efforts in their organization.
To guide individuals in developing strategies to overcome the barriers that are impacting their effectiveness by exploring where they may be stuck or losing energy and power.
For participants to leave the workshop with a re-vitalized sense of their ability to implement plans that will positively impact their reality and the reality of their organization.

Philosophy

During the Agents of Change Workshop individuals are challenged to "become less comfortable with the too comfortable and more comfortable with the uncomfortable." This represents a significant paradigm shift for most people and therefore can show up in the workshop as a form of resistance. People will be challenged to look inward and be willing to give up what they know in order to discover new strategies and solutions.

Sometimes the audience will experience some challenges with the non-linear learning methodology used in this workshop because for many people it is unfamiliar. The challenges experienced through the participants' resistance and discomfort is actually part and parcel of the learning process. Through careful and sensitive facilitation of the "resistant moments", people slowly begin the critical shift towards looking at themselves as the source for solutions versus pointing to external factors.

At the start of this workshop TWI makes a significant effort to create understanding for what it means to be a learning community. This emphasis helps establish a climate where the resistance and discomfort can be embraced as a positive force for learning.

Our approach is experiential and highly interactive. We pride ourselves in our ability to create and maintain an open, non-threatening learning community in which participants are encouraged to use their own experiences, as well as to experiment and take risks in order to maximize their learning.

TWI methods include:

Personal interaction through large and small group (dyads and triads) discussions designed to foster openness and shared learning.
Specific tie-in of the participant's own workplace reality.
We use an approach we call "What?, So What?, Now What?"
- after each activity, the group engages in a discussion around "what they learned," "what are the implications of their learning?" and, most importantly, "now what do we do with this when we return to work?"
A learning journal is also used to capture these reflections.
Curriculum is intended to increase proficiency at the cognitive, affective and behavioural levels.

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