Janelle Brittain, President and CEO of the Dynamic Performance Institute, LLC, is an internationally recognized trainer, speaker and consultant with 30 years of business experience in training, management, marketing, sales and turn-arounds. She is the author of 6 published books, including her two most recent ones: How to Say It Performance Reviews and Star Team Dynamics

   Janelle has also produced training films and audiocassettes. Business publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Investor's Business Daily and Crain's Chicago Business continually seek Janelle's insight.

   Janelle's background includes 10 years in healthcare and 9 years in high-tech sales for Xerox and Control Data. While in sales at Xerox, she created techniques, which skyrocketed her to top performer nationwide. She established the Dynamic Performance Institute, LLC in 1989 to share these techniques with others. Since then, Janelle has expanded her areas of expertise to be able to dramatically improve the performance of individuals, teams and companies. Janelle has helped over 300 companies worldwide.

Topics:

1) Managing the "Tuff Stuff" of Leadership

   Leadership in today's world needs to tap into every aspect of the human capabilities... from a keen visionary mind, to insightful communications to a combination of Machiavellian patience and a well-paced sense of urgency. This requires strategic thinking to see the opportunities with the greatest potential and leading the available resources to achieve the goal in record time.

2) Building Star Teams

   Teams have emerged as a tool to capture changing workforce knowledge, while productively increasing the bottom line. However, knowing when and how to best use teams is a complex art and skill. Based on your needs, Janelle works with you to choose the right keynote, workshop, retreat or curriculum. Experiential Team Building is also available, ask us for details. Following is a sampling of topics:

Creating Teams

• Why and when to use teams as a business strategy
• Create employee buy-in
• Types of Information Age teams
• Putting together a new team -- getting to know each other
• What are the typical developmental stages of a team?
• What roles help the team handle their own process more effectively?
• How to use sponsors to assure influential support

Challenges

• Expertly guide your team through change
• How to increase creativity and constructiveness in problem solving
• Use problem solving and conflict management to build a team
• Expand a team's risk-taking ability
• How to handle emotionally charged team meetings
• How to deal with or remove a disruptive team member
• Team re-building

Cooperation

• Increase team collaboration
• Create interdepartmental cooperation
• Competition vs. cooperation
• Working together to serve the customer better
• Motivating everyone to participate
• Team assessment for continual improvement in cooperation
• Understanding Synergy Builders and learning to avoid Synergy Busters

Communications

• How to run great meetings that get results and don't waste time, balancing both process and relationships
• Establish guidelines to promote effective team communication
• Beyond words: how to listen for the real meaning
• Create clear team communications
• How to ask questions that teach people to think, get the information you need and get your desired results
• Handle emotional communications with more finesse
• Informal communications, spontaneous meetings and other tools to increase team communications
• Getting all the personalities on the team to communicate better and collaborate

Power/Empowerment

• How to decide who should have the power and make the decisions: answering empowerment questions
• Assessing the rights and responsibilities of an individual within the team
• Self-directed teams
• The In vs. the Out group

Leadership

• Team leadership: a new skill
• What type of leadership is most appropriate for which type of team?
• Finding out what motivates people
• How to get commitment to the goal and vision
• How to build trust in a team
• Building team spirit
• Leading vs. following
• Some cautions on team building

3) Developing Global Team Leaders

   Global operations can be a delight or an absolute pain. It all depends on your ability to capitalize on the diverse skills of the people you work with.

• You can have 12 people of 12 different nationalities reporting to you from 12 different locations around the world, with 12 different sets of cultural and regional problems.
• Or -- you can be the leader of a global team of 12 people who work together regardless of distance and differences, and who solve their own problems as well as yours.

   The ability to bring people from many different cultures together, and motivate them to become a team, is an indispensable competency for anyone with international responsibility

4) Conflict Management

   Managing conflict is often one of the toughest challenges teams face. Have you ever wondered:

• Is it wrong to use an aggressive conflict style?
• Am I too passive in handling conflict?
• Am I causing myself stress-related health problems due to the way I handle conflict?
• What's the best way to handle this disagreement?

   Research shows that the way most people handle conflict can actually lead to serious illness. Learn how to decide the best way to handle each conflict, in order to reduce your stress and promote a win-win resolution.

This interactive workshop identifies:

• Five conflict management styles and when to use each.
• Healthy ways to handle anger.
• Specific resolution techniques and processes to apply in many different situations.

   Customized role plays specific to your industry can be added for "real world" practice in applying various conflict management styles and techniques.

5) Managing Growth to the Next Stage

   Your business is ready to grow to the next stage, but your leadership team is not. It is typical that the original leadership team that handily takes the company through the entrepreneurial stage uses the approach of "fly by the seat of your pants and put out the fires as they come up." This swash buckling approach can cut through the thicket of the adolescent stage of a company, but will hold a company back and can cause deadly mistakes when it is ready to mature into the second stage of growth.

   Learn how to create the discipline, systems and leadership qualities in your team that will accelerate your business to the next level. In this program you will learn to:

• Identify both the positive and negative aspects of the first stage entrepreneurial leadership traits and the second stage growth leadership traits.
• How to quickly create the systems necessary to assure consistent quality and performance necessary for stage two growth development.
• How to change the thrill of adrenalin in your entrepreneurial leaders into the satisfaction of the leadership qualities of developing people, systems and a growing company.
• How to turn your focus from tactical to strategic, so you can become a greater leader.

6) Board Training & Retreats

   The degree to which a Board of Directors is effective is felt throughout the organization and its community. Whether it is a corporate, non-profit or association Board makes no difference. If there are factions, conflicts or just lack of good communication, getting the business of the Board done becomes second priority. Bring in Janelle Brittain or one of DPI's other Board facilitators to:

• Improve the collaboration on the Board
• Increase each Member's understanding of the other people on the Board
• Explore what each person brings to the Board
• Shift communications to be more open and to seek understanding
• Create customized Communication Agreements to be used at and between Board Meetings
• Introduce additional processes to use for decision making
• Provide techniques to prevent Toxic Board Meetings
• Work with the Board to make sure the balance of tactical to strategic work is the most effective for the organization's goals
• Explore areas of distrust, and work with the board to increase trust
• Establish appropriate Board Assessment tools
• Provide resolution techniques to use when there are conflicts

   Strategic Planning Retreats provide the once a year opportunity to craft the future of the organization. Unfortunately, they often end up being a theoretical discussion, get off track, have personality clashes or feel unproductive. Make sure your next retreat is productive, by bringing in Janelle Brittain to facilitate the process. She will work with you to design your meeting to produce real results. Then she will ably manage the process during the retreat to assure you advance to your goals of the meeting.

(for Non-profits and Associations)

   Association and Non-Profit Boards do not have much time together to make decisions that will potentially affect thousands of other people and the future of the organization. Often there are new Board members each year which changes the team's dynamics. At the beginning of each year, the Board must quickly build a working environment that supports trust, open communications/discussions and collaborative decision-making. Janelle builds her programs around the four critical areas which best capture the Board volunteers commitment and cohesion:

1.    How to Run Great Board Meetings that Produce Commitment and Results

2.    Improving Communications on a Board

3.    Analyze: How Much of a Strategic or Tactical Board Do We Need to Be?

4.    Building or Revising a Strategic Plan

If the Association Board does not communicate and collaborate well, the Association's goals will not be met and the year will be filled with anguish for both staff and Board. Learn how to establish a collaborative environment right away, then how to maintain it throughout the year.

9) How to Run Great Committee Meetings that Produce Commitment and Results

(for Non-profits and Associations)

Have you heard any of these complaints?

"I'm not looking forward to this committee meeting. I just know he/she is going to dominate the meeting."

"Why do these meetings have to take so long? They go on and on with no decisions being made."

"Why aren't people coming to our meetings anymore?"

   Motivating volunteers to altruistically give of their time, energy and expertise to help an organization requires tapping into both heart and mind. The heart provides the enthusiasm needed to ignite everyone's motivation. Plus, we must be organized, disciplined and focused in order to appeal to the mind.

   After having served on many boards and committees, Janelle Brittain has experienced well run, invigorating meetings as well as frustrating, de-motivating ones. She designed this "how to" training program to create meetings that best capture the volunteers commitment. The focus is on meetings that:

• Are marketed well in advance
• Are well run and include both business and laughter
• Have action focused follow-up.

10) Coping With Change Without Maalox(R)

   Learn how to make change work for you, not against you. In this interactive program, you will experience the reasons why people resist change and learn how to use people's strengths to deal with each changing situation.

You'll have the tools to answer these questions about any change:

• How am I going to handle it?
• What can I do to help make it easier on myself?
• How do I tend to handle change now? (workshop only)
• How can I increase my flexibility to handle any change I'm faced with?
• How will I be able to cope emotionally?
• What's the best way to introduce change so others will accept it?

   You will learn techniques to help your co-workers, customers and yourself handle change in a fast-paced business setting. After learning your own change style, you'll experience the typical styles which people slip into when faced with change. You'll discover what the styles contribute, how they impede, and how to work with each. We offer methods to increase personal flexibility and show you how to introduce change to others so they will accept it more readily. The DPI philosophy is that there are no wrong ways to handle change -- just ways that cause more or less stress, struggle and anguish.

Additional Topics:  Fast Integration: The First 100 Days, Communications, Stress Management, Productivity, Customer Service