What does Dalton Kehoe talk about?
Employee Engagement, Workplace Wellness and Local Leadership
In every organization, managers and employees work in a stressful environment — too much to do, in too little time, with too few resources and in the midst of change. All this can lead to decreases in both productivity and physical and emotional wellness for employees at all levels. Wellness issues show up in rising rates of absenteeism and lengths of disability leaves — and in declining productivity — as employees respond to continual feelings of stress by emotionally disengaging from their work.
These negative effects often appear to be inevitable but they aren't. Based on his own research, consulting experience and results from key organizational studies, Dr. Kehoe's talk highlights the particular elements of managerial behavior and decision-making that organizational leaders must focus on if they are to support the kind of local workplace practices and employee relationships that can enhance their engagement in their work and buffer them against workplace stress.
Leadership For Engagement: Competent, Caring and Collaborative
This presentation combines insights from the research done on the dimensions of competence and caring in local leadership behavior and employee engagement (Marcus Buckingham and many others) with the growing body of data on the emotional effects on employees of the fairness or justice of their manager's behavior. I vividly demonstrate how three-C leadership (competent, caring and collaborative) not only increases employee productivity and unit profitability and efficiency as well as customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Unleashing The Energy For Change: The Power Of Appreciation
In today's organizations — where people are being asked to change their work, their behavior and their way of seeing themselves and others — the Three F's of organizational change are usually put into play. There's Fear (crisis gets their attention), and Facts (tell them what to do to avoid crisis.) And, finally, there's Force (threaten their jobs to make something happen.) This approach is quick, but the changes come slowly, awkwardly or not all. We reason that people don't like change, when the reality is that people don't like being changed from the outside, as with the Three Fs. They stimulate the wrong emotion — fear — and the wrong action — self-defense — for creating any kind of lasting change.
To create rapid and lasting change, Dalton Kehoe says, we need to evoke the emotions underlying hope: optimism and acceptance. We need to embrace the three essentials of Appreciation: (1) understanding people's situations by asking good questions and listening before asking for change; (2) valuing and honoring people for what they've already done and unlocking their potential to do it in a changing future; and as a result, 3) increasing the value of everything we do. Kehoe show us why Appreciation and Appreciative Intelligence are the forces that must shape our attitude and define how we communicate with others. Audiences will learn how Appreciative Inquiry can bring these elements into our work and personal relationships and help us to get what we want. With humour and optimism, Kehoe delivers practical value and emotional punch, underscored with a real sense of purpose. (Kehoe has also successfully customized this talk for other organizational challenges, such as leadership, employee engagement and customer service.)
D.I.A.L.O.G.U.E: Effective Communication in Difficult Circumstances
A good deal of what we do every day as human beings in the process of preparing to talk to other people is pretty much automatic. Most of our internal, "natural" acts of processing information (perception, cognition and emotion) are schematic, automatic processes focused on creating a comforting certainty about what's going on and what's going to happen next. We don't think very much before we talk in most situations. And that's fine as long as nothing upsets our view of ourselves (our "rightness") or our perception of other people's view of us. Automatic fast and closed ("Blink Talk") is the way we live our lives.
This kind of "CONNECT talk" is fine in situations that are well structured and predictable. However, when we are faced with differences, disagreement and disorder in our relationships with others, we must move into a new mode... "D.I.A.L.O.G.U.E. talk". In this speech, which can also be delivered in workshop format, Professor Dalton Kehoe teaches his audience the principles of effective communication in difficult situations. Each element in this process — Descriptive talk, I messages, Appreciative questions, Listening actively, Open acknowledgement, Genuine support, Understanding first, and Emotional self-management — help to overcome our natural tendency to become defensive and controlling when confronted with conflict, and move the discussion along to a productive, or less harmful conclusion. Learning this approach to communication in difficult circumstances helps audience members to become more mindful of their behaviour, and gives them the tools to preserve relationships when disagreements happen.