Handling a Chaotic Work Environment: How to Prioritize Work and Make Good Decisions Under Pressure
  • CODE : CHDE-0034
  • Duration : 90 Minutes
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Chris DeVany is the founder and president of Pinnacle Performance Improvement Worldwide, a firm that focuses on management and organization development. Pinnacle’s clients include global organizations such as Visa International, Cadence Design Systems, Coca-Cola, Sprint, Microsoft, Aviva Insurance, Schlumberger, and over 500 other organizations in 22 countries. He also has consulted with government agencies from the United States, the Royal Government of Saudi Arabia, Canada, the Cayman Islands, and the United Kingdom.

He has published numerous articles in the fields of surviving mergers and acquisitions, surviving change, project management, management, sales, team-building, leadership, ethics, customer service, diversity, and work-life balance, in publications ranging from ASTD/Performance in Practice to Customer Service Management. His book, “90 Days to a High-Performance Team”, published by McGraw Hill and often accompanied by in-person, facilitated instruction, has helped and continues to help thousands of executives, managers, and team leaders improve performance.

He has appeared hundreds of times on radio and television interview programs to discuss mergers and acquisitions (how to manage and survive them), project management, sales, customer service, effective workplace communication, management, handling rapid personal and organizational change, and other topical business issues. He has served or is currently serving as a board member of the International Association of Facilitators, Sales and Marketing Executives International, American Management Association, American Society of Training and Development, Institute of Management Consultants, American Society of Association Executives, Meeting Professionals International, and National Speakers Association. Chris is an award-winning Toastmaster’s International Competition speaker. He recently participated in the Fortune 500 Annual Management Forum as a speaker, panelist, and seminar leader.

Chris has distinguished himself professionally by serving multiple corporations as manager and trainer of sales, operations, project management, IT, customer service, and marketing professionals. Included among those business leaders are Prudential Insurance, Sprint, BayBank (now part of Bank of America), US Health Care, and Marriott Corporation. He has assisted these organizations in mergers and acquisitions, facilitating post-merger and acquisition integration, developing project management, sales, customer service, and marketing strategies, organizing inbound and outbound call center programs, training and development of management and new hires, and fostering corporate growth through creative change and innovation initiatives.

Chris holds degrees in management studies and organizational behavior from Boston University. He has traveled to 22 countries and 47 states in the course of his career.

This webinar has been approved for 1.50 HR (General) recertification credit hours toward aPHR™, aPHRi™, PHR®, PHRca®, SPHR®, GPHR®, PHRi™, and SPHRi™recertification through HR Certification Institute® (HRCI®). Please make note of the activity ID number on your recertification application form. For more information about certification or recertification, please visit the HR Certification Institute website at www.hrci.org.

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This highly interactive Webinar offers you and your team an array of practical tools to help you get things done in today's chaotic and constantly changing work environment. You’ll learn practical techniques for making structured decisions—even under pressure—to earn buy-in from bosses, coworkers, and customers. In a workshop environment, you will participate in valuable exercises utilizing real-world case studies. You'll emerge with an action plan you can use right away to master expanding workloads and complex decisions.

Areas Covered

Managing Escalating Pressures

  • Develop Answers to Vital Questions on Managing Work Pressures
  • Use New Tools to Control Stress, Reduce Backlogs, and Redistribute Work Overloads
  • Adopt Visual Maps That Help You Stay Calm under Pressure While Rebuilding Confidence and Energy
  • Collaborate with Coworkers to Invent Shortcuts
  • Juggle Multiple Projects without Dropping the Ball

Gain Certainty about Priorities

  • Prioritize by Validity, Not by Urgency
  • Apply Three New Rules to Prioritize Your Projects
  • Make Your Priorities Visible to Requesters
  • Rank Your Priorities with the PAR Chart
  • Apportion Your Time between Strategic and Tactical Work
  • Start Priority Negotiations Early with Requesters

Prevent Collisions among Customers, Internal and External

  • Replace Three Outmoded "Rules" of Time Management
  • Adopt Two New Rules for Today’s Chaotic Conditions
  • Learn Four Strategies to Avoid Calendar Collisions
  • Design Tools That:
                —Educate Requesters on "Blind Risks" in Their Requests
                —Help Requesters Arrive at Your Door Better Prepared
                —Create a Selective Daily Action Plan
                —Match Assigned Deadlines with Actual Estimates

Manage Traffic While Meeting Needs

  • Outline for a One-Page Business Case: Convince Others
  • New "To-Do List": Help Everyone Face Reality
  • The "Dot Chart": Rechannel Interruptions

Work Request Validation Card: Help Requesters Make a Case When Seeking Your OK

  • Quick Interim Review: Correct Employee Performance Shortfalls Before They Escalate
  • Smart Subject Lines: Eliminate the Need to Open e-Mails
  • "On the Wall" Meetings: Shorten Meeting Time—Upgrade Involvement and Improve Joint Decisions

Communicate Powerfully Despite Pressure

  • Employ Assertive Responses No Matter How Manipulated or Provoked You Feel
  • Determine the Rare Occasions When Non-Assertive or Aggressive Responses May Be Advisable
  • Decline a Request Successfully, Whether from Above, from Peers, or from Customers
  • Use a Risk Reduction Card to Encourage Requesters to Assume Their Half of Any Negotiation
  • Select Final Commitments and Refine Applications for Tools Introduced Today

See How Your Values and Thinking Styles Drive Decisions

  • Learn How Your Values and Thinking Style Drive Your Decisions
  • Apply Three Survival Steps to Decisions
  • Detect Your Preferred Thinking Patterns

Learn the Decision Guide

  • Come to See That Decision Making Is a Learned Skill
  • Understand the Decision Guide Format through a Demonstration Case
  • Learn the Decision Orbit Format to Generate Options for a Case

Apply the Decision Guide to Your Own Case 

  • Form a Team to Assemble a Real-Life Case Using the Decision Guide
  • Complete the Decision Guide and Orbit, Step by Step
  • Demonstrate Your Case for Fellow Attendees; Collaborate on Refining Your Decisions
    See Others on Options
  • Use Verbal and Visual Tools to Overcome Stakeholder Resistance
  • Take Part in Role-Plays to Demonstrate a Choice of Verbal Tools
  • Create Risk Clocks, Calendars, or Bar Charts to Educate Others about Risk Escalation
  • Learn New Processes to Gain Internal Team Commitment

Fast Focus Analysis

  • Try Out Fast Focus Analysis, a Tool for Making Complex Decisions with Multiple Issues and Opposing Stakeholders

Course Level - All Levels

Who Should Attend

  • CEO
  • Senior Vice President
  • Vice President
  • Executive Director
  • Managing Director
  • Regional Vice President
  • Area Supervisor
  • Manager

Why Should You Attend

  • Become more productive by prioritizing work and maintaining focus
  • Become a stronger communicator with techniques that enable you to question and clarify priorities
  • Make better decisions based on consistently good analysis
  • Become more decisive and make better decisions by gleaning the right information and appraising the situation more effectively
  • Gain the cooperation of others by communicating the risks and gains of decisions
  • Learn stress survival techniques to help you balance work and life when you must make tough choices you face every day
  • Are you feeling overtasked, over-worried, and overdone?
  • Could you use a ‘managing multiple priorities effectively refresher”, to help you get a better handle on things?
  • Would you like to brush up on your management and delegation skills?
  • If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then come laugh, listen and learn as Chris DeVany leads us all through those important topics, key questions, and answers we all need to be able to address effectively to improve our communication effectiveness, improve our team members’ and team’s performance, adding to the bottom-line!
  • $200.00



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