The success of any organization rests on individual employees and their commitment to working together as a team to make the organization the best it can be. How well employees work together has a great deal to do with their individual success, the success of their fellow employees, the co-op, and their owner consumers. This seminar is intended to assist participants in improving the communication skills between "internal and external" employees as a means of enhancing their work with others and their customers. The course will assist participants in better understanding how to improve communications with fellow employees, the key elements in the Communication Cycle, improved understanding of internal and external job ‘interconnectivity', and managing problem ‘communication' situations when they occur. This is an ideal course for all-employee training. The course will benefit participants by:

• Fine Tuning "Inside and Outside" communications
• Increasing customer satisfaction through improved employee communication
• Learning to better manage stressful situations
• Understanding what customers expect from their co-op and how working and communicating together helps meet those expectations.
• Learning how the Communication Cycle serves as the key to improved internal/external communications.
• Working together to earn customer loyalty
• Leading the 21st Century Workforce

When you think of workplace attitudes you must ask yourself the simple question: would you want an employee who is extremely good at his or her job but has a bad attitude or an average employee who has a positive attitude? I believe the overwhelming response would be for the later because we all have learned the hard way that bad attitudes can reduce the effectiveness of ones organization. The fact is that skills can be taught but an attitude is often difficult to change. The question often asked is what is an attitude? To some it's a mindset, a way of thinking but that's only partly right. The bigger picture is that an attitude is a habit of thought. It defines how one looks at their world and workplace. What employers want are people with attitudes that think "I can," not "I can't." This one day seminar is devoted to the building blocks that lead to positive attitudes. Our trainer will show participants how to find, keep and maintain an approach that leads to a positive outlook. This highly interactive course includes interactive session as well as self evaluations to help individuals create an open mind and heart to developing a more productive, meaningful work life. This session will look at:

• How does one understand the importance of having a positive attitude
• How to develop and maintain positive feelings and thoughts in the workplace
• How a positive attitude leads to more productivity and a commitment to doing things right
• How attitudes impact and influence those around us
• The relationship between positive attitudes and internal and external customer satisfaction
• Identifying personality and attitudes - our true "colors"
• Creating personality matrix-the value of it
• Emotions and attitudes
• Anger-when, why, how, who
• Attitude "revamp", a process and project

Leadership is sometimes described as the ability to foster commitment, creativity and productive attitudes in others through effective self-knowledge and interpersonal skills. In short, leadership is the ability to bring out the best in people. This is a valuable attribute to possess, but what can you do to develop it? How do you recognize and build upon the attributes you already have? This one-day program explores those questions and helps you work toward your own leadership development plans. Participants in the course will learn to:

• Examine their own attributes in light of the characteristics of a good leader
• Gather and use feedback to gain insight on how you are perceived by others
• Fine-tune their communication style for achieving best results.
• Influence a work environment that promotes enthusiasm and productivity
• Create a personal development plan to build your own leadership skills

As the quest for the restructuring of the electric utility industry continues, the prospect of change to how we have done business increases. The impact this change will have on consumers as well as employees can and will be substantial. The Building a Better Workforce Through Change Management program is designed to assist managers and supervisors in understanding the impact of change and how they can support their employees through workplace changes. Employing principles, guidelines, case studies and exercises, participants will learn about the change process and making it work for them. It provides answers to frequently asked questions and gives participants the tools to effectively interact with employees regarding each person's role and responsibilities within the change process. Topics covered include:

• Recognizing and overcoming resistance
• Minimizing productivity losses
• Reducing unnecessary employee stress
• Increasing employee buy-in and support for change
• Effectively planning, launching and managing change in your organization

Almost everything we do in our work is done within the context of a team effort. More often than not, the difficult part facing the person responsible for leading others is inspiring individuals to work together toward a common end or goal. This seminar is designed to assist participants in learning the skills of being an effective team builder, the effectiveness of teamwork, the importance of being an effective team leader. Additional topics to be covered include:

• Why some teams succeed and others fail
• Some of the pitfalls of a team
• What you can do to help your team succeed
• How to reduce and resolve conflict on a team
• The results of team members not treating each other with dignity and respect
• What to do at the first hint of dispute
• Setting appropriate ground rules for team members
• Maintaining control
• Remaining impartial

Maintaining a competent, productive, and efficient workforce is something all managers and supervisors work to achieve. Retaining valuable staff is critical to a company's effectiveness and customer service. Money is not the sole solution to solving the riddle of keeping quality staff; rather, friendliness and professionalism rank as clear incentives to retaining employees building employee loyalty. Often it is the simple and less costly incentives that influence whether an employee stays with a company. This one-day class is centered around the simple premise that you must create a "positive internal" environment if you wish to build your business, offer quality customer service, and retain competent employees. The course will offer insights into how you can evaluate your current methods of dealing with employees, ‘tips' for improving employee management, and helpful methods for making your workplace the ‘best' it can be. Some of the items this course will deal with are:

• How to maintain positive employee relations
• How managers and supervisors influence their employee's attitudes, work, and productivity.
• Conducting new employee orientation
• Useful tips for helping your employees succeed
• Developing a professional workplace
• Motivating employees to grow with your company
• How to help employees be successful
• Communicating why your company is unique

It is a proven fact that team effort is a key ingredient to success and improvement for small units, department, and the company as a whole. Teams help to analyze and solve problems, work to construct solutions, fortify an organization, increase reliability, save money, and serve as a vehicle for change. Realizing and understanding the importance of the teaming process to organizational growth and development is an essential skill for everyone in a leadership capacity. This one-day class is designed to offer participants the opportunity to ‘learn' more about team building and how it can be implemented at their organization. Through discussion, interaction, and ‘team' work, participants will gain valuable insight into how they can foster a team based environment. Some of the topics to be covered include:

• How to recognize organizational strengths & weaknesses
• Utilizing synergy
• Thinking together to reduce ‘boundaries'
• The factors that prevents improvement
• What do ‘teams' look like
• Understanding team dynamics and function
• How do the team members function together
• How each team member related to the whole
• Consensus building
• Selecting team members

This two-day seminar is designed to build essential communications skills for leaders who communicate in a variety of ways with their subordinates, co-workers and managers on a daily basis. Commonly used tools - both
verbal and written - will be covered. In just two days, the attendees will:

• Learn to speak like a leader by becoming an overall better communicator
• Build better work relationships while communicating for needed results
• Develop more effective presentation skills for use in training and general speaking situations
• Develop better skills in writing with emphasis on accurate, brief and clear communication in fast-paced situations
• Learn to communicate with diplomacy, discretion and influence

Day One:

• What Communication Involves and Its Importance to a Leader
• Speaking like a Leader - The Basics Behind Becoming a Better Communicator
• Building Better Work Relationships while Communicating for Results
• Communicating in Difficult Situations - Giving and Receiving Feedback
• Communicating with Diplomacy, Discretion and Influence

Day Two:

• Writing Skills in Fast-Paced Situations: Memos, Notes and E-mails
• Developing Effective Presentation Skills
• How-to's of Crystal Clear Communication
• Hands-on Communication Exercises

As primary influencers of the workplace environment, managers and supervisors bear a significant responsibility for the productive outcomes of their organizations, departments, teams, and work crews. This program is designed to address the communication styles and techniques that tend to create an environment of trust, confidence, and mutual respect necessary for optimal performance. Class exercises, discussion along with real world case studies, combine to create a meaningful learning experience for any manager or supervisor. Learning outcomes include:

• How to increase levels of collaboration and mutual support among team
  members
• How to express your ideas in ways that gain the attention, support and
  respect of others
• How to quickly "fit in" with any group of people
• How to make an unforgettable, positive first impression on anyone
• How to minimize conflict and reduce friction on the job and in your personal life

Are you often asked to make a presentation, guide a process, or lead a retreat? If you would like to understand how to encourage full participation and promote understanding while remaining impartial, then this one-day program is designed to increase your group facilitation skills. You will learn to:

• Use the group decision-making model
• Recognize the importance of balancing task and people issues
• Utilize the diversity on your team
• Identify and use tools for effective meeting management
• Effectively manage conflict and build confidence

Few would ague that life and work are hard enough without the complications surrounding self-defeating emotions, behaviors, and habits. The multiple forces that bear down on us every day can eventually take their toll. No wonder people often feel anxious, resentful, taken advantage of and even trapped. This one-day seminar is intended to help participants understand how to stay focused on their goals, whether work or personal, while ups and downs occur around them. Participants will gain insight into developing ‘personal' flexibility to deal with uncertainty and to find meaning in what they are doing. This seminar will focus on the important personal skill of emotional self-control. Participants will learn about what role emotions play in their life, the ways they are expressed, how to manage emotional ups and downs, to deal with stress and how to handle crisis situations. Over the course of the day, the class will learn how to make ‘better' choices at work and elsewhere, how to practice self-discipline, and control emotionally difficult situations. In addition, others issues to be covered include:

• Build confidence by learning to respond correctly to difficult situations and people
• Explore ones attitudes and how to use anger constructively
• Control how one reacts to emotional situations presented by other people
• Embrace how to ‘let go' of the old and accept change
• Learn to eliminate habits that tend to pull you down and work against you.

This one-day session will be conducted in two parts. Part one, will focus on the history of rural electrification in the United States, including an overview of the electric industry and the reasons that led up to the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935 to bring electricity to rural America. The class will trace the program from the formation of the nation's first electric cooperative to today's modern, multi-service cooperatives.

In the second part, participants will gain an understanding of the Touchstone Energy brand, an alliance of more than 600 cooperatives in 44 states that collectively deliver power and energy solutions to more than 17 million customers every day. The course will focus attention on the mission supported by Touchstone Energy, including high standards of service to all customers - residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural. Topics covered during this one-day session include:

Part 1

• The goals of the original program
• How it was implemented and what was in the rural electrification act
• Why electric and telephone cooperatives came to be formed and how, including a review of the seven cooperative principals
• The struggles of the early cooperatives and how they overcame them

Part 2

• The Touchstone Energy brand and what it represents
• Mission And Vision
• Benefits from affiliation
• Nationwide branding events, projects and activities sponsored by Touchstone Energy

How can you ensure top performance from people you see infrequently? How do you communicate effectively with different locations that are some distance apart? The need to accommodate customer convenience requires a new set of skills for managers and supervisors whose span of control includes district offices or remote locations. By learning tips and techniques used successfully by other distance managers and supervisors, participants can develop the skills and ability to effectively manage multiple remote business centers. In this course, participants will gain insight into the solutions to challenges posed by leading from a distance. Topics covered include basic principles of distance management, the key competencies involving distance management, employee expectations, and effective distance communication. Participants in this half-day course will learn

• 7 competencies of effective distance manager
• 5 obstacles to effective distance leadership
• What employees at multiple locations need (and expect) from their bosses
• Leading people who don't report directly to you
• Use of appropriate technologies for effective communication

How can you ensure top performance from people you see infrequently? How do you communicate effectively with different locations that are some distance apart? The need to accommodate customer convenience requires a new set of skills for managers and supervisors whose span of control includes district offices or remote locations. By learning tips and techniques used successfully by other distance managers and supervisors, participants can develop the skills and ability to effectively manage multiple remote business centers. In this course, participants will gain insight into the solutions to challenges posed by leading from a distance. Topics covered include basic principles of distance management, the key competencies involving distance management, employee expectations, and effective distance communication. Participants in this one-day course will learn:

• 7 competencies of effective distance managers
• 5 obstacles to effective distance leadership
• What employees at multiple locations need (and expect) from their bosses
• Leading people who don't report directly to you
• Use of appropriate technologies for effective communication

The purpose for this seminar is to provide participants with a clear understanding of the importance of employee evaluations and the process to follow in preparing for and conducting appraisals. The session will focus on the following key strategies:

• How to prepare for a performance appraisal
• The things to do and not do in conducting the actual interview
• What to say and not say in a performance review
• How to better manage discussion difficulties that arise during evaluations
• How to keep the evaluation focused and on track
• The importance of establishing performance goals for employees
• Setting and conducting follow-up discussions 
• Proper record keeping

This one-day course is designed to prepare new and future foreman, crew leaders, and others in supervisory capacities for the challenges of effective leadership. Participants will gain insight into what people respect in leaders and how to develop their own unique leadership style. The course will discuss among other topics: what management looks for in a leader, what ‘followers' expect, the characteristics of effective leadership, the common pitfalls encountered by leaders, how to develop ones own leadership tools, winning support and overcoming resistance, and how to keep things ‘on track'. This program is a must for anyone who needs to know what a leader is . . . and is not. Some of the things you will learn are:

• How to project a positive and energetic image
• Develop a leadership style that works for you
• Learn which skills you already have and which ones work
• Gain insight into what will gain you respect as a leader
• Learn confidence in leadership roles
• Act and talk like a leader
• Learn to cope with stressful situations

The ‘brain drain' loss facing today's organizations is unprecedented in our history. While the loss of key talent and irreplaceable company knowledge due to attrition through retirement or resignation has always been a challenge it has never before reached this level. With the rapid increase of retiring "Baby Boomers" and the migration of younger workers from one job to another at intervals unheard of in the past, leaders must employ every method available to ensure continuity, to reduce the "brain drain," and keep service to customers at the expected high level. While there is no way to be totally prepared for this eventuality, there are concrete actions that leaders can take. These issues and the strategies to deal with them will be covered in this in-depth session. Some of the key topics to be covered include:

• Identifying strengths/limitations that exist in their organization's method of training, retention and team building.
• How to relate better to employees of all ages and levels of experience.
• The use best practices to motivate near-retirement employees to share knowledge and expertise while continuing to work to their full potential.
• The use best practices to motivate younger or newer employees to continue their employment with the organization for longer periods of time.
• Focusing on several key actions that will provide continuity and retain important knowledge, processes, procedures and expertise.

Today's organizations, more than ever, are focused on ways to achieve greater performance, reduce safety risks, find better ways of promoting change, and seek avenues to increase income. In order to achieve these goals, individuals must employ effective decision-making and task planning skills. The use of Operational Risk Management (ORM) serves as a means of enhancing the decision making process. It is a systematic approach to optimizing risks using the four key principles that govern all actions associated with risk management. ORM is a continuous process for the detection, assessment, and ultimate sustained control of risk while enhancing performance and maximizing organizational capabilities. This one-day session will introduce participants to the principles of ORM, a six step process of application, and each steps key attributes. Participants will utilize the skills learned by applying the information to applicable project scenarios. The session is highly application based and participant interactive. Topics to be covered include:

• The ORM Six-Step Process
• Application of a Risk Management Worksheet
• Use of additional tools for assessing risk in the work place at all levels
• Learn to minimize unnecessary risks by maximizing the decision making process

Form 7 is the Financial and Statistical Report submitted monthly to the USDA Rural Utilities Service. This report is based on the system's accounts and other departmental records and reflects the status of the system at the time of the report. The information in the report's 16 sections helps the board, the management team, and employees understand the performance of the cooperative. In addition, the report is connected to other studies and reports prepared by the management team and departmental leaders. Understanding the information and grasping the cooperative's financial philosophy helps board members to make consistent policy and financial decisions; helps the CEO, vice presidents, and department leaders to construct sound procedures and policy recommendations and to prepare appropriate financial strategies; and helps cooperative employees understand the impact of their daily activities to the cooperative's bottom line. The purpose of this training session is to:

• Assist participants in understanding the financial picture of the cooperative
• Provide useful decision making information
• Assist the cooperative team in operating more efficiently and effectively
• Demonstrate how the various financial and management reports are integrated
• Demonstrate how decisions are interrelated and impact several areas of the cooperative's operations

There can be no doubt that the electric utility industry of the 21st Century will look much different than it does today. With the changes in its workforce, increasing retirements, and new technology creating the need for new job skills are all factors to be considered and dealt with from a management perspective. Few will challenge the facts that public power leaders are faced with unprecedented challenges, and must therefore develop the base of knowledge and skills to effectively manage these challenges and opportunities. Participants in this program will learn practical theory, engage in case studies, group discussion, and hypothetical simulations involving management and leadership. Topics covered include: 

• Oganizational Culture and Change
• Understanding the heritage and history of the electricity industry
• The future of publicly owned utilities
• Assessing ones own behavioral style
• Learning the basic characteristics inherent in a team environment
• The principles of Effective Leadership
• An introduction to basic theories of leadership
• A model for effective interpersonal communications
• An understanding of the Communication Cycle and its role in improving business relationships and task efficiency
• An understanding overview of basic theories and observations regarding human behavior

This seminar is designed to assist managers and supervisors in understanding the principles of job skills knowledge and development. Each participant will discover various learning styles and how to effectively use each to accelerate the skills performance process. Role-modeling/practice sessions will be conducted using a variety of appropriate training scenarios. Practice sessions are video-recorded in order to help each participant develop appropriate communication skills and techniques. Some the topic areas included in this session include:

• Learn to recognize team members attributes and skills
• Help others apply their talents to work assignments
• Achieve goals through skills development
• Contribute to team success through individual performance

The hallmark of good supervision is effective delegation. Delegation is simply when supervisors give responsibility and authority to subordinates to complete a task, and let the subordinates figure out how the task can be accomplished. Effective delegation develops people who are ultimately more fulfilled and productive. Managers become more fulfilled and productive themselves as they learn to count on their staffs and are freed up to attend to more strategic issues.

This seminar is designed to assist managers and supervisors in understanding the principles of delegation, and the value associated with using delegation effectively. Through role-modeling and practice sessions, participants will develop an clearer understanding of delegation and appropriate communication skills and techniques to be used. Topics to be covered include:

• Understanding what work that can and should not be delegated
• Identify the steps to be followed when delegating work
• How to communicated effectively what is being delegated
• Identifying decision making levels

The warehouse and purchasing functions serve as the bridge between administration functions and operations. As such, completing tasks accurately and timely is critical. Furthermore, harmonious relationships that foster teamwork are crucial for precise work, accurate tasks, and positive attitudes. Effectiveness in these areas can determine if warehousing and purchasing contribute to a financially successful bottom line. In the workshop, participants will focus on the following areas:

• Best practices in warehousing and purchasing
• Personality types and how they can contribute to productive teams and lessen conflict and stress
• RUS Form 7 and how purchasing and warehousing fit in the cooperative's financial picture

Today's workforce is comprised of employees separated by three distinct generational views. Yet, within the next ten years, a transition will take place in which there will be two primary generations staffing the workplace. One group known as Generation X, has already begun its entry. Another group, known as Generation Y, will begin their careers within a few years. This half-day program is designed to assist current leadership is formulating strategies to maintain, improve, and ensure that effective workplace operations, customer service, and system reliability is maintained by the new generation workforce. Topics to be covered include:

• Gen X and Gen Y, who are they?
• New generation wants, needs, and expectations
• Communication: styles and substance
• Seven leadership characteristics that work.

It is often the ‘unspoken' and ‘unrecognized' expectations of people that lead to job frustration, poor performance, lack of commitment to the organization, and high turnover. If an organization is to be productive, efficient and effective it is essential to establish a process for identifying and managing the work expectations of their employees. This one-day session is designed to assist in uncovering and exploring the expectations employees have of an organization. Some of the outcomes associated with this session will be:

• The importance of working as a team
• What are the key unspoken employee expectations
• How can you address issues of recognition among your employees
• Learn ways to improve performance while reducing frustration