2 days

Overview

Attendees:

This two-day workshop is aimed at people who want to take their consultancy skills to the next level of professional excellence.

As a result of attending this workshop, consultants will be able to do the following:

• Develop a culture of consultancy which focusses on the clients of your organisation
• Set standards for professional behaviour within the consultancy team
• Protect and promote the culture and international reputation of your organisation

Learning tools:

Before the workshop, participants will receive a five-page questionnaire to complete. This questionnaire will be built around the skills a consultant should possess in order to succeed in both a national and international context. During the workshop, the trainer will use the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI), which is a tool for indentifying and explaining personal motivation. This powerful tool will help consultants to understand their own motivation, and then to apply that insight to other people. The SDI helps organisations to build high-performance teams through increasing personal understanding and acceptance, and to minimise unwarranted professional conflict when dealing with external clients and contractors. Day two of the workshop will consolidate the communication skills the consultants have developed, and look at the skills they need to excel in writing consultancy-reports. 

Programme

Setting personal objectives

• Identifying individual goals for the workshop
• Completing the first part of the SDI questionnaire.

Introducing the client-focussed consultancy model

• Identifying the values and motives of the consultants
• Understanding the mindset of the client
• Clarifying the scope of the consultancy
• Identifying the role of the consultant
• Using email correctly in the project

Meeting the client's expectations

• Identifying the client's perceptions and expectations of your organisation
• Measuring how your organisation appears against the client's expectations
• Agreeing boundaries for how consultants behave during client interactions.

Building trust with the client

• Identifying the three types of consultancy conversations
• building trust, exploring challenges, and handling differences
• Listening, reflecting and questioning
• Building rapport with others.

Separating warranted and unwarranted disagreement

• Completing the second part of the SDI questionnaire
• Defining harmony and discord in a consultancy scenario
• Identifying the three stages of professional disagreement
• Agreeing guidelines for acceptable behaviour in disagreement
• Defining roles for handling disagreement and creating team-unity.

Day two - Writing Consultancy Reports:

Setting personal learning objectives

• Feedback on learning points from Day One.

identifying objectives for writing consultancy reports

• Clarifying the audience, purpose and message
• Applying SDI to understanding the audiences needs
• Creating consistent quality in written reports.

Planning the structure of the report

• Generating the content and planning the order
• Clarifying the message for the client
• Making the content flow.

Building a persuasive argument in writing

• Answering all the client's questions
• Providing relevant evidence for the argument
• Representing your organisation professionally in writing
• Adding visual appeal to the report.