Research carried out on many teams in large corporations show that they use suboptimal solutions when dealing with conflicts in teams. Every time there is a conflict in the team, they respond in a way that comes to undermine the team rather than empower it. This article provides guidance on how to avoid bad responses to conflicts and instead use better a better approach known as Constructive Collaboration.

This is a fairly flexible exercise you can use to improve delegates’ creativity, decision making and team working skills. Effectively you get the groups to design a game in the given time and later evaluate the process they went through. You can use a number of variations to customise this exercise based on your needs.

Being assertive is not just about expressing your rights; it is also about increasing the efficiency of your communication with others. There are a number of ways you can express yourself to achieve this aim. This article suggests a few useful sentence formulations to help you express yourself assertively and increase your confidence in dealing with potentially aggressive people.

In today’s competitive world, coming up with creative ideas sooner than your competitor can make all the difference between success and failure. However, creativity is not something that you can force people into or expect them to suddenly become creative by sheer will power.

Instead, creativity seems to be highly dependant on the state of your mind. It is about your brain. If you can provide a suitable environment for your brain, it can deliver many novel ideas rather quickly. On the other hand, a tired or stressed mind is almost useless for anything creative as if it can’t be set free.

Hence, to become creative you should simply focus on setting up your environment and adopt your behaviour in such a way to maximise your chances of success.

This article provides a series of guidelines you can use to become more creative.

Deadlines are a fact of modern life and professionals in just about any role need to be able to efficiently deal with them. However, people deal with deadlines in different ways based on their personality. Deadlines can be stressful and the way people deal with this stress usually comes to define their success and subsequently the success of the team, especially when things go wrong. This article shows why everyone, team members or managers, must be aware of these differences and make decisions based on this knowledge.

When conducting meetings and interacting with other people, your body language can become a critical part of your communication and may even come to define your success or failure.

There are a number of simple yet powerful strategies which can make your encounters more productive and effective. If you are an office worker, you can use these strategies to have an edge over your colleague, client or even your boss. If you are a trainer you can use them to make your training more effective and memorable. These body language strategies are as follows...

Instructional methods can be divided into one-way and two-way methods. In the one-way method, the direction of the information is from the instructor to the audience. In the two-way method, information is exchanged in both ways. These methods are also known as content-centred or learner-centred activity. In practice, lectures are generally one-way and training courses are two-way.

The methods in each style are quite different but they both have their uses. Lectures are suitable for a large audience, where interaction is not possible or time consuming. Even though lectures are very useful as a teaching method, delivering a training course in the form of a lecture is not recommended as the training session could become boring and unproductive. This article explores the one-way instructional method and suggests solutions to make the experience more interactive or memorable without losing the benefits of a lecturing activity.

An opening exercise such as an icebreaker is useful to start up a training session. As the name suggests, icebreakers are designed to “warm up” the session. It is important to note that delegates need to be receptive to learning before they can start to learn. An icebreaker helps to warm up the delegates and prepare them for more learning activities.

Icebreakers are effectively a tool in your trainer’s toolbox. Of course, like any tool, you need to master the skill of using them to get the most out of them. This article explores various qualities, benefits and advantages of icebreakers and presents guidelines in using them.

Just about everybody is involved in either teaching or learning or both. If you are a trainer, your job is highly biased towards the teaching side which means you need to understand how to train your delegates in the shortest amount of time and get maximum results. This requires a deep understanding of how learning and memory works in humans. Otherwise you could easily be wasting your time as your knowledge will not ‘sink’ into the minds of your delegates.

In this article you will be introduced to a set of core features of our short and long term memory and understand its direct impact on training which you can take advantage of to increase retention and learning.

Modern methodologies on training such as the TAP program, Accelerated Learning, or other top-of-the-range accredited train-the-trainer programs are based on the fundamental theory of Cognitive Training Model. This model captures the essence of learning and shows precisely what you need to do as a trainer to increase the effectiveness of your courses for your learners.

The following shows you what the learners must do to learn and as a trainer what you need to do to satisfy your learners’ needs.

Procrastination is what we do when avoiding doing important things. We defer our decision or action to a different time. Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with anxiety associated with starting or completing an action. Procrastination also means that we overestimate difficulties associated with doing something or making a decision. As a result, we postpone our tasks hoping that at some point in the future we will find a better environment to deal with those difficulties. This error of judgement often proves costly as procrastination becomes a habit and this causes regret for the decision maker. Fear of failure, perfectionism, weak prioritisation, inability to make important decisions or emotional mood swings are other factors preventing individuals from doing what they should be doing at a suitable time.