Public organizations frequently have senior employees who have risen through the ranks of the system, who have relatively little exposure to other types of organizations and organizational innovations. Many executives assumed their positions without professional training in management, while others who came from outside the organization do not always succeed to carve their way in the new organizational culture. Training processes and operations aimed at creating and strengthening a culture of learning are an important tool for developing the organization’s staff, exposing it to new knowledge and ideas, and invigorating it. This information gives executives and employees the tools to deal with burnout (of both people and the knowledge), development and enhancing professionalism as well as the assimilation of new managerial and organizational approaches.
The training processes are carried out within a broader organizational process, either as a supportive and supplementary element, or separately in response to a specific need. The major challenge in the training world is to generate motivation and openness to learning, confidence in the ability of the trainees to develop and change things in themselves and in their environment, and to establish a process that will facilitate reiterating and deepening the messages and their long-term implementation. We often include tours and meetings in organizations from all sectors of the economy to expose the trainees to new approaches, methodologies, and techniques, as well as to give them an opportunity to see what is similar and feasible and to draw inspiration from it.
In the training and learning processes, we combine frontal instruction, simulations and case analyses, learning from colleagues, meetings with customers and street surveys, organizational games, field exercises in various areas, outdoor training (ODT), integration of work with actors, film clips, etc. The workshop sessions serve as an organizational arena for meetings and dialog among the participants (sometimes from the same unit and sometimes from different units), which are not always feasible in other settings.
The areas of training and learning we offer include:
1) Training and programs for assimilating strategy, values, and organizational culture, for creating uniformity in organizational terminology and messages delivered through internal and external interfaces.
2) Programs for developing intermediate and senior level executives. In this context, we teach executive skills, such as decision-making, managing changes, motivating employees, designing and implementing management routines, measurement processes, control and feedback, conducting discussions, and management of a focus group.
3) Imparting communication skills in the fields of service, interviewing and questioning, persuasion and influencing, negotiation, etc.
4) Building instruction kits, including a guide, aids and sets? to be given at team meetings and in-house training sessions.
5) Training executives and in-house instructors to give training based on these sets? aimed at providing organizational tools for long-term maintenance and enhancement of learning skills.
6) We guide improvement teams and group processes for organizational/staff development in settings of divisional teams, groups of executives, groups of people holding the same position throughout the organization, etc. These are participatory processes in which the team, under our guidance, carries out self-assessments and researches issues of interest, discusses concepts and methods of action, and translates them into concrete proposals for improvement.
7) Programs for absorption and entry into a new job position aimed at shortening the time needed for settling into the position for both new employees and executives.
