Services

Professional Goal Setting

Contributing to stress in the workplace is the need to deliver tangible results in areas of business development, sales, production goals and other areas of responsibility.  In this post-recession era, many women are doing the jobs of two or three people at work, increasing the pressure to get things done.

This program guides women through a series of exercises designed to prioritize workload to maximize productivity.  While intangibles, such as motivating one's workforce, help drive results, the focus here is on developing strategic goals, creating relevant measurables, communicating them up and down the organizational ladder, and developing actionable plans at the personal and team level to make them happen.  Participants will leave this program with a personalized professional action plan.

Communicating Your Personal Brand

Competition for opportunities and promotions depends upon establishing a unique personal brand in the workplace that differentiates a woman’s capabilities and inspires confidence in her consistent adherence to core values while pursuing goals. Personal brands guide a woman’s approach to work and serve as a meaningful way to communicate with clients, subordinates, peers, mentors, and importantly, sponsors.

Each participant will engage in an exercise to inventory strengths and capabilities and develop a personal brand statement that conveys her differentiating talents. Participants will then workshop their brand statements in small groups to refine and enhance their impact. FTGC wraps up this program by reviewing strategies for leveraging personal brand at work and beyond.

Becoming Visible: The Art of Being Noticed

The history of women at the conference table is fraught with the challenges of being heard amongst other voices. Women commonly relate incidents of suggesting an original idea that receives lukewarm reception only to find that same idea garnering enthusiastic support when suggested, sometimes only minutes later, by a male colleague.

This program expands the actuality of the conference table to the larger question of visibility. Participants will explore visibility and identify the many venues in which becoming visible matters. We will touch on barriers to achieving visibility from historical and theoretical perspectives, delving deeply into perceptions and double standards around assertive versus aggressive communications. Role-plays will help participants internalize new and different methods for increasing their visibility presented by FTGC and shared by participants in the program.

Three Phases of Program Structure

Phase 1: Illuminate the shared experiences of women in organizations in all their complexity. The intent is to give shape to the elephant in the room, not to create a forum for unbridled complaints. However, to encourage new thoughts and behaviors, we must create a candid understanding of the present. FTGC programs offer a safe environment for self-discovery and to share challenging thoughts, feelings, habits or experiences in a professionally facilitated environment. Participants relieve stress through the process of catharsis and the recognition that one’s experiences are shared by others. Gaining awareness opens participants to learning and change. In Phase 1 they learn, "We are not alone."

Phase 2: We then process current challenges in small group activities, identifying underlying sources for the challenges we face. Through education and discussion participants will learn the history of challenges typically experienced by women in organizations, current industry-wide trends for women in similar organizations, organizational practices that contribute to women’s shared experience, and gender-based behavioral patterns that perpetuate their challenges. There are many reasons women experience the workplace the way that they do. Phase 2 is designed to foster understanding and perspective, a new way of thinking.

Phase 3: We end our programs with action-oriented planning that places the locus of control over one’s work experience squarely back in the hands of the participant. We encourage them to Build Their Own Metaphors. While we as presenters and facilitators are armed with strategies for changing the game at work based on our education and experience, participants will also benefit from sharing with each other successful strategies they have discovered in their work. Utilizing SMART 100-Day Action Plans, we encourage participants to create actionable goals that can be tracked and evaluated for progress. A hallmark of Forget the Glass Ceiling Programs is the productive focus we place on moving ahead after attending our programs.