Resources

Vivo Team is growing.

We are looking for experienced, professional, trainers/facilitators who have the competence, motivation and the ability to collaborate in a team-centric company to deliver our global, award-winning leadership and team development programs to our clients.

Trainer Qualifications

• Personable, likes people, enjoys being in front-of-screen
• Curious, listens for understanding
• Strong virtual presence
• Able to present, in an articulate, connected-with-participants’ way
• Able to make connections to people’s experiences and challenges and move them to become more aware.
• Very facilitative and engaging
• Able to detect cognitive overload in a group
• Empathetically, respectfully confrontative

Trainer Requirements

• Experience leading highly interactive, live, virtual content sessions
• Understanding of, and ability to work with, people analytics in L&D
• This is a contract role. We are looking with someone with a minimum of 5-10 hours per week availability.

Trainer Experience

• At least 10 years of professional experiences, preferably with leadership/management experiences
• Certificate or Degree, that relates to Learning and Development

Want to transform the way your people behave?

Robust, high-touch, practical training and development is the way.

Many people think coaching is only for those who clearly “need” it. But, coaching should always be a part of one’s learning and development.

Why is coaching so important? Well, let’s start off with a few yes/no questions:

1. Do you want to be a more effective leader?
2. Do you feel there are obstacles in the way of achieving your goals?
3. Do you need more guidance and support in addressing specific concerns?
4. Are you unsure why, despite your best efforts, some things are just not working?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these four (4) questions, you might just benefit from a coach!

Coaching assists you in:

• Achieving Goals – A coach can help you identify your goals and stay accountable, increasing the likelihood that the goals will be achieved.
• Individualized Learning – Coaching facilitates deeper learning. You will learn more about yourself, gain insights on how others perceive you, and understand how small changes in behavior can dramatically improve results.
• Improving Specific Skills – Coaching often focuses on specific skill building including communication, feedback, emotional intelligence, accountability, structures, and team cohesion.
• Gaining Perspective – As a third party, a coach offers a safe space to discuss sensitive topics to gain perspective without feeling intimidated by office politics or hurting feelings.
• Personal Awareness – Coaches can help you become aware of your blind spots—areas of work or personality you are not aware of that need improvement. Becoming aware of these areas allows you to work with your coach on improving them.

At Vivo Team, coaching is not an “add-on” in any of our programs–it’s included in all of our Team and Leader programs, and always will be, because we know coaching increases learning and behavior changes.

So, do you want to meet some of our expert executive coaches?

Earlier, we mentioned that all of our programs include coaching– this can be in a 1-to-1, 1-to-2, 1-to-3, or 1-to-4 setting.

But, if you’re interested in connecting further with our executive coaches, or if you don’t yet feel comfortable in a small group setting, our LXP (learning experience platform) hosts a feature called “Coach Connect”.

This ”Coach Connect” feature enables learners to submit questions anonymously and receive a video response from one of our coaches with suggestions and actionable next-steps. Better yet?! While the sender’s identity remains anonymous, the entire cohort has access to the coach’s video tip response–not only the learner who submitted the question. This ensures the learning is shared horizontally, and that all team members are aligned on how to respond to the given situation.

Performance coaching has a positive impact on one’s professional and personal life.

As long as you are ready and willing, prepare yourself for the following (coaching) gains 💪

• Accelerated ability to lead and deliver
• Confidence to lead teams, influence others, and generate results
• Improved accountability and performance
• A shift from tactical leadership to strategic leadership
• Positive cultural changes
• Increased competitive advantage
• Practical skill and strategy development
• Ability to build and lead highly productive teams
• Nurture and contribute to team success

The technical skills that helped you get promoted into a leader/manager position does not guarantee your future success. As Marshall Goldsmith says, “what got you here, will not get you there.”

Moving into a leadership role requires a very different, complementary skill set. You go from doing to working with people to get things done. There is one key set of skills required. It’s called emotional intelligence. According to the Harvard Business Review, it accounts for nearly 90% of what sets high performers apart from peers with similar technical skills and knowledge.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is defined as:

1. The ability and willingness to understand and manage your own behaviors and emotions.
2. Recognizing, influencing, and facilitating the behaviors of others.
3. Helping people develop their unique talents and personal satisfaction.

Over the years, emotional intelligence (EQ) has evolved into a core leadership skill. Research from TalentSmart shows that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance. Leaders with a highly developed EQ are more likely to stay calm under pressure, resolve conflicts productively, and respond to people with empathy.

Emotional intelligence matters because leaders set the tone of their organization. An effective leader pours energizing oxygen into the work atmosphere. If they lack emotional intelligence, it has a stifling effect on the workplace resulting in lower employee engagement and a higher turnover rate.

The Five Ingredients of Emotional Intelligence

1. Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is your ability and willingness to understand your strengths and weaknesses and to recognize how your words, behaviors, and emotions affect you and your team’s performance.

2. Self-Management

Self-management refers to the ability and willingness to manage your words, behaviors, and emotions, particularly in stressful situations, while maintaining a calm and positive outlook. Leaders who lack self-management may have a hard time keeping their impulses in check. A key leadership responsibility is to keep the end goal in mind—that is to ask: “How will what I am doing or behaving affect people’s performance and satisfaction?”

3. Empathy

As a leader, “putting yourself into someone else’s shoes” is crucial to developing ideas and solutions, problem-solving, effective communication, and avoiding or preventing conflicts. When people feel understood they are more likely to voluntarily accept the leader’s influence. A leader who has mastered empathy is able and willing to:

• Listen for understanding using additional questions and small encouragements.
• Give corrective, praising, and inspiring feedback with respect and authenticity.
• Build a productive work atmosphere that builds team competence, motivation, and collaboration.

4. Social Skills

Social skills are the ability and willingness to interact well with others. While it’s important to understand and manage your own behaviors, words, and emotions, you also need to know how to read a room. It is key to developing psychological safety in the workplace.

5. Leader Assertiveness

Leader Assertiveness refers to your ability and willingness to influence, coach, and mentor others and resolve conflict effectively. It’s about using the above skills to get stuff done in spite of setbacks—both structurally and interpersonally. A leader’s job is to be effective. It is not about being liked.

By Tierra Madani, CPHR, HR Consultant (Chemistry Consulting Group)

Self-awareness is a core capability for great leaders to develop. Successful leaders are aware of their natural tendencies and utilize this know-how to boost those tendencies. By definition, self awareness is an understanding of your internal state, which shapes the way you interact with others. As one of the components of emotional intelligence, there is much opportunity for growth in this area for any professional, especially those managing others. 

Be aware of the negative effects of low self-awareness, which can limit your effectiveness as a leader. One of the key indicators of having low self-awareness is being unaware of your personal blind spots that limit your behaviours, reactions and beliefs. This can lead to issues and conflicts in communication, work environment, morale, mental health and, in some cases, can result in a team member quitting or being dismissed. 

Are there leaders that embody low or high self-awareness in your organization? Is this something you are working towards in your own personal and professional development? It’s an ongoing and continual improvement process that can start at any time and is valuable enough to make it as part of your daily or weekly list of practices. Here’s a few tips on how to boost your self-awareness:

Tips on Boosting your Self-Awareness

• Get to know yourself more

Understanding yourself is an important part of building your emotional intelligence. By definition, emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behaviours and relationships. 

• Point out external factors

External factors are often a long list of factors, triggers and indicators that affect our perspectives and other’s perceptions. What are the external factors that affect you? Think about triggers or indicators that both negatively and positively prompt others’ behaviours towards you. Here, we must ask ourselves why we do the things we do and how do others respond to us? The evaluation continues from there in determining why you respond again and why you are reacting the way you are in a given situation. 

• Gather feedback

We build our ability to show empathy when we are open to and ask for feedback. It is important in understanding how you impact others with how you show-up. Enlist the help of those you trust for feedback on how others may perceive you in certain situations and inquire further to gain a deeper understanding. 

• Write it down

Situations may elicit a new insight you won’t want to forget, so write it down. This is the basis of continuous improvement and how we remind ourselves about our ‘aha’ moments and times when we handled something really well. Was there a time when you utilized something you learned about your self-awareness to improve an interaction? Keep a journal and have it handy to reference again. 

• Keep an open mind

Stay open to feedback, be agile and check-in with yourself frequently. New situations can lead to new triggers you’ll need to add to your external factors list. You may also have an opportunity to gain more feedback during your team check-ins or during your performance review processes. Continue to get to know yourself more and never stop learning. 

Self-awareness is an essential trait of a great leader. You’ll see benefits as you take the time to evaluate yourself and the reactions you prompt around you and use that knowledge to improve your leadership skills. With greater self-awareness, you’ll be able to create stronger bonds with your team, make better decisions and to inspire others to do the same.

Guest blog by Peter Krammer, Senior Partner of Okos Partners

Every plan, whether it’s a long-term strategic, yearly operating, or a defined-term project plan must be grounded in clear, measurable, long-term objectives. These objectives set the course of the plan. However, the plan’s success depends primarily on how you manage the short-term objectives, or action plans. This is a practical guide for how to balance the two.

What does “long-term” and “short-term” mean in a plan? What are the elements of both, and why can you not achieve one without the other?

Long-term objectives are a fancy term for goals; they describe the paths forward with defined endpoints and measures of success. Goals must be clear, concise and compelling as they are needed to engage a team and other stakeholders such as customers, other departments or teams, or even shareholders. Long-term objectives are definitive statements of your commitments. Once you make these commitments, you become accountable for them. 

Short-term objectives are the action plans that define the implementation path and determine the success or failure of the long-term objectives, and of the plan itself. Why do they determine success or failure? While there is no substitute for clever thinking when creating long-term objectives (and strategies), they are projections of a future state. People are notoriously bad at predicting the future, even with data and AI, and given the temptation to create “stretch goals” to impress stakeholders or investors, which then become commitments, things can get dicey when the future becomes the present. 

The action plans are the only work that actually gets done in a plan. Therefore, the only control you have in the outcomes, and your only opportunity to change course if your predictions are wrong, happens with the confines of your action plans. 

Action plans, being short-term, are the antithesis of predicting the future. They are practical, tactical, and if written correctly, no longer than 30-90 day projects. This coincides with our most accurate view of the future. If a particular action plan or project will take longer to complete, say 6-9 months, we recommend breaking this into shorter projects that can be more easily managed and kept on track. If the action plan is a year plus, it is most likely highly complex and merits its own plan with long- and short-term objectives. 

Action plan essentials include:

• a project definition
• the work that needs to be done
• who the work is assigned to
• the deadlines and milestones
• the resources required to reach them (i.e., people, tools, and budget).

Every action plan must contain this combination of definitions, dates, accountabilities, and resources. This is so that the people responsible for the action plan understand clearly their mission.  

What does this mean to you as a leader? 

First, by understanding the clear distinction and relationships between these two vital management tools, you are able to clearly define and prioritize two critical leadership strategies: communication and accountability. 

Of course, the more open and clear the communication, the less confusion to contend with. And clear accountability is one of the bedrocks of engagement; everyone needs to know where they are headed. However, there are clear constituencies with differing interests in both of these factors when it comes to long- and short-term objectives. 

Regarding long-term objectives, the team shares accountability for reaching the goal, however it is the leader who is most accountable to and will be held responsible for the goal by stakeholders outside the team. 

Clear, concise and compelling communication of the direction and expected results rules the day with the team; they need to clearly understand the mission if they are going to commit to it. Beware of cloudy thinking and opaque communication to your team; you will regret it as soon as you publish the plan. 

Clear and concise (and probably not as compelling) communication rules the day with the other stakeholders; they need to know what you’ve committed to and are most interested in the results. Beware of over- or under-committing to stakeholders; your enthusiasm or sandbagging may not have the backing of your team. 

Regarding short-term objectives, your stakeholders are the team itself. As mentioned above, this is the work that needs to be done and this is where your communication should focus and focus on the team. As above, any lack of clarity will produce either shoddy results or heroic firefighting, both of which have significant negative impacts on engagement. And it is within the short-term objectives where the real accountabilities lie for the team. While the goal is important, the work is critical—if it does not happen, the goal is unreachable.   

When it comes to balance, a clear goal needs successful execution in order to be achieved, and every action plan needs a clear goal as a beacon and motivating force for the teams involved in completing it. For the leader, balancing these tools and strategically deploying them sets up the journey to success for every plan.