Workforce Culture
Collaborate with The Institute of CGE to Transform Your Social Impact Organization Workforce.
The Institute of CGE is proud to introduce the Attuned Workforce Approach, helping teams in social impact organizations become more collaborative and productive.
In our stressful world, people need a transformative approach, one with the potential to create lasting change by teaching the skills of stress management and much more. The Attuned Workforce Approach teaches your teams to optimize brain functioning, unleashing their best critical thinking, developing and maximizing their emotional intelligence. We help create a collaborative and productive workforce that solves problems, achieves goals and enjoys coming to work!
Working in social impact organizations can be as stressful as it is rewarding. The people we serve are impacted by issues such as homelessness, food insecurity, mental health concerns, substance use disorders, domestic violence; serving an at-risk population requires our staffs to be trauma-attuned, emotionally aware and able to work within a collaborative team culture.
Too often, workforce development trainings are one-time events; organizations seeking real change can benefit from working with a partner uniquely positioned to provide training, coaching and support along the way.
When trained in the Attuned Workforce Approach,
Your team is Aware
Your team members learn the impact of chronic stress in their lives and how to be aware of their own emotional state; they learn to recognize and regulate that state to optimize their brains and bodies for success in the task at hand.
Your team is Attuned
Once your team is emotionally well-regulated, they can attune to, or empathize with each other, accessing the parts of their brains designed for critical thinking and choosing the most effective strategy to meet the organization’s and each other’s needs. The optimal workplace environment is created when teams are attuned to the needs of self and other. They are then better able to help the people served by your agency.
Your team is Aligned
Every organization is governed by rules, guidelines, policies, procedures. Every business has its own unique goals, competitive landscape and culture. The Attuned Workforce Approach places a priority on the human capital charged with meeting the goals of the organization. The Attuned Workforce Approach teaches organizations to develop a culture that values the alignment of all involved in achieving shared goals, driven by shared values of mutual respect, collaboration and optimized brain states to enhance productivity.
These aims are achieved through an immersive training experience that teaches about the impacts of chronic stress, the importance of emotional regulation and how to avoid getting stuck in a fixed mindset by choosing a growth mindset instead. Howard Glasser’s Nurtured Heart Approach is a key element of what you will learn, as are Leah Kuypers’ The Zones of Regulation and Carol Dweck’s Mindset: New Psychology of Success.
All professional development experiences are delivered by highly qualified, dynamic and experienced professionals, presenting in engaging and interactive ways. Our goal is to provide practical, effective information, education and consultation to help grow your toolbox of approaches and strategies in your work and life.
Most trainings are available within a range of 30 minutes or longer. The good news? If a full training program is not in your current plan, your organization may opt for individual training or consultations.
Understanding the Effects of Chronic Stress on Staff, Youth & Families
The first step in a social impact organization’s becoming an attuned workforce is awareness of the detrimental effects of chronic stress on our brains and our bodies. This training includes learning about the childhood trauma and its impact on our ability to manage emotion and think critically. When we have this understanding, we can accurately tune in to and meet the needs of another person.
Getting into the Zone for Success: Utilizing Regulation Strategy Plans (RSPs)
People make better decisions and have better results when they are in calm well-regulated emotional states. We are all exposed to moments of high stress and sometimes extended periods of high stress. When we feel this way, we are ready to fight, flight or freeze and we are not as prepared to use critical thinking skills. This training will focus on becoming aware of the detrimental effects of stress on mood and decision-making and will create an individualized Reset Strategy Plan (RSP) to effectively manage stress and return to a better mind-body state.
Calming the Storm: Twelve Effective Strategies for De-Escalating Escalated Staff, Youth or Family Members
The goal of this training is to add to a staff, youth or family member’s toolbox of skills designed to stay out of power struggles, minimize escalation of defiance/opposition and promote cooperation/movement towards better-regulated mind/body states.
The Nurtured Heart Approach: Feeding the Flowers not the Weeds & Clarity without Drama When Setting Limits/Expectations
The Nurtured Heart Approach is a set of trauma-attuned principles and strategies designed to bring out the best in our staff, youth and family members. Stand 1 teaches us to do our best to stop rewarding undesired behaviors with our attention and connection. Stand 2 teaches us various ways to grow the desired behaviors and qualities in others and ourselves. Stand 3 teaches us the importance of clear rules and limits and how to deliver them without excessive energy. This approach will show you how to grow positive qualities in your staff, youth and families.
The Foundational Steps in Changing an Organizational Culture Using John Kotter’s Organizational Change Model
Moving your organization’s culture toward the Attuned Social Impact Community involves changing practices and policies. In this training, we will use components of John Kotter’s model to build an impact steering committee; create a sense of urgency; identify and communicate the vision and initiatives; and generate and publicize short-term wins. The guiding team will learn how to create an implementation plan that includes these steps.
Growing Resilience in Your Children: A Three-Part Parent Training
Session 1: Introduction to Nurtured Heart Approach (NHA) and the Three Stands: Feeding the Flowers and not the Weeds and absolute clarity around rules and expectations and how to assertively and calmly reset yourself and others.
Session 2: Understanding the effect of stress on our children and ourselves. Learning ways to better regulate our emotions and optimize our brains to enhance parent effectiveness and parent-child relationships.
Session 3: Using NHA to build a growth mindset and build resiliency skills in our children.
Creating a Positive & Motivating Work Culture
Recruiting and retaining the best staff is crucial for success in any workplace, but the stress of the work can negatively affect the morale and overall culture, leading to poor work performance and high turnover. More than ever, all staff and especially formal and informal leaders need to focus on creating a positive and motivating work environment. Borrowing from the work of Stephen Covey, John Kotter, Howard Glasser and Marcus Buckingham, this training provides an overview of the five foundational intentions for formal and informal leaders that will contribute to positive and motivating work cultures.
Preventing Burnout & Creating Energy in Your Life
Stress has become ever-present in our world. This training will focus on defining burnout and the importance of self-care, as well as provide a variety of strategies to effectively reduce stress. Utilizing a tool called the “Energy Exchange Pie Chart,” individuals will identify the energizing and draining components of one’s life and start to plan to grow elements that energize life and decrease those that don’t..
Utilizing Motivational Interviewing to Grow Personal Motivation in Staff, Youth & Families
This training provides an overview of the key concepts in Motivational Interviewing (MI), based on the book of the same name by William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick. MI is a way of being with others that constitutes a collaboration without pushing, directing or power struggles. The focus of the collaboration is to assist the person to resolve ambivalence towards change with MI’s four processes: Engagement (listening empathetically without judgement); Focusing (helping the person identify what they want different in their lives); Evoking (asking questions to help the person explore the landscape of their feelings and perceptions around the area of change and discover clarity around what’s important and grow their self-efficacy to achieve that goal); and Planning (making individualized plans to walk through the trip of change).
Transforming Your Critical Inner Voice: Moving from a Fixed to a Growth Mindset
The voice we listen to the most is the one that talks to us in our head—the inner voice, which sometimes turns its attention from the world around us to ourselves. It can be kind and compassionate and sometimes critical. This critical inner voice has a significant impact on our mood, relationships and our ability to be resilient. This training will show the difference between the inner voice and the “real” you, while identifying the detriments of a fixed mindset and outlining the benefits of a growth mindset. The Nurtured Heart Approach is used as a methodology for transforming your critical inner voice to a more growth mindset orientation.
Engaging the Hard-to-Engage Adolescent
Adolescence is a time of identity formation, rebellion and conflict with adults and authority figures. Sometimes, just getting a friendly conversation started can be a challenge. This training will provide an understanding of why it makes sense for adolescents to behave this way. It also describes the three conditions that must be created to engage the adolescent in a meaningful way. Ten tips for successful engagement and techniques for dealing with the five most common roadblocks to relationship-building are also shared. Participants will engage in role-plays and experiential learning around the seven most common ways that we inadvertently shut off communication with an adolescent.
Creating a Resilient Mindset During Challenging Times
This training focuses on using and practicing the five intentions of staying in the present moment, focusing on what you can control, choosing to energize positive and empowering thoughts (feed the flowers, starve the weeds), practicing self-care (replace self-criticism with self-compassion) and learning ways to reset yourself to grow a resilient mindset in yourself and others.
The Art of Reframing: Choosing Motivational Meanings That Free You to Grow
The lens through which we view our life experiences shapes the nature of the meanings we ascribe to them. This training will help you widen your lens and examine alternative and valid motivational meaning your current lens may not be considering or even aware of. In a lot of ways, the choice we make about what challenging events mean determines whether we survive or thrive in our lives.