Training

Our interactive training sessions help professionals and students build and refine important skills for both individual and team high-performance in today’s economy.

Leadership, communication, self-awareness and trust-building are all essential tools to construct great careers and great teams in the knowledge economy.

Our workshops are tailored to the needs of each team, and they prioritize participant engagement in the process. While we introduce important concepts and guide the process, the emphasis of these workshops is placed in participant reflection, interaction and application of key principles.

Training for Businesses

Training for Schools

Career Skills: self-awareness and optimism

Businesses

MentorU training sessions are built around our 5 critical characteristics for high-performance. These workshops can be completed together as a comprehensive training program or as individual sessions, depending on your needs. If you are interested in a training that is not highlighted here, but falls within the 5 characteristics, please contact us to see if it is something we offer.

Shared Purpose

Values Alignment

We define shared purpose as a collective drive to advance the organization’s mission, and a common belief in its vision. This requires an alignment of individual team members’ values to those of the organization, as well as to their teammates. Our values alignment workshop was developed to help team members create a stronger sense of belonging in their workplace and greater relatedness with their teammates.

Workshop objectives:

Identification and connection of team members’ values to those of their colleagues’ and of the organization.
Create a stronger sense of relatedness to other team members and to the organization.
Improve clarity in individual roles and their relation to the organizational mission.
In some cases, identify the unique purpose of a smaller team within the organization.

Format: Individual values identification and prioritization; small group discussion; larger group integration.

Timing: ½ day

Good Communication

Speaking for Significance

The ability to effectively “sell” an idea, product, service or plan has never been more important than it is today. As our attention spans continue to decline and the amount of information available at our fingertips continues to grow, it is essential to deliver genuine, meaningful and succinct messages to engage audiences of all sizes and formats.

Our unique public speaking methodology emphasizes the 3 essential ingredients for purposeful presentations: Knowing (purpose, audience, material, direction); Telling (engaging stories); and Selling (integrating your authentic strengths, skills and values for a genuine and meaningful delivery).

How is our process unique? Our expertise in career coaching enables us to help workshop participants draw out their most natural and meaningful preferences, strengths and personality traits. Armed with this knowledge, we then draw from our extensive research and skills in interpersonal communication to coach them to use their strengths to their advantage in delivering genuine and impactful messages.

Workshop objectives:

Improve participants’ understanding of how to design and deliver a purposeful presentation.
Help participants identify and integrate their greatest strengths into their presentation style.
Advance presentation skills

Format: Multiple formats possible depending on group size and current skill level. Suggested format includes the following 4 steps: interactive workshop; short presentation delivery & feedback for each participant in group setting; individual coaching sessions; re-delivery of presentation to integrate feedback.

Timing: variable, depending on group size and desired depth in training and coaching.

Feedback

Skillful delivery, acceptance and integration of feedback are critical abilities in the workplace. Yet, somehow, we so often hear staff protest that they do not receive honest, supportive or useful feedback on the work that they complete. On the other side of the table, managers often relay stories of overly-sensitive, defensive staff who are unwilling to adapt based on feedback. This is not a new phenomenon.

The reason this remains a challenge in many organizations is that giving and receiving feedback effectively are skills that need to be developed through self-awareness and practice. High-performing teams have open and fluid mechanisms and established norms to integrate feedback loops into their work.

Workshop objectives:

Improve participants’ understanding of the various types of feedback.
Help them identify best practices in delivering each of these types.
Practice the skills necessary to receive and deliver feedback effectively.
Make a plan to implement these practices in day-to-day work.

Format: Interactive workshop including presentation of theoretical concepts, self-reflection, group discussion and role-play.

Timing: ½ day – full-day

Effective Leadership

Self-determination: Inspiration & Empowerment

While every person has their own unique definition of leadership and the traits that leaders possess, the fundamental purpose of a leader is to inspire and empower their team members to do effective work. At MentorU, we view leadership as the responsibility to foster a sense of autonomy, competence and emotional relatedness among team members.

Based in Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan’s Self-determination Theory, our leadership development workshop has been constructed to help leaders of all ages create an environment that fosters intrinsic motivation in their team members.

Workshop objectives:

Help participants understand the basic principles of self-determination theory and how they have been leveraged effectively in other work teams.
Have participants connect these principles to their own teams and work.
Build a plan to create a strong sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness in participants’ teams.

Format: Interactive workshop including presentation of theoretical concepts, self-reflection and group discussion.

Timing: full-day, possibility for multiple days, depending on group size. Can also be broken down into shorter sessions over a period of time.

Mutual Trust

The Two Sides of Trust

There is nothing more important than trust in establishing healthy and productive human relationships. Mutual trust between team members fosters creativity, motivation and collaboration. However, its development is imprecise and arduous. None the less, there is a distinct set of attitudes and behaviours that has been proven to build trust effectively.

These characteristics can be broken down into 2 separate groups: interpersonal and operational skills. While it is possible to establish trust in one of these domains and not the other, high-performing teams demonstrate key indicators in both.

Workshop objectives:

Help participants understand the key characteristics of interpersonal and operational trust.
Have participants identify areas and teammates with whom they can improve these characteristics.
Build a plan to create a stronger sense of trust within work teams.

Format: Interactive workshop including presentation of theoretical concepts, self-reflection, group discussion and role-play

Timing: ½ day – full-day

Synergy

Job Crafting: maximize meaning and create synergy

The first step in making the most of your team’s diversity of talents is to identify team members’ interests, skills and values. While this may seem obvious, very few teams take the necessary time to fully understand each other’s needs and motivations.

In fact, very few people take the necessary time to identify and analyze their own

needs and motivations.

Once properly identified and shared, this awareness creates synergy, as team members can more readily identify partners for effective collaboration depending on interests and abilities. To help teams achieve this level of synergy, we use a number of inventories and questionnaires, in conjunction with intrapersonal and interpersonal integration activities.

Workshop objectives:

Help team members better understand and integrate their interests, skills and values in their work.
Spread this information throughout the team to create awareness and explore opportunities to create synergies.
Build a plan to take advantage of complementary strengths and interests among team members.

Format: Interactive workshop including self-reflection, presentation of theoretical concepts and group discussion.

Depending on the amount of time you have available for your workshop, some or all of the following inventories and questionnaires may be used:

Vocational personality
Character strengths
Values identification
Skills inventory

Timing: ½ day – multiple days, depending on size of group and time available to complete personality assessments in advance.

"Jay provided presentation skills training to our Summer Orientation guides and he instantly connected with the participants! The staff were fully engaged throughout the entire workshop. Jay is an expert and the examples he gives are relevant, so the staff can connect with the topic. The presentation and the activities were adapted to the time and number of participants we had, and it was great to focus on the ‘acting’ of the staff in front of the camera. Practice is the key to success, and Jay found the right way to give empathetic and genuine feedback to the participants so no one got hurt and/or demolished. I hope to have him again, because the staff mentioned that this was their favorite part of the training".

Valérie Massé

Coordinator, Orientation and Transition

SASS, University of Ottawa

Schools

Career Skills: Self-Awareness and Optimism

In line with the Ontario Ministry of Education's Creating Pathways to Success

career/life planning program, we have developed targeted workshops that

facilitate high school students' career exploration.

Career Skills

Workshop Objectives:

1 - Encourage students' positive self-image and promote the importance of intrinsic motivations

2 - Help students understand that career paths are rarely linear, and to embrace open-mindedness

3 -Help students connect their interests, values and talents to various education & career opportunities

Format: Interactive workshop including self-reflection, presentation of theoretical concepts and group discussion.

Timing: Variable, but workshops are built to fit within the 75-minute class schedule.

Grade levels: Workshops are tailored to specific grade levels. Here is what you can expect:

Gr. 9: Exploration of traditional and non-traditional education and career paths
Gr. 10: Career investigation & introduction to concept of vocational personality
Gr. 11: Identification of individual preferences and their relation to the labour market
Gr. 12: Implementation of action plan and emphasis on the pursuit of the Ideal Self

"Our grade 10 students found Jay's workshop to be both informative and interesting. A number of students relayed that, as a result of hearing about his personal journey, they felt less stressed not knowing what they wanted to do with their lives. His message emphasizing the journey over the destination really connected with our students".

- Jose Abad, Careers Teacher, John McCRae Secondary