Instructor Led Programs

Dealing Positively with Challenging People & Situations

To realize the importance of effective communication and how to respond positively with internal and external customers during challenging situations. 

Sometimes it seems like people are difficult on purpose, even when you try your best to help them. Some days it seems like all your ‘buttons have been pushed’! Attend this engaging seminar to help you recognize when you are going to ‘react’ rather than ‘respond’. 

Styles of Leadership

This facilitation will present the six styles of leadership, visionary, pace setting, command directive, participative, affiliative and leader as coach.  The application of each style of leadership within leadership team and individual situations will be explored and practiced. 

Navigating Difficult Conversations for Employees

In our fast-paced and interconnected world, difficult conversations are inevitable, yet many of us find ourselves avoiding them altogether. Whether it's providing constructive feedback, dealing with a misunderstanding, or discussing sensitive topics, we often shy away from these encounters due to fear, discomfort, or uncertainty. 

Trust in the Workplace

Trust is key to the success of every organization.  Organizations with low trust pay a high price.  The costs take the form of low morale, low productivity, and low job satisfaction and often lead to a lack of creativity, innovation, and even more important, respect.  This seminar will explore how trust is lost and how it can be regained so that your organization or group can work together more effectively, creatively, and with greater satisfaction and respect for each other. 

Navigating Difficult Conversations for Managers

This session will help equip leaders who manage people to explore the art of dialogue to prepare yourself to manage and facilitate critical conversations with your staff. – with a focus on discussions pertaining to the new Flexible Work Arrangements (FWA) policy.

Play to Your Strengths: Foundations of CliftonStrengths

In our fast-paced and interconnected world, difficult conversations are inevitable, yet many of us find ourselves avoiding them altogether. Whether it's providing constructive feedback, dealing with a misunderstanding, or discussing sensitive topics, we often shy away from these encounters due to fear, discomfort, or uncertainty. 

TIAA: PROTECT! Invest for Success -- 5 Principles you need to know

No matter where you are in your career, this presentation helps you understand key investing principles for retirement. From compounding to taxes to choosing investments, you’ll learn that how you invest is as important as how much you save.

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual Contributors

Join us to be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to ensure that your performance conversations with your supervisor are as helpful as possible throughout the year.

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual for All Supervisors

Join us to learn how to begin providing feedback to your direct reports and receive feedback as a direct report.  You’ll be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to your performance conversations!

Improving Your Professional Writing Skills

This program is designed to teach employees how to improve their professional writing, including e-mail messages and letters, marketing copy (i.e. brochures), and more. Individuals will learn how to create accurate, clear, compelling content for any medium. Through hands-on, skill-building activities and interactive discussions, individuals will be confident that their message will be received. 

Interfaith Education: Interpersonal Understanding

We live in a world with an incredible diversity of beliefs and belief communities. This diversity is often not discussed or engaged with when we talk about inclusion. There are a lot of needs and considerations that come with working with such a large diversity of beliefs and belief communities. It is very helpful to understand the fundamentals of religious, spiritual, and secular inclusion to better serve the people you work with and provide services for. This program helps prepare participants to engage with that diversity in an inclusive and positive way. 

HEALTH ADVOCATE: Holiday Game Plan: Strategies to Manage the Holiday Season

Stress is stress, but for some reason it seems to quadruple around the holidays! This workshop addresses the multiple causes of holiday stress,  and provides tips on how to reduce these stressors so participants can maintain their productivity, achieve a better balance and more fully enjoy the holiday season with friends and loved ones.

Project Management Series -- 4 Sessions

Please note that this is a four-part program and that participation is expected in all four parts of the program to receive credit for attending.***

Part I: Project Management - Overview and Initiation - October 13

Part II: Project Management - Initiation and Planning - October 20

Part III:  Project Management - Execution with Monitoring and Controlling - October 27

Part IV: Project Management - Closing, Methodologies, and Soft Skills - November 3

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual for All Supervisors

Join us to learn how to begin providing feedback to your direct reports and receive feedback as a direct report.  You’ll be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to your performance conversations!

Providing Exceptional Customer Service in a Hybrid Workplace

Life as we know it is very different; we are living and serving our internal and external customers in ways we could not have even imagined even one year ago. But are we achieving success or are we finding excuses to explain why customer service is falling behind?

Accessibility @ PSU 102 – Accessible Word Templates

This session introduces the main points of accessibility policy and guidelines and uses demos of assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and testing strategies and tools to show how following accessibility guidelines benefits everyone. The session ends with information on how to learn the skills and strategies to successfully implement accessibility guidelines based on your job duties and technological environment. 

Creating a Healthy and Inclusive Work Environment Begins with You

In this seminar, you will learn how to become the ultimate team player through managing adversity and contributing to creating a positive work environment.  When faced with adversity, you have the power and the choice to “feed the good wolf” inside you and do the right thing.  Bob will present seven “Good Wolf Behaviors” that empower work teams to build and maintain a healthy work environment.  You will also learn about three Emotional Intelligence strategies that will empower you to manage work-place adversity and contribute to a positive climate and team morale.

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual Contributors

Join us to be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to ensure that your performance conversations with your supervisor are as helpful as possible throughout the year.

The Art of Delegation

The course provides instruction on why delegation is important, what delegation is, and insight into a multi-step process for delegation.

PLEASE NOTE: There is PRE-PROGRAM WORK that needs to be completed as part of this course. You will receive the pre-work assignments a week or so before the course reminder email you will receive from the Learning Resource Network:

Personal Safety and Awareness

A 75 minute session that introduces key strategies for personal safety, including physical resistance strategies that includes self-defense technique demonstration.

Career Conversations -- Individuals (2 part program)

Penn State believes that supporting career development for our employees is critical to the success of our organization.  It is an exercise that focuses on future possibilities; an opportunity to think and plan—with the flexibility required to meet individual needs.  As an organization, we want to provide you with tools and resources that will help you examine your career aspirations and begin to craft a career development plan. 

Enhance Your Personal Brand: Lessons from the World's Most Successful Companies

Apple.   Google.  Target.  Twitter.  Coca-Cola.  Starbucks.  These are some of the most famous brands in the world.  But did you know that you have a brand as well?  Your personal brand is the essence or promise of what will be experienced by others when interacting with you.  Through self-reflective exercises and creative thought experiments, this program will show participants what factors comprise their personal brand, which ones may be increasing or decreasing their effectiveness, and how to develop a personal brand that enhances personal and professional success. 

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual Contributors

Join us to be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to ensure that your performance conversations with your supervisor are as helpful as possible throughout the year.

HEALTH ADVOCATE: Handling Emotional Callers/Customers

Even the strongest customer service teams can be challenged by the intensity of callers who may be in a highly-charged emotional state. This webinar focuses on de-escalation strategies, and the importance of safety, self-care and decompression to prevent burnout. Techniques for staying solution-focused will be discussed, to include how adjusting our own expectations and communicating empathy and compassion can help with problem solving.

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual for All Supervisors

Join us to learn how to begin providing feedback to your direct reports and receive feedback as a direct report.  You’ll be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to your performance conversations!

Time Management

This program discusses practical, common sense techniques to use time wisely at work.  It provides paradigms to help set priorities, manage meetings, organize workspaces, and develop personal daily and weekly plans.  Employees learn to identify time wasters at work and to recognize time-use barriers.

TIAA: MANAGE! Make the move toward long-term financial security -- Your midcareer retirement check-in

For anyone halfway down the road to retirement, this webinar is a critical checkpoint. It takes you through the keys to successful money management, how to juggle competing financial demands and retirement saving strategies that can help put you on the path to lifelong financial security. 

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual Contributors

Join us to be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to ensure that your performance conversations with your supervisor are as helpful as possible throughout the year.

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for all Supervisors

Join us to be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to ensure that your performance conversations with your supervisor are as helpful as possible throughout the year.

Military Cultural Competency – Be a Veteran Ally

Do you know a military service member or veteran?  Have you ever worked with one?  What are they like and what were their experiences while they served?  What challenges do they experience while serving or as they transition back to civilian life?  How are they different from you and I, if at all?  How do I engage and talk to them?   

Leading with Your Strengths

There's only one right way to lead... YOUR way.  And the CliftonStrengths for Leaders report will help you figure out what that is and how to do it.   
This course is a great investment for leaders at any level, as it helps people see how their innate talents contribute to greater success in their leadership role.   

Professional Writing Essentials: Grammar

Who is this class for? Or is it “whom”? Build your writing skills with this grammar review that provides the basics on subjects such as misplaced modifiers, pronoun case, active and passive voice, and much more. This course is designed to equip employees with a firm foundation in the English language so that they can properly and effectively communicate. Learners will participate in discussions and exercises to sharpen their grammar skills. 

The Emotionally Intelligent Leader and Team

An emotionally intelligent leader and an emotionally intelligent team have been shown to greatly improve employee retention and engagement.  The purpose of this module will be to solidify what is and how to be an emotionally intelligent leader and how to establish and maintain an emotionally intelligent team.  The presentation will be based on ‘Emotional Intelligence 2.0’ by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves and ‘Team Emotional Intelligence 2.0’ by Jean Greaves.  An understanding of emotional intelligence would be desired; however, a basic review of emotional intelligence will be conducted.  Along with the presentation, there will be break-out rooms and a case study to solidify the learning. 

Managing Resistance to Change

Resistance is a common response when teams and organizations are experiencing a change event. It can prevent successful change outcomes, but also provide valuable insight to the team and managers. Understanding what resistance looks like and how to better manage it is key to successfully managing change. 

Beyond Diversity: Creating a Culture of Belonging

We interact daily with individuals who have diverse traits and beliefs and are different from us in multiple ways. How we handle these interactions will determine our individual and collective experiences in both our workplaces and larger communities, and who feels included or left out. This program helps participants understand the various aspects of diversity and the many immediate actions each of us can take to create a culture of belonging in all our spheres of influence.

Leading by Developing People

Are you responsible for developing others?

Developing people is an important key to effective leadership.  In this facilitated discussion, we will review the concepts introduced in the Leading by Developing People Skillsoft video training that you will complete before the session and discuss opportunities and challenges for you to put them into practice.

Resume Crafting Strategies Workshop

In this session, you will learn about the vetting process that recruiters use when reviewing candidate resumes, along with the implications this has on what you decide to include on your resume and how you plan on formatting it.  The presenter, Dr. Bob Orndorff, will reinforce the importance of crafting your resume strategically versus slapping your content onto a piece of paper.  You’ll also learn how to customize and tailor your resume to the needs and values of the recruiter and their organization.

Accessibility101@PSU - An Introduction

This session introduces the main points of accessibility policy and guidelines and uses demos of assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and testing strategies and tools to show how following accessibility guidelines benefits everyone. The session ends with information on how to learn the skills and strategies to successfully implement accessibility guidelines based on your job duties and technological environment. 

PENN STATE POLICE: Who We Are and What We Do

Information on how to contact University Police and Public Safety and services and resources provided by University Park police. 

HEALTH ADVOCATE: Extreme Self-Care

If positive energy is so important, why aren’t people more upbeat, especially at the workplace? This workshop provides strategies and tools to help participants live life in a more positive way, even when faced with negative people or situations. They will also explore the causes of negativity, learn how self-talk affects attitudes, and gain tips to become their most productive selves.

Transgender & Gender Inclusion 101 Workshop

The Transgender and Gender Inclusion 101 Workshop explores basic terminology associated with the transgender and/or gender non-binary community, engages participants in a discussion around gender diversity, and highlights some of the challenges constructed by gender-restrictive practices. 

Leading a Hybrid Team at Penn State

Making the move to established hybrid teams challenges traditional management models. We’ve discovered the benefits and trials that come with Hybrid work and recognize that there’s still a lot to learn.  
In this facilitated session/discussion, we will seek active involvement through the chat function and breakout sessions, providing a safe environment to explore what is working, what could be better, and troubleshooting where needed. 

Accessibility @ PSU 102 – Accessible Word Templates

This session introduces the main points of accessibility policy and guidelines and uses demos of assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and testing strategies and tools to show how following accessibility guidelines benefits everyone. The session ends with information on how to learn the skills and strategies to successfully implement accessibility guidelines based on your job duties and technological environment. 

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual Contributors

Join us to be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to ensure that your performance conversations with your supervisor are as helpful as possible throughout the year.

Performance Management - Giving & Receiving Feedback for Individual for All Supervisors

Join us to learn how to begin providing feedback to your direct reports and receive feedback as a direct report.  You’ll be given useful guidelines, exercises, and examples that you can apply to your performance conversations!

Run Hide Fight: Active Attacker Response Program

Guidance on how to respond to an Active Attacker situation for Faculty, Students and Staff can be obtained through the Run Hide Fight: Surviving an Active Attacker Program, presented by the University Police. The Run Hide Fight: Surviving an Active Attacker Program provides information on the steps you can take to mitigate the actions of an Active Attacker.

Professional Writing Essentials: Persuasive Writing

In this course, participants will learn how to write persuasive prose intended to compel, drive, provoke, and interest their audience. Writers are often tasked with creating language that entices their audience to do something, and for University employees, this can include everything from making donations and increasing enrollment, to clicking the next page on a website or signing up for a newsletter. This advanced course will discuss the different types of persuasive writing: ethos, logos, and pathos. Through discussion and exercises, participants will become familiar with persuasive writing techniques and how to use them. 

TIAA: RETIRE! Write your next chapter -- 5 steps to setting your retirement date

For anyone starting to think seriously about when to retire, this presentation takes you through five
steps to deciding when the time is right.         

The Collaborative Leader

In this facilitated discussion, we will review the concepts introduced in, “The Collaborative Leader” Skillsoft video training that you will complete before the session.  

In the session, you will learn about collaborative leadership skills and the advantages of leading collaboratively. You’ll also learn about building collaborative teams, how to deal with challenges, and how to collaborate beyond your team and organization.