Professional Development Workshops

Besides 1:1 Career Counseling, Accadence offers a range of Professional Development Workshops. Each Workshop is available as a class-room or seminar in a one, two or three-hour formats. They can run in series or as stand-alone. They can be customised to align to your existing program in a school or business context.

They are interactive, high energy introductions to the respective subjects, where the participants work through the topic for themselves. Each workshop is based around a workbook or learning canvas where the students record their insights as they go, so they have a tangible take-away they can use in their further personal development. We also offer a Career Development Series of 12 Workshops

Here some outlines of recent workshops

30% launch discount

Starting on Monday 8th June

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Starting on Saturday 13th June

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This workshop will equip participants with the fundamental concepts for managing themselves and their professional behavior, which they will learn though a series of practical activities. Self-Awareness: the uses of feedback and other methods to maintain an accurate self-assessment of one’s own capability and impact. Contextual Awareness: the uses of observation, empathy and listening to reveal one’s blind-spots and assumptions. Situational Self-Management: based on understanding of self and context, to vary one’s behaviour intentionally to achieve better outcomes. Finally, they will apply what they have learnt to their own experience of giving and receiving work tasks.

To work effectively in Asia today, you must be culturally literate and versatile. This brief workshop based on Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map alerts you to the professional differences that you may encounter when working in diverse teams or on business travel. This workshop will share some techniques for identifying the hidden cultural trip wires that can easily bring you down.

Even within Asia, there are great differences in the way national cultures express professionally. We will explore the reality through our own experiences and some video cases. We will explore the theory behind the different behaviors you may encounter and how you can use that understanding to build more profitable relationships. There will be plenty of time to practice and experiment with different behaviors.

Virtual working in global organizations brings another set of cross-cultural challenges. The workshop will look at how you can make an impact and be understood from a distance over video or tele-conference.

The workshop will look closely at how different national cultures deal with: Communication, Feedback, Trust, Relationship Building, Conflict, Decision-Making, Time and Agendas, Influencing, Leadership & Followership

All work gets done through relationships. This half-day workshop shows participants how to assess the health of their existing relationships, how to increase the quality of those relationships and build new ones. Participants will learn how to build a professional relationship, be trustworthy, develop visibility and manage stakeholders intentionally to a plan. Conflict is an inevitable and productive feature of diverse, high performing teams. Participants will learn how to make the best use of Conflict for the work and avoid destructive conflict and stalling harmony in their professional relationships.

Heraclitus, the Greek Philosopher wrote that “change is the only constant in life”. We only see that truth accelerating in our professional lives today due to digitisation, artificial intelligence, automation and componentisation. How do we plan our careers and achieve success in such an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world? How do we respond to the opportunities and threats that rapid change thrusts towards us?

In this two hour workshop, Andrew will share ten habits that should be part any MBA’s continuous professional practice: activities that can propel your career when opportunities appear and make you more resilient to economic and industry headwinds. The underpinning message of the workshop is: don’t wait until the opportunity appears or your job is threatened to manage your career; by then it’s too late.

In this workshop you will learn habits that you can apply every working day to:

•Develop your career strategy

•Learn what you need to know

•Work towards your next role

•Communicate your intent

•Network purposefully and professionally

•Build resilient relationships

•Get noticed in your industry

•Identify present and future opportunities

•Use Feedback effectively

The purpose of this workshop is to equip participants to prepare for and conduct an internal meeting to get a decision or achieve buy-in for a course of action. The workshop will focus on how to prepare to influence a group or individuals, structure an argument and behave with appropriate executive presence in the meeting. Through each step the participants will work on their own case from audience analysis culminating with making their presentation to the class. Each participant will get personalised feedback on their content, verbal presentation style and body-language. It’s a prerequisite that participants can have in mind an imminent or recent presentation that could benefit from working on during the class.

This workshop will equip participants with an understanding of how group dynamics show up in teams and other work groups. It is based on two models. We use Tuckman’s model of team development as a tool to measure the maturity of a team on its path to high performance, and as a guide for options that team managers and team members have to move a team up the curve. We use Kantor’s model to illuminate the patterns of individual behaviour in groups and for recommendations to managers and team members how to vary behaviours to produce more satisfying outcomes from one-to-ones and group meetings. The workshop follows four phases. After establishing an understanding of the two models, the participants join a live simulation where they work as a temporary team to solve a problem. Thirdly in review stage the facilitator guides them through learning from the dynamics that appeared or did not appear during the simulation; and finally there is an application stage where participants apply their learning to their own collaboration challenges such as designing more productive meetings or experimenting with different behaviours in meetings.

In this workshop participants learn what it means to have an entrepreneurial, growth mindset and apply it hands-on by taking them through a live experience of how to identify value-adding opportunities in their own work context through to making an action-ready business plan. In the first third, participants identify what it means to be entrepreneurial as an employee within a large organization: taking ownership, working across boundaries, agile and innovative work styles. They will personalize their learning into how they can be more intrapreneurial in their own context and give themselves an alternative to their normal approach to problem solving and innovation approach. With these definitions in mind, the rest of the workshop guides participants through a rapid application of some common entrepreneurial frameworks including Design Thinking, the Business Model canvas and OKRs to identify a business opportunity in their own domain, ideate ways to realise the opportunity, select ideas for action and build a business plan to achieve it.

Feedback is the action that starts our learning at work. Formal and informal feedback alert us to our blind spots, our weaknesses and skills we need to acquire. Equally feedback helps us to validate what we are doing well and identify our strengths that will power us forward.

A healthy feedback culture is also essential to build a high performing team. Whether you are a manager or yet to have that responsibility, giving actionable feedback to your staff, peers subordinates and others in the firm is the platform for building a more effective team.

Managers should be giving feedback continuously through the year: validating (positive) feedback and developmental (negative) feedback. As managers we know that we should not be surprising our staff in the year end evaluation. Our staff should be fully aware of our views of their performance from our feedback. We should give it in a timely fashion so they can take corrective action and develop themselves before we assess them at year end.

In this brief workshop you will learn how to:

• Show your positive intent
• Give useful feedback
• Time your feedback for best effect
• Script your feedback
• Identify and control unhelpful emotions that may derail the process
• Demonstrate feedback trends
• Receive feedback
• Plan action based on feedback received

And here will be plenty of time to practice the giving and receiving feedback skills.

Are you ready for the critical, career-defining conversations that happen around the end of the year?

• Have you already drafted your year-end self-evaluation? Have you delivered on your commitments?
• Are you confident you know how your boss will evaluate you?
• Have you positioned your compensation and promotion expectations ahead of the critical decision-making meetings?
• Have you prepared your objectives for the new year?

These conversations are the hottest topics on the career calendar in most most firms. Expectations and emotions are cranked up as the business results come in and the end of the year approaches.

Besides the performance of your firm, your team and yourself, this workshop will look at what else you can do to increase your chances to meet your own expectations. We’ll ask:

• How can you start influencing your boss and other stakeholders now?
• How can you best present your achievements for the year?
• How can you manage your emotions through the year-end period and keep focused on delivering results?

We are told that we join the company but leave the boss. The direct manager has the most power over our career development, especially in the early years. The direct manager/subordinate is the pivotal relationship. It drives the opportunities we get, measures our performance, engages us, is the gateway to pay, promotion and new experiences, and much of our happiness at work.

So how can we build a better a relationship with our direct supervisors and accelerate our careers as a result? How to Manage Your Boss is a short experiential workshop for early-career professionals to acquire some concepts and learn some behaviors for getting on better with their bosses and accelerating their career growth. Both you and your boss will benefit from more structured, purposeful communication and making the most of the little time that you can spend together. But the focus of this Workshop is to share some techniques for the subordinate to advance. They include:

• Understand the 6 Leadership styles and how you can use different subordinate styles for better results
• How to use your 1:1 meeting time together for better results
• How to build Trust & Visibility
• How to collaborate with your boss on your career roadmap & make your boss your champion
• How to say Yes and No to your boss
• How to give feedback to your boss

Are you working in a culture of Conflict avoidance or one that prizes Harmony above all….or one that never lets a good Conflict go to waste?

• What tells you that a conflict is coming?
• Who do you rather avoid than engage?
• What topics lead to confrontation at work?
• When you face conflict do you avoid it or go all-in for a win-lose outcome?
• We all know that win-win results are best but how do you get there… and influence the other party to partner with you?

Conflict is essential for any business to be creative, get the benefit of the diversity in the team, move forward intentionally as a team and optimize use of resources. But constant Conflict can take a toll on the individual.

This lively, interactive workshop will introduce the basic concepts for managing workplace conflicts through a series a mini-cases, where the participants will play out conflicts in roles and also have a chance to bring their own conflict cases into the group work.

We will look at the precursors for conflict, escaping from recurring patterns of conflict, managing emotions during conflict, conflict resolution strategies and how to say ‘No’.

Mentoring has become a sought-after and valued skill for recycling and developing knowledge, experience and capabilities in Financial Services. It’s especially effective in developing soft-skills, accelerating personal development, career management and supporting Mentees as they navigate major professional and personal challenges and opportunities.

When Mentors plan the process and intentionally manage the relationship the meetings with their Mentees can be so much more impactful than a casual coffee chat. When they combine some coaching skills with appropriate domain experience they can Mentor more effectively: transforming careers and adding to the human capital of the firm. Mentor and Mentee can both benefit from a well-run Mentoring relationship.

This brief workshop is appropriate for first-time and experienced Mentors. It equips experienced professionals with the minimum practical Mentoring concepts and skills to be ready to start a new Mentoring relationship.Also, it takes the participants through the steps to plan and manage a successful Mentoring relationship.

The Mentoring Skills Workshop includes

• What is Mentoring?
• The roles of Mentor and Mentee
• Self-Assessment of Mentoring skillsPlanning skills development
• How to structure a Mentoring relationship
• Setting the ground-rules
• How to start and end a Mentoring session
• How to track Mentoring progress
• How to reflect and learn from Mentoring

Mentoring has become a sought-after and valued skill for recycling and developing knowledge, experience and capabilities in Financial Services. It’s especially effective in developing soft-skills, accelerating personal development, career management and supporting Mentees as they navigate major professional and personal challenges and opportunities.

This brief workshop is targeted at Mentors, who are managing a current Mentoring relationship. It provides a quick check in on the progress of their Mentoring process and provides an opportunity to do some timely course-correction if necessary. While there will be some instructional elements on the topics the group requests, most of the learning will be done in peer coaching groups, forming a self-supporting mechanism which the participants can continue after the workshop. So the participants will benefit form each other’s experiences as well the facilitator’s expert guidance.

This workshop covers to It is designed to:

• Teach Mentors how to reflect on their experience of Mentoring
• Evaluate progress in their Mentoring relationship
• Evaluate their performance as Mentor and the progress of their Mentee
• Learn from the observance or contravention of their ground rules
• Identify early warning signs of derailment of the Mentoring process
• Learn corrective and developmental actions to sustain and enhance the Mentoring process through to conclusion

Ideal for an intact team or project team that's starting its work together, committing to a change or for a group coming back from a failure or needing a reset, this workshop explores the positive capabilities of the individuals and the team.

Firstly, the Team members will learn about themselves, how they interact within the team and others outside the team, in the form of the Gallup CliftonStrengths® Full 34 Strengths profile. The Facilitator will introduce the concepts of strengths and positive Personal Development. Together they will explore what drives them, what rewards them, what they have to offer the team and what they need from the team. The second half exercise will be a structured and positive exploration of how the team can apply what they have learnt to benefit how they work together as a team. They will also practice some exercises to explore their combined team strengths. They will compile their findings into an individual action plan.

Takeaways for the attendees:

• The Gallup CliftonStrengths® Full 34 Strengths profile.
• A development experience that is recognized and used by thousands of companies worldwide.
• Self-awareness of their strengths and what it means for their teamwork & mentoring.
• Tips and resources on how to explore more about how they can work with their strengths.
• A new language and tool-set to describe and tackle people problems at work, not only within the team.

Ideal for an intact team or project team that already has substantial some experience of work with each other and is looking develop further and take their team functioning to the next level.

This workshop is organised around a Social Styles self-assessment in a culturally neutral method. Through the Social Styles framework the participants will identify their social style preferences, strengths and weaknesses, how those complement the others of the team and how they can use their preferences to perform at a higher level. The team will explore how they can use their social style preferences to build Trust, have productive but not destructive Conflicts, Commit as a team, hold each other accountable and focus as a team on results. Besides the insights and shared understanding, the result will be a brief, written, personal development plan to leverage strengths and address weaknesses. The team will learn a new language and tool-set to describe and tackle their one-to-one relationships.

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It is a critical inflection point in financial services careerswhere many high-potentials derail. They don’t make it to franchise leadership and cannot go back to their comfort zone. They end up stuck and a lost to the organisation. This workshop teaches the latest research and practical techniques for managing your own journey from expert to leadership successfully. Learning objectives include

• What is Leadership
• Leadership v Management
• Self-Awareness & Authentic Leadership
• Crucible events
• From Intent to Behavior to Impact
• Michael Watkins’ Seven Seismic Shifts
• Career Pathing
• How to plan your next move
• Visibility & Voice
• Generating Followership

You will also learn how to guide your own high-potentials through it to avoid the blind-spots and pitfalls, and so retain and develop this valuable human capital for your firm. How do they evaluate and navigate the risk of leaving the role where they have been successful and progressed quickly, to a leadership role where they do not have hands-on impact in the business and must drive performance through influence?

Today, being a competent manager is not enough. Effective Leaders need outstanding interpersonal skills. Coaching is well recognized as an effective and efficient development intervention for your Managers, High Performers and High Potentials, by which you can help them navigate change, lead peak performing teams, influence clients and drive their career progress.

In this brief, interactive workshop you will learn a handful of high impact Coaching Skills to enhance your management and Mentoring skill-set and enhance your teams’ performance without further study. You will learn how to structure a solution-focused conversation and how to structure a longer-term mentoring/coaching to achieve a major goal.

This Workshop assumes some direct management experience. You will learn hands-on. In the workshop you will form Coaching pairs with fellow participants to Coach/Mentor each other during the Workshop and continue to develop your skills after the Workshop.

As an added benefit, your Mentoring skills will also be sharpened by the skills you will learn in the Workshop. When you combine them with your experience, you can mentor effectively and add to the overall Human Capital of the firm.

You will learn your Coaching Skills under the supervision of Andrew Jones a former leader in global Financial Services and now a seasoned Executive Coach working with fellow leaders in the industry.