Xcelerators

Dr. Karen Peesker, Assistant Professor

Managing sales teams in today's complex and modern sales environment is challenging. This interactive session is built on extensive research that defines which sales leadership behaviours are perceived to enable salesperson performance. In this half-day program, participants will learn how to put these leadership behaviours into action to enable teams to improve business results.

Learning outcomes:

• Identifying and practicing sales leadership behaviours
• Learning skills and behaviours to coach for sales success

Janice Rudkowski, Assistant Professor

Brand success is based on multiple factors, but, fundamentally, it depends upon your company’s level of customer insight. Today, this requires a deep understanding of the relationship between your brand and the customers’ experience including the identification of each touchpoint throughout their journey.

In this half-day Xcelerator, participants will experience a valuable hands-on opportunity to inject creativity into their business by learning how to map out customers’ brand journeys.

Learning outcomes:

• Identifying key customer touchpoints via offline and online environments
• Evaluating gaps and opportunities in your current customer experience
• Developing a customer touchpoint mapping journey
  

Dr. Steve Gedeon, Associate Professor

Design Thinking is one of the hottest new ideas in understanding what customers want and will pay for. It is a structured method, built on a set of visualization tools and a way of thinking that places customers at the centre of your new product and service design process. This half-day informative program focuses on how design thinking can help businesses better understand and engage with customers.

Learning outcomes:

• Learning the language of design for non-designers
• Transforming approaches to business planning, customer discovery and market experimentation
• Learning creative methods to increase customer insights and to create more engaging user experiences

Dr. Frederic Dimanche, Director, Ted Rogers School of Hospitality & Tourism Management

Luxury customers can be demanding and challenging to work with. They’re not only wealthy, but as consumers, they also tend to be more sophisticated and have high expectations. This interactive program takes a close look at understanding luxury customers and designing experiences that will exceed their expectations.

Learning outcomes:

• Understanding luxury customers’ motivations and expectations
• Differentiating “premium” and “luxury”
• Distinguishing luxury service and luxury attitude
• Knowing how to turn service into a core competitive advantage

Dr. Ron Babin, Associate Professor

Siri, Alexa and Google Home are just the beginning of an innovation wave that will change how we work and live. Such digital disruption can rapidly change an industry, as iTunes and Spotify have done for music, as Netflix has done for video entertainment and Amazon has done for retail. Robotic process automation, including cognitive computing, is the next change to prepare for. This half-day Xcelerator will explore the disruption created by Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) for today’s organizations and businesses.

Learning outcomes:

• Understanding digital disruption through robotic process automation and how it will affect businesses
• Creating a preparation map for when and how to implement robotic process automation
• Identifying which organizations and vendors will change how we work and live, through digital disruption

Dr. Murtaza Haider, Associate Professor

Despite unprecedented interest in big data, research shows businesses have experienced limited success in driving real value from their data resources. Whether because of governance challenges, shortage of big data talent, or a lack of imagination, companies have yet to master how big data can be implemented across their organization to generate results. In this half-day program, participants will learn how to use big data for strategic decision-making and business development.

Learning outcomes:

• Learning how you can build a practical roadmap to advance your organization’s data analytics journey
• Understanding how businesses can leverage data-driven decision-making for higher productivity

Dr. Philip Walsh, Associate Professor

Intrapreneurship helps companies improve performance, deepen employee engagement and increase business agility by empowering employees to look for and pursue innovation opportunities. In this half-day program, participants will discuss the importance of promoting innovation from within an organization, and how to design the organizational conditions needed to implement strategies for exploiting innovation successfully.

Learning outcomes:

• Learning how to nurture creativity in your organization, and empowering all employees to think and act like entrepreneurs
• Analyzing how innovation affects industry structure and competition
• Identifying the factors that determine the returns on innovation investment and evaluating the potential for an innovation to establish a competitive advantage
  
• Gaining insight into management best practices for enabling intrapreneurship
  

Dr. Chris MacDonald, Associate Professor

This half-day program explores the essential ethical dimension of leadership. Participants will discuss the role that critical thinking skills play in both effective leadership and ethical decision-making. Special attention will be paid to the practical application of core principles: participants will be taught tools that can be applied immediately to real-life ethical challenges, big and small.

Learning outcomes:

• Understanding the key ethical challenges of leadership
• Recognizing the applicability of ethical leadership skills throughout an organization
• Learning to apply a simple rubric for ethical leadership decision-making

Andre Serero, Executive-in-Residence

Developing a strategic leadership  mindset requires a comprehensive understanding of strategic leadership, with a particular emphasis on the key behaviours and attitudes. By using everyday examples and break-out sessions, this half-day program will help participants to act and think like strategic leaders.

Learning outcomes:

• Gaining practical tools and techniques to apply to help you become a better strategic leader
• Identifying what is holding you back from optimizing your strategic leadership potential
• Understanding the silo mentality and learning how to breakdown this destructive organizational barrier
• Learning how to detect threats and opportunities by scanning the environment for signals of change
  

Dr. Philip Walsh, Associate Professor

Now more than ever, it is imperative to understand the competitive positioning of organizations in response to industry change.  By evaluating internal resources and capabilities, participants of this half-day Xcelerator will be able to assess and recognize competitive strengths and weakness, and determine appropriate choices for creating a competitive advantage. Participants will examine proven concepts and real-life cases that demonstrate how strategic planning can prepare your business for success in virtually any business climate.

Learning outcomes:

• Identifying external driving forces that may impact your industry
• Identifying industry forces that may affect your business
• Identifying the core strengths and capabilities of your organization and creating a strategic road map that identifies goals, targets and objectives for the short, medium and long-term

Frank Miller, Adjunct Professor

With the latest technology and automation advancements changing the way we work, it is important to learn effective change management techniques. Participants will learn proven change models to help implement sustainable change strategies and address individual and organizational resistance to change.

Learning outcomes:

• Learning how to frame the context of change
  
• Addressing resistance to change
  
• Recognizing when to "wing it" and when to use proven change models
  
• Understanding how to implement sustainable change strategies

Dr. Michael Halinski (opens in new window) , Assistant Professor

It is commonly thought that increasing engagement is an organizational approach to motivate employees and reduce turnover. However, research shows that the number of engaged workers is concerning - only a third of employees are engaged and approximately half are not engaged at all. Even more strikingly, engagement may lead to numerous negative organizational and individual outcomes. Participants will learn how to increase engagement through successful engagement intervention.

Learning outcomes:

• Defining what engagement is and what it is not
  
• Identifying how to increase engagement (and common mistakes)
  
• Identifying successful (and unsuccessful) engagement interventions
  
• Exploring the dark(er) side of engagement
  
• Examining the latest research on employee engagement (yes, there is an app for that)

Frank Miller, Adjunct Professor

Prepare for the barrage of HR questions you will receive as a manager. Although your company likely has a Human Resources (HR) department, your employees will often direct questions/concerns around pay, career opportunities and employment legislation to you. Learn what to say and how to react, and gain an understanding of how your actions affect others.

Learning outcomes:

• Create an awareness of what HR does and doesn't do
• Build a fundamental knowledge of HR skills

Amrita Bhalla, Managing Director & Founder, AB Consulting HR & Lecturer TRSM

Conflict is inevitable in an organization, and a leader should manage conflict effectively rather than suppress or avoid them. However, managing conflict can be difficult as it requires self-awareness, excellent communication skills, and motivation to be able to resolve uncomfortable situations. In this session, participants will be taken through various scenarios to practice and apply the strategies to resolve these types of conflict in the workplace. 

Learning outcomes:

• Work through real-life scenarios that participants may face in their day-to-day work
• Practice applying various strategies to resolve conflict
• Complete a brief self-assessment based on the Thomas Killman conflict mode instrument 
• Learn to identify conflict modes and styles, looking at the strengths and liabilities of each

Dr. Ellen Choi, Assistant Professor, HR Management & Organizational Behaviour TRSM

Mindfulness practices allows leaders to develop the internal resources that enable them to be more effective and extend more compassion while guiding others. Throughout this session, Dr. Choi provides participants with an overview of what mindfulness is, how it is relevant to the modern workplace, and how it can be applied to enhance performance, manage stress and deepen relationships.

Learning outcomes:

• What mindfulness is and how (and why) mindfulness can be applied at work
• How to practice mindfulness and guide oneself through a practice
• How self-compassion can be used as a tool for sustaining excellence 
• How empathy supports team effectiveness and apply empathy in practice
• To apply mindful listening and a mindful approach to asking questions

Dr. Ellen Choi, Assistant Professor, HR Management & Organizational Behaviour TRSM

In terms of mindfulness, there is evolving research that finds high-quality relationships at work to be beneficial for well-being and motivation as it fulfills needs and provides social support. In this session, Dr. Ellen Choi provides an overview on how mindfulness supports interpersonal benefits while equipping individuals with skills to create more psychologically-safe workplace environments.

Learning outcomes:

• Understand the empirical links between mindfulness and interpersonal outcomes
• Recognize listening blocks in self and others
• Practice empathizing in difficult situations
• Explore the concept of nonviolent communication
• Connect with the sound of your own voice in group settings
• Practice a loving kindness meditation