Promoting your Expertise as an Internal Consultant

An intensive two-day course designed to stretch and equip technical, professional specialists with the skills and capability to raise their profiles and deliver quality proposals and solutions to business clients: effectively becoming an internal consultant for their company.

The course is highly interactive, will raise self-awareness, and improve ability to influence, persuade and negotiate whilst building the confidence to operate in a complex and changing world.

What will I learn?

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Analyse the service or market place in which you operate and clearly demonstrate the strategic alignment of your assignments and projects to the corporate aims of your organisation.
• Achieve business focused outcomes through strategic influencing, persuasion and negotiation.
• Drive and manage change initiatives through a clear understanding of the consultancy cycle and change management processes
• Develop an engaging and flexible consultative style which can be applied to a range of situations including complex matrixes and international contexts.
• Improve the quality of your own interpersonal skills through greater self-awareness and personal impact.
• Apply a toolkit of communication tools, develop action plans and proposals for business improvement and development.
• Create your own professional development plan to sharpen your skills and capabilities.

What will it cover?

Strategic Management Perspectives

• Introduce a range of strategic analytical tools
• Strategic thinking skills for conducting an analysis of the service or marketplace.
• Produce a framework for developing and presenting business plans and the business case
• Demonstrate strategic alignment and fit of own assignments to corporate aims of the organisation.
• Organisational culture and its impact on change initiatives

Change Management Strategies

• Organisational imperative of change and the link to project management and assignment delivery
• Strategic change drivers and the essential elements of change
• Change models and the underpinning processes
• Skills needed to drive and manage change initiatives
• The role of change agent

People Engagement Strategies

• Understand the role of politics in organisational culture
• Political awareness and sensitivity
• Strategic influencing model applied to specific organisational context
• Raising the standard of negotiation, persuasion and influencing
• Improve ability to reach win-win outcomes through influence and persuasion rather than line management authority

Personal Style Analysis

• Diagnosing interpersonal style and impact
• Consider the appropriateness of own personal style on the outcome of projects and assignments
• Develop a range of communication tools which give flexibility to interpersonal style
• Adapting your style to different situations
• Gaining commitment and buy in to change and dealing with resistance
• Encouraging change, creativity and innovation

Consultancy Skills

• Developing a consultancy approach
• Skills of the effective internal consultant, listening, questioning, body language
• Modelling and practising the consultancy cycle
• Adapting your style to different situations and contexts
• Practical experience and feedback on performance

Experienced professionals working in specialised/technical functions such as projects, IT, finance, or marketing; in charge of processes but with little line management responsibilities.

You have the ability and opportunity to make a significant contribution to the strategic aims and direction of an organisation and you would like to know how to make your expertise count more.

You are likely to be engaged or aspire to be engaged in assignments, projects and interventions which add significant value to the organisation. Some of these challenges are likely to include working within a large team with perhaps international and remote working issues which conspire to make the delivery of projects and assignments ever more complex.