Trainings
Graymake partners with individuals, executives, managers, and teams to create inclusive, engaging experiences that help employees succeed and organizations thrive. As we explore the unexamined pains preventing your organization from achieving its best work, we uncover where things have gotten stuck, what needs might be unmet, and what’s already working.
We believe self-care and use of self are foundational to good work. Good health and keen awareness are paramount to working with others and to delivering best results; we therefore thread these practices throughout our offerings.
Whether in person or online, Graymake’s trainings are designed to deliver what organizations need to move forward, enabling them to optimize engagement, maximize productivity, and improve profitability by acknowledging the importance of well-being and self-worth in the workplace.
Conflict Resolution
Conflict Resolution Overview
A can’t-miss training that gives participants an overview of the nature, perspectives, and structure of conflict in various settings. After fully defining conflict, learning constructive approaches, and touching on power, we will explore interests and goals as well as the nature of our own conflict styles and tactics in relation to others.
Conflict Resolution Intensive
This deeper exploration of conflict reviews the concepts learned in the CR Overview and builds upon them. With a deeper understanding of positions, interests, and needs and how these relate to conflict styles and tactics, emotions in conflict will be introduced more concretely. The training offers specific tools for engaging in difficult conversations and for increasing cultural competency as related to conflict in the workplace; participants practice using these tools in various conflict scenarios.
Conflict for Managers
An important training for managers looking to sharpen their knowledge and skills to navigate conflict more effectively. Participants explore their current approaches to conflict as well as their own biases to better understand how this affects their management style and recognize how the diverse needs of their teams may create conflict if not successfully managed. We will practice specific tools to open, hold and engage in difficult onversations by learning how to move from positions to interests and needs as well as coach managers on theories of power in conflict.
Conflict Creeps
Also offered as a retreat, this popular training looks closely at all parts of your organization to help identify those places where conflict has woven itself. Audience-specific, it incorporates various activities and tools to map conflict patterns and explore how negotiation, assumption-making, communication, reconciliation, decision-making, and value alignment are unfolding in your workplace. These insights will reveal where you’re doing well and where you have work to be done—work that will ultimately improve the culture of your company.
Bias Training
Bias Uncovered Overview
This essential training provides participants the opportunity to learn what bias is and how to distinguish between its many types. Participants will also explore where bias comes from, biologically and in a socialized sense, as well as how to counteract our own biases.
Bias Uncovered Intensive
This deeper exploration of bias begins with a review of the concepts learned in the Bias Uncovered Overview and builds on them. With a deeper understanding of biases’ various types, as well as how they’re formed and counteracted, we will dive deeper into its nuances, including how prejudice is different from bias, and how bias can show up in unique ways in different contexts of the workplace.
Bias Throughout the Employee Lifecycle
This training focuses specifically on bias in the workplace, and answers important questions: throughout each stage of the employee lifecycle, how does bias affect the employee (or potential employee) experience? How is this affecting them, your culture, and your bottom line? No matter your role, what can you do to have a positive impact?
DEI/BEDI Trainings
Belonging, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Overview
This training provides an overview of belonging and DEI in the workplace and beyond. The terms are introduced and defined; then the training examines common language for other terms used in the field of diversity and inclusion and race equity work. Participants will grapple with ideas not previously studied, from new perspective on history to the ways we interact with others.
Belonging, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Intensive
After reviewing BEDI, this course digs deeper into exclusion and inequities that are specifically problematic in the workplace. We’ll discuss code-switching, the connotations of “professionalism,” and how groups can be affected differently since they do not exist within the designed structures of most workplaces. We will practice scenarios that ask, “What might you do?” Depending on the participant makeup, the training may include times for caucusing—separating groups so participants can speak more candidly—and re-forming for further discussion.
Self-Care Training
Self-Care as a Tool for Professional Practice
Our most popular training. If you or your employees aren’t your best, neither are your products, processes, and clients. Using self-assessments, tools, and techniques for self-care, along with storytelling and both personal and collective reflection, this training supports participants as they assess where they are out of alignment in their self-care aspirations and practices. To know oneself is to be most effective; to care for oneself is to be most grounded. Conscious self-care results in clarity. And clarity gets results.
“Right off the bat, Anne was easy to connect with, and throughout the training she was an attentive and warm facilitator. The presentation flowed naturally, with just enough time to practice the skills being taught. I left feeling it was a productive use of my time.
—Allie Gerstley, Teacher, Garrison Forest School, Baltimore, MD
Graymake’s offerings are informed by the values and philosophy of both restorative justice and organization development.
The fundamental hypothesis of restorative practices is, in fact, that people are happier, more cooperative and productive, and more likely to make positive changes in behavior when those in authority do things with them rather than to them or for them.
In our experience—backed by research in numerous fields—this shift to group decision-making and accountability creates results that are more restorative, transformative, and holistic; creating positive cultures and reducing the likelihood of future negative incidences of harm.
Restorative work says that achieving these objectives requires:
Those who have been harmed are involved in the process and complete it feeling satisfied
Those who have offended understand how their actions have affected others and take responsibility for them
Any outcomes help to repair the harm (or harms) done and address the reasons for the offense
Both those who caused harm and those who were harmed gain a sense of closure and are reintegrated into the community
At a time when most of us are experiencing little to no separation between work and home life, in the era of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #COVID19, massive uncertainty, loss and conflicts in politics, religion, and more in the workplace, we must equip employees at every level with more tools and help them hone them. By increasing communication, conflict, and awareness of one’s impact on self and on others, we can create workplaces where everyone can thrive.
Graymake offerings are available in-person, online, or as a hybrid. We work to meet your needs.