Baxter Warne’s Optimise Program is a series of productivity enhancement services based on the fundamental principle that people are an organisation’s most valuable asset.  For almost half a century, management consultants have been preaching that organisational transformation is the key productivity tool necessary to give your organisation an advantage.  In most cases, their advice as to the best ways to improving productivity is to adopt a  "top down" leadership style and to implement stronger management systems.  While much of this is true, we believe that significant productivity gains occurs only when a company's employees are engaged optimally with their work and positively encouraged to optimise their inner strengths, these being the key attributes for which they were originally hired!

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Our Optimise Program brings together the world’s best systems to improve an organisation's “bottom up" performance by understanding "who their people are" and by fine-tuning the inherent culture to bring about a ‘positive’ bias.

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We recognise that individuals will more readily realign their professional aspirations so as to realise opportunities within a healthy organisation, by aligning "who they are", "what they believe" and "what they would most like to do" within the properly constructed values framework of a healthy and progressive organisation. 

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Rooted in Martin Seligman’s PERMA Principles of Positive Psychology, our programs can provide your personnel with the tools and means to redefine key mind-sets which may be preventing them from working in the most productive and satisfying way within your organisation.  All participants in our Optimise Program gain from their personal journey of discovery. In many cases this is a preparation for their upward transition to a more elevated career. 

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The PERMA Principles of Positive Psychology is a social model which provides a pathway to a more satisfying life.  It is comprised of five basic elements:

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P             Positive Emotion.  Feeling good with positive emotions

E              Engagement.  Having fulfilling work – finding “flow”

R             Relationships.  Creating and maintaining positive social connection

M            Meaning.  Having a purpose and important meaning in life

A             Accomplishments.  Being proud of yourself and what you can achieve

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As clinical psychology has moved from solving individual mental health issues to improving the lives of healthy people, the form of Positive Psychology that PERMA represents is now widely practiced among individual coaches to help individuals to live better and more productive lives.  Importantly, the solid science behind these developments is now being successfully applied to the cause of productivity enhancement in commercial enterprises.    

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Become an Employer of Choice

Our Optimise Programs harness the power of positive psychology as expressed in Strengths Profiling and Corporate Mentoring programs and supported by  Resilience Training. Such programs are essential in assisting organisations become Employers of Choice. The challenge is to bring people of real talent together through Contextual Selection and help them find meaning and purpose within your organisation, by positively collaborating to deliver outstanding outcomes.

 

Baxter Warne has selected the best tools and processes from the world’s leading management schools and crafted them to become a highly effective program for Australian organisations.  The availability of very high quality on-line testing tools, combined with our highly skilled and passionate coaches in a combination of workshops and face-to-face coaching, means that Optimise will give your organisation significant productivity gains over your competitors.   

 

Our Optimise Program helps to build teams of individuals into a cohesive force working together with a common management language and more effective means of collaboration.  Our tools inform and allow a process of Contextual Selection which is changing the way organisations build and manage high performance teams.

                                                               

The Core Elements of the Optimise Program

1. Positive Psychology

 

Optimise has been developed to bring together the world’s best systems that have been adapted to apply Positive Psychology to the workplace.  Positive Psychology allows us to improve “bottom up’ performance by understanding who your people are and by tuning your organisation to ensure that you maintain a ‘positive’ bias in all aspects of Human Relations.

 

2. CAPP's Strengths Profiling

 

Just as people are your most valuable asset, an individual’s greatest assets are their ‘strengths’, much of the reason why you hired them.  However, not everyone is clear about what their strengths are and how to make the most of them.  A strength is much more than something they are good at or capable of doing well, it also gives them energy when they perform it.  Being motivated and enjoying their activities is what leads people to be engaged and productive individuals, in teams, and within your organisation.

 

We use the CAPP’s Strengths Profile technology to gauge:

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• Performance - How well an individual performs when using their strengths

• Energy – How energised they are by using their strengths

• Use – How often the individual uses their strengths

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The multi-dimensional nature of these tools allow an experienced coach extremely valuable insights into the individual, leading to more appropriate engagement and improved productivity.  (click here to see the corporate Benefits of Strengths and the Gildersleeve taxonomy)

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3. Corporate Mentoring

Developed by Richard Attrill of 3QETC, and used internationally by Westpac, these programs are state-of-the-art in-house applications of mentoring in leadership development and enhanced performance.     

 

4. Resilience Training

Developed by Dr. Samantha Graham in Sydney, State Of Mind (www.stateofmind.sydney) Resilience Training is a highly effective set of resilience tools and techniques that individuals can easily integrate into daily routines facilitating the growth they need to perform at their best, both individually and collectively. 

 

Participants in State of Mind courses report being more creative, more focused and more able to fully present in the face of highly demanding situations. The effect of this training is profound and long-lasting, and the development of cohesiveness, productivity and rapport among a team, is exceptional.

 

5. Contextual Selection

 

We apply our Optimise principles to the identification of selection of the best people to realise an organisation’s defined Vison and Mission.  We use advanced values-based techniques to evaluate the optimal characteristics of a team of individuals to meet the needs of enhanced productivity.    

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Collaborating with our trusted Associates, Chris Gildersleeve and Samantha Graham and incorporating the most advanced Leadership Coaching services, Baxter Warne offers today’s most innovative corporate leadership thinking, combined with our traditional and time-proven management consulting services. We believe that each of the above integral elements of the Baxter Warne Optimise services are ground breaking in their own right and essential for all senior executives in a modern organisation.  By applying such progressive thinking to the leadership of an entire organisation, it is now possible to create and maintain a champion team in any industry sector.

 

 

Our Professional Coaching Partners - this needs a separate page

Chris Gildersleeve

CEO of Gildersleeve Associates, Chris is one of Australia’s most experienced organisational behaviour experts. With a strong commercial background, Chris understands the productivity imperative of organisations and has devoted many years of study at a Masters level to understanding what differentiates one company from another in terms of individual behavioural dynamics.   With deep analytic skills, Gildersleeve Associates is expert at Team dynamics and is helping to shape the language of Optimise so that we can deliver long term sustainable productivity gains in progressive organisations.     

                                                                                                                  

Dr. Samantha Graham

Sam’s PhD is in Education Design from a UK management school, while her Masters is in Human Ecology at Edinburgh University.  In the former, she researched the shifts in mindset that leaders in any field go through, to reach a more integrated, more systemic, broader understanding of the context they are operating in and influencing.  In the latter, she focused on the role of power and group dynamics in shifting perspective towards more inclusive understandings of self in relation to others. 

 

She has been designing and facilitating group learning processes since 1993 (25 years) and has designed Postgraduate programs for a number of Universities (Edinburgh, Sydney & Western Sydney), as well as created programs for not for profits such as MND & Me (Motor Neurone Disease) and the Australian Conservation Foundation, through to leadership teams in corporations such as the BBC, the Reserve Bank of Australia, Nestle and Lend Lease. 

Sam combines her love of seeing people thrive, with her skills as an education designer, and nothing gives her greater pleasure than working with a group of people to help them do what they do, to the highest level possible.

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