Aguiar Professional Training (APT) was founded in 2011 with a simple, yet powerful mission: To help individuals realize a happier, more productive, and more fulfilled life experience — in the workplace as well as in their personal lives. A simple statement, yet broad in scope.

The successful company focuses just as intently on culture as it does on skills, meaning that employees all share the same positive, self-starting, and supportive attitude. By ensuring that each employee is not just talented, but a team player, companies are better able to maintain a cooperative and amenable work environment that translates into a better personal life, and a better customer service experience for clients. This is the mission of APT. Using research-based methods with a track record of success, APT is committed to staying on the front lines of innovation, helping companies to accomplish more with the resources they already have in place.

Consider this: What skills are needed by managers to create a culture that emphasizes relationships and builds trust among employees? How can organizations maintain an atmosphere that energizes their employees, and motivates them to work cooperatively and perform quality work without hesitating to step up for tasks that they believe they can perform? How do individuals learn what behaviors energize them, and which are drainers, so that they can use this North Star compass to point them in the right direction when making career and life choices, and to maximize the time spent in the areas where they will automatically do their best work?

Conflicts of Interest — Why you need to consider outsourcing
Based on our experience, there can often be significant problems in the organizational structure of any given company that are the result of poor management skills (especially soft skills) attributed to middle or upper-level management. Can a direct employee realistically deal with those types of issues, knowing that his or her job may be at stake? We’ve all heard the phrase “kill the messenger.” Although you want to make a serious attempt to deal with those kinds of problems (for example, a toxic work environment that has been created by a certain manager), you may not be able to penetrate the veil and discover what needs to be done to correct the situation unless you have an independent, or neutral, outside analyst who can: identify the problem, document it without fear of retribution, then implement the solution, perhaps by mentoring or coaching that manager in developing better soft skills. The direct employee is always going to have a conflict of interest, because he or she is going to be concerned about keeping a job, or dealing with internal relationships between managers, or having to risk future confrontations with that manager. Furthermore, involved employees, especially managers, may be reluctant to open up to another employee, for fear of retaliation, blackmail, confidentiality reasons, or simply because their statures are so radically different in the organization. There can be serious privacy issues present in some circumstances. The litigation exposure in some cases can be significant, especially if it can be shown that the company did not resolve the issue, for whatever reason, or used a “band-aid” approach, resulting in a formal complaint being made or litigation being pursued. To resolve these kinds of problems, you need to bring in a professional specialist.