DAY 1
Session One - Introduction
The course is introduced by the trainer, and this process includes:
- Mutual introductions by participants, and personal learning objectives
- Course objectives
- Timetable and approach to be followed
- Domestic arrangements
Session Two - Leadership - A Fresh View
Creating a foundation for Purpose, Clarity and Will:
- What’s really happening in your area of responsibility?
- What’s your purpose?
- What do you do when you’re really up against it?
In focusing upon the core principals of Purpose, Clarity and Will, this module will address the foundations required in leadership practice to be effective, authentic and real. Participants work together to produce and refine a model of their understanding of what leadership is about, and required to be, within the current business climate of their organisation. They are given the opportunity to explore what currently works for them, what challenges they face and what they might want to do differently.
Session Three - The Personal Journey to Authentic Leadership
In this session individual leadership style is diagnosed and alternative approaches discussed. The importance of flexibility in approach is stressed. Increasingly, accomplished individuals find that the right mix of goals and skills changes over time as their visions and responsibilities grow, making it imperative to continually recalibrate their measures of success as a leader. Participants are invited to see how they have used past ‘success’ to create a platform for the next stage of their personal and professional life and explore some reoccurring patterns that emerge.
Session Four - Communication
Effectiveness in communication is one of the prime skills leaders need to consistently demonstrate. Participants experience the problems of effective communication. They will be offered feedback on their impact and through coaching will become more aware of how to achieve the clarity and impact they desire:
- Creating a powerful context
- Interference in communication
- Verbal communication skills
- Getting buy-in to your ideas
- Questioning skills – intelligent questions
- Creating impact – what is the impact you wish to create?
- Conscious and gracious feedback that grasps the nettle
Session Five - Persuading and Influencing
Being able to build and maintain good rapport is essential for effective influencing. Rapport is something that often happens naturally - we may know we have it - but not know exactly how we have achieved it. This session explores how we can use our natural abilities with more purpose and integrity, to create and maintain relationships when influencing. In particular the session allows participants to tune in to others’ physiology, voice, and language. Participants also develop skills for understanding others’ thought processes. They then practise presenting their case in line with their audience’s preferences. The varied exercises in this session enhance the participant’s ability to build and maintain rapport in various situations.
DAY 2
Session Six - Performance Discussion
Managers should be aware of the power of properly focused performance discussions and the impact they have on staff performance. These meetings, whether formal or informal are the crucial checks and balances needed for steering direction, objective setting, performance review, motivation, acknowledgement and planning.
Session Seven - Defining Outcomes for Success
Utilising key tools and techniques from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), a process for defining outcomes is introduced, which enables participants to plan for success. They will be able to apply outcome thinking as a means of breaking free from chronic problem-centred approaches to issues. Participants go on to learn a technique for clarifying the next steps needed to achieve their outcome, the practical action that turns vision into reality.
Session Eight - Gathering Information
In order to influence change we need to understand others. We can then devise the most appropriate communication and influencing strategy, targeted at those we want to persuade. Participants learn how we delete, distort and generalise our experience, both in our memories and our descriptions of “reality”. This session explores how we can use specific questioning techniques to recover and restore others’ experience. We also learn how to establish other information about them - their priorities, their motivation and their values.
Session Nine - Negotiating Successfully
Everyone in a leadership role negotiates in one way or another, whether it be setting objectives, agreeing project or assignment timescales, allocating resources or carrying out a performance review. By using simulations and cases from their own work environment, this session develops and sharpens skills which will equip participants to make the most out of every negotiation situation. Among the subject areas covered are:
- The importance of establishing trust
- Planning and structuring a negotiation
- Phases of negotiating
- Face to face negotiating behaviour
- Negotiating styles
Session Ten - Conflict and Pressure Management
Participants discover their preferred approach to working with interpersonal conflict. Discussions focus on the implications of these preferred approaches for interpersonal effectiveness, both within their organisation’s culture and in their personal lives. They engage with the approaches and practice of Emotional Intelligence as a powerful and desirable leadership stance. Participants begin to develop practical tools for practising the 5 core stages of Emotional Intelligence:
- Self-awareness - clearly noticing what’s happening within myself
- Emotion management – managing my state consciously, taking responsibility
- Self motivation – utilising my will in order to change any negative patterns or behaviours
- Relationship management – keeping my relationships ‘clean’
- Emotional coaching – as a result of my own practice, helping others to ‘move on’
Participants discover the ‘Power of Now’ – how to access stillness in a ‘hurricane’. This is a practical and experiential session providing an opportunity to powerfully reflect on and manage our internal states.
Session Eleven - Self-Limiting Beliefs
The inner-critical voice is that internal (and often extremely negative) voice that virtually all of us experience in different areas of our lives at different times, especially when we are under pressure. Participants are invited to notice firstly the impact of their own self-limiting beliefs, notice those of others and assess the impact of this at an operational level within their organisation.
DAY 3
Session Twelve - Coaching and Mentoring
The effective leader knows that they have to achieve results, but they can also see the close relationship between highly developed staff and a successful organisation. They see coaching as an ongoing process in which they encourage and develop their staff to higher and higher levels of performance by creating an environment of continuous support, guidance and mentoring. This session will approach the subject by addressing participants’ own needs in applying the learning from the course to their own circumstances. Models used will include GROW and Heron’s Six-Gateways coaching model. Each participant can benefit from mutual coaching by peers as well as by the facilitator. Participants will explore the appropriate use of mentoring.
Session Thirteen - Meaningful Meetings
Participants will be given a powerful model to use in support of creating short, sharp meetings that really deliver.
- What’s the true purpose of this meeting?
- How many meetings have you sat in, quietly watching your will to live tunnelling out of the room?
- How much time, money and will-power are currently wasted within your organisation through poorly-focused meetings that don’t deliver results?
- Where are you colluding in mediocrity through not calling others to account for the quality of their contribution?
Session Fourteen - Strategy and Thinking (Part 1)
Participants are asked to review the meaning behind mission and values statements and to consider both:
- The impact these have upon those they manage
- How to get other to buy in to their mission statements, visions, ideas and plans in a meaningful way for others. Putting the customer at the centre of the organisation is often very challenging and this session concludes with why this is so important for success
Session Fifteen - Strategy and Thinking (Part 2)
Participants identify an operational change they would like to make and explore key components of formulating a successful strategy to implement this. They then draw up a set of compelling criteria for managing their personal impact, communication, creating meaning for others, getting ‘buy-in’, challenging assumptions and negativity, implementing change and/or improvement in their area of work.
Session Sixteen - Action Plan, Review and Close
