Smart Leadership: Achieving Strategy through Leading the Function

By attending this highly interactive program, delegates will:

• Clearly define and communicate the organization’s business context
• Clarify, assess and address your own personal assumptions, biases, and values regarding team leadership
• Tailor your leadership approach to people’s individual styles
• Master the basic skills of principled, “win-win” negotiation and persuasion
• Learn to deliver effective feedback for both positive behavior and for confronting non-performance
• Practice the skills for assessing a person’s needs and, based on those needs, for delivering effective coaching or mentoring
• Understand the nature of a changing function or environment and learn how to tailor your leadership approach to address this environment
• Master the skills of setting a direction and establishing flexible plans that deliver the required results
• Practice the leadership skills of effective questioning, advocacy, and presentation
• Learn and apply the basic skills and applications of effective team building

Context, Direction, Vision and Outcomes

• Identify the requirements of leadership at various stages in the team’s development
• Communicate the business and organizational “context” for your team
• Communicate a “tangible” – that is, concrete and actionable – corporate vision
• Understand the need for outcome-based goals and objectives
• Develop outcomes – i.e. goals and objectives – that are specific, clear and flexible
• Learn how to establish outcomes in times of uncertainty
• Overview the 10 key competencies for team leadership

Managing Individual Differences

• Identify the behaviors of assertiveness and responsiveness
• Recognize the basic behaviors of the four styles: Analytical, Driver, Amiable and Expressive
• Receive feedback on your own managerial style
• Identify the needs and expectations of the four styles in a team setting
• Practice versatility skills for a variety of people in a variety of business situations
• Develop a strategy for dealing with key stakeholders and team members

Communication and Advocacy - Questioning, Listening and Presentation Skills

• Understand the primary communication barriers and needs in teams
• Practice the skills and applications of active and empathetic listening
• Experience the skills of open and closed questioning both as the questioner and as the one being questioned
• Develop “questioning strategies” for a team-related issues
• Review the elements of trust as they relate to the communication process
• Practice the skills advocacy, i.e. presenting and advocating a specific point of view
• Develop a communication strategy for your team leadership needs

Team Building and Empowerment

• Understand the difference between groups with common interests and true teams
• Distinguish between the needs of teams set up to accomplish specific tasks and those of teams set up to determine issues and approaches on their own
• Practice the skills of jointly developing goals and outcomes for a team
• Identify the key style related interpersonal aspects of team interaction
• Practice the skills of delegating and empowering in a team situation
• Establish effective feedback systems for an intact team
• Master the skills for recognition and celebration in a team setting  

Coaching and Managing Performance Issues

• Identify and clarify the problems that lie underneath reactions and emotions
• Understand the function, behaviors and growing importance of team empathy
• Develop a leadership strategy for dealing with reactions and conflict
• Understand the content and use of a continuum that differentiates between High
• Directive/Low Inquiry ‘mentoring’ and Low Directive/High Inquiry ‘coaching’
• Identify team member development needs that may fall on the mentoring/ coaching continuum
• Learn the key interaction skills of the coaching process

FOR WHOM:

Current leaders, Management professionals, Frontline managers, Team leaders, Supervisors, Line managers, All aspiring leaders in any field.

TRAINING METHODOLOGY

The training methodology combines lectures, discussions, group exercises and illustrations. Participants will gain both theoretical and practical knowledge of the topics. The emphasis is on the practical application of the topics and as a result participant will go back to the workplace with both the ability and the confidence to apply the techniques learned to their duties.