Managing yourself Managing Your Team Managing Your Company
Achieving Goals
Conflict Resolution
Performance Measurement
Working Efficiently
Motivation and Rewards
Customer Service
Situational Leadership
Communication Skills
Process Improvement
Professional Development
Team Development
Supervisory Skills
I’m already using what I’m learning during this training. After each session we have a team debrief and come up with a plan of what we can do next and when. The training also shows us how to use procedures and tools we have written in big manuals but find hard to implement.” Ernesto Lepore, Matlin Autos, REPCO dealership (SA)
“…the practitioners who attended the seminar were impressed by the quality of the presentation and we hope we have the opportunity to call on you again in the future” David Howard, President, The Law Society of SA
“Both presenters were professional, knowledgeable and interesting to listen to, GREAT job!” Participant, RDNS, SA
“I have changed my communications style and make sure that people fully understand what I want” Participant ARC
Setting and Achieving Goals
Have you ever stopped and written down all the things that you want to achieve in life? Or you are just too busy to plan?
Clarifying what you want is the first step to getting it – both in business and your personal life.
This area of managing yourself works on raising your self-awareness of what is important to you and how to develop a plan to achieve it.
What will you learn?
- Where you are now – your personal and business situation
- What you want and need to achieve to have a happy and productive personal and business life
- How to set S.M.A.R.T. goals
- How to optimise your chances of successful achievement of your goals
Tools* to take away?
- The Wheel of Life
- The Goal Map
- Energy Optimisation Checklist
- Progress Map
Prioritising and Working Efficiently
Working less and achieving more is something that everyone aspires to do.
But even with the best of intentions and endless to-do lists we still get taken over by events and deviate from our chosen course of action.
This area of managing yourself is closely linked to time management. It establishes a good basis for being result driven and nurturing positive habits of working on a few key priorities rather than long lists of tasks.
What will you learn?
- What does it take to be a good “time manager”
- Working with plans, schedules and priorities
- The 6 step plan to smart time management
- Integrative approach to smart personal management
Tools* to take away?
Adaptive Management and Situational Leadership
Sometimes we come across managers who are dealing with people without sufficient consideration of their behaviour and its impact on those people. It’s the familiar: “That’s who I am and you just have to live with it”.
And whilst it’s true that we all have our preferred management, work and personal behavioural styles it is possible, and desirable, to adapt them as much as we can.
In this area of managing yourself we deal with your management styles, their impact on your staff and ways of improving them so that you can be a more competent and inspiring Manager.
What will you learn?
- Recognise your own management style
- Develop an understanding of the different ways of achieving a more balanced and effective approach to managing your staff
- Understanding the difference between management and leadership
- Situational Leadership – from full “hands-on approach” to complete delegation
Tools* to take away?
- “Discover your Management Style” questionnaire
- Adaptive Management Strategies
- The Situational Leadership Model
Self Awareness and Professional Development
Emotional intelligence (EI) has long stopped being a novelty and has even entered the recruitment and selection process.
And whilst we should be cautious how we interpret EI indices (the same applies to IQ indices) it is important to recognise that understanding and responding appropriately to other people’s emotions is the smart way to management.
This subject of managing yourself explores your unique characteristics in several key areas to increase your self-awareness and help you to develop a reliable professional development plan.
What will you learn?
- What are your general personality traits
- What is your learning and working style and how it fits with your personality
- What key strengths you can use to work smarter
- An integrated professional development plan
Tools* to take away?
Conflict Resolution
Do clashes, confrontation, contradiction and conflict seem to be the “order of the day” in your workplace?
Is conflict always a bad or negative force in your business?
It certainly doesn’t have to be – conflict can be a great source of new, directed dynamism!
This area of managing your team works on both the positive and negative effects of conflict – how to identify them and use them to improve performance.
What will you learn?
- How to identify potential key areas and causes of conflict
- How to encourage constructive conflict
- Why win-win is NOT a Utopian dream, but won’t just “happen” either
- What to do when someone has to lose
Tools* to take away?
Motivation and Rewards
Managers find it difficult to gain a good understanding of each person’s individual motivations.
It is hard enough to motivate a team as a whole. Even though one-to-one customised motivation is more achievable in a smaller company environment, it is still something every manager and team leader should aspire to achieve consistently.
This area of managing your team focuses the attention on the benefits of getting to really know your staff, measuring their performance and applying customised motivation.
What will you learn?
- Work and motivation – what makes people tick
- Performance and motivation – the carrot and/or the stick
- How to involve people in creating a motivating work environment
Tools* to take away?
- Motivation Profile
- Insight into Personal Motivation
- A comprehensive list of contemporary rewards and incentives
Effective Communication Skills
Have you ever wondered why your team seem to need to be told things two or three times? Why wastage levels seem high? Why conflict always seems to be the order of the day?
Most of what goes wrong in business today is not down to poor management, ignorance, belligerence or downright stupidity – it’s quite simply down to poor communications!
This area of managing your team focuses on removing the “What you think you heard is not what I think I said” barrier to effective communications and really understanding how to get all of your messages across
What will you learn?
- How to use different communications styles for different needs
- How to reduce barriers to effective communications
- The real role of body language in communications
- The effects of “jargon” and how to avoid them
Tools* to take away?
- Communication Style Preference Test
- Presentation skills checklist
- Assessment Tool for Communication Skills
- Top Ten Tips for Improving Communications
Team Development and Culture
All good Managers know that teams don’t just miraculously appear! So much of what needs to happen to develop the team needs careful planning.
So much also depends on the organisations “culture” – the way in which it does business
This area of managing your team helps you to recognise and get the best out of your Team and to help them develop to meet the new challenges of the future.
What will you learn?
- Recognising different types of “Teams” and “Groups”
- The real stages of Team development
- Organisational vs. Team culture – causes and effects!
- How to maximise team decision making
Tools* to take away?
Operational Planning and Performance Measurement
All mangers know that “if you can’t measure you can’t manage”. And it’s true. But before you can measure, you should plan what to measure.
Hence the importance of planning.
This area of managing your company works on raising your self-awareness of what is important to you and how to develop a plan to achieve it.
What will you learn?
- Making sense of all available types of plans a company can have
- The practical process of operational planning
- Measuring performance – what and how you should measure
- Improving performance – making the difficult decisions
Tools* to take away?
- The Planning Pyramid
- The SWOT
- A Sample Operational Plan
- A Comprehensive List of Performance Indicators
Strategic Customer Service
Customer Service has won its prominent place in management practice as the leading source of business competitive advantage. And given its tendency for inconsistency and obvious dependence on people performance, most of the improvement efforts traditionally focus on people’s skills and behaviour.
This area of managing your company takes a deeper, more strategic approach to customer service. We explore both the human and systematic support elements of customer service.
What will you learn?
- Bringing customers’ perspective into defining customer service levels
- The support elements of customer service
- What makes customer service exceptional (based on research and practical examples)
- How to improve customer service
Tools* to take away?
- The Customer Service Attributes
- The Customer Service Blueprint
- Adding Value to Customer Service Checklist
Process and Service Improvement
Work and process efficiency is linked to increased productivity and profitability. But they do not cover all the reasons for improving company processes and services. An understanding of how each person fits in and contributes to the company success; providing consistent service to clients; improving both employees’ and customers’ satisfaction are all valid and important reasons for managers to address this key issue.
This area of managing your company is not the traditional process re-engineering. Whilst it still works with process flow-charts we explore the human involvement and impact on the company processes, procedures and outputs.
What will you learn?
- How to analyse the current key production and service processes in your company
- How to detect major success and failure points
- Implementing failure prevention and process improvement devices
Tools* to take away?
Supervisory Skills
There is only one step that separates a technical expert from a technical supervisor but to the person and the organisation it often feels more like a long and hard journey to make and facilitate this transition.
Even though, in most cases, it is high-performing technical experts that are promoted to technical supervisors, they do not instantly or automatically make successful managers. For one very simple reason – technical competence and motivation are quite different to management competence and motivation.
If you or your team leaders and supervisors experience some of the following:
- Find it hard to let go and leave others to do the technical work
- Uncertain how to communicate clearly and present ideas to team members or other managers
- Rely heavily on facts and logic to manage people successfully and make decisions
- Unsure how to motivate other technical experts to achieve desired results
- Unsure when to delegate and how to do it successfully
- Need help to manage performance and monitor progress
then this program will be of benefit to you.
It focuses on the unique nature of the technical supervisor’s position and the challenges facing the expert moving to successfully fulfil the role.
What will you learn?
- Where you are now – why do you want to be a supervisor and are you prepared to take the risk
- 7 steps to making an effective transition
- Developing sound communication strategies
- Understanding unique motivational needs of technical experts and matching rewards and approaches to motivate them
- Selecting appropriate delegation strategies and managing individual and team performance
Tools* to take away?
- A comprehensive range of support tools
* Our learning and action facilitation tools, models and checklists, have been developed as a result of many years of formal and informal training and experience of working with businesses in diverse economic and social cultures
