Leadership
75% of the reasons people leave a job “come down to their manager” (Gallup 2021). So three quarters of your retention issues are directly related to your managers!
A leader’s primary purpose is to inspire their people to achieve their goals. Today’s leaders operate in a complex environment and the need to develop a servant leader mindset and skillset has never been more critical. With this mindset they recognise their purpose is to help team members to succeed first, and then they both succeed as a partnership. A skillset provides skills to be flexible to the team members needs and effective in providing a leadership style which inspires the person.
Your managers need a practical set of leadership skills able to be implemented immediately. Organisations needs to be able to measure the effectiveness of their initiative by measuring improvements in retention and engagement within 6 months.
Coaching
We define coaching as a deliberate process using focused conversations to create an environment that results in accelerated performance and development.
But most managers don’t understand how critical coaching is for the development, growth, and performance of their people.
Powerful and positive coaching takes place when you combine practical conversation skills and a contemporary coaching process. When managers are able to demonstrate both the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of coaching the right skills can help managers have more effective interactions with their people. These skills are both people and results oriented and promote clarity and a positive sense of regard.
Teamwork
Work teams fail 60% of the time.
Often, they don’t accomplish their goals due to a lack of shared purpose, unclear goals and roles, a lack of mutual accountability and ineffective leadership. Employee frustration with their manager’s leadership of team initiatives is a significant contributor to failing to build and sustain high-performance teams.
Being able to lead productive, effective teams is critical to leveraging the strengths and diversity of team members, addressing cross-functional challenges, and getting work done in any organisation.
Frontline Leadership
Your frontline leaders are responsible for up to two-thirds of your total employee population and therefore influencing up to two thirds of your retention and engagement results.
However, research indicates up to 60% of frontline leaders underperform in their first 24 months and some 50% received no training before or after their appointment, the most significant transition in their career.
There are clear correlations between increasing frontline leadership effectiveness and engagement, trust, organisational commitment and a reduction in intentions to quit.
Leadership conversations are a skill and with practical application can significantly contribute to increasing retention and engagement. Without these skills, conversations can become blaming and judgmental leading to reductions in retention and disengagement.
Performance Conversations
Performance conversations should be inspirational!
Even the most robust performance management process ultimately is reliant on a manager’s ability to carry out positive and powerful performance conversations. Recent research highlights full time employees born after 1980 reported, 62% felt ‘blindsided’ by a performance review, 74% frequently feel ‘in the dark’ about how their managers and peers think they’re performing at work and 47% fell that receiving a performance review makes them feel like they can’t do anything right (Wakefield Research 2015).
Managers need a powerful set of performance conversations skills to develop clear and compelling goals, carry out day to day coaching and to complete performance reviews focused on learning what happened and what can be achieved by continuous improvement in the future.
Trust
The level of trust employees have with their leader determines how well they work together, listen to one another and rely on each other to get things done.
In fact, one the primary factors affecting employee turnover is whether or not a trusting relationship was developed between the manager and the employee. Yet many people are unaware of the actions that build or erode trust.
We teach leaders how to build trust and, if it’s been broken, how to repair it. Our practical skills focus means it is easy to learn, easy to remember, and most importantly easy to use on the job. Leaders build a common language for people to talk about trust without fear. By using the Building Trust Model, individuals are able to look at their relationships and focus on the aspects of those relationships that need repair. Understanding what behaviours lead to high trust is the first step in developing higher trust with others.
Change Management
Most change initiatives fail and for similar reasons: 80% of companies use a top-down, minimal-involvement approach that ignores the concerns of the people who are affected.
Leading People Through Change® is unique: it’s a concerns based model for change and the backbone is a high-involvement, collaborative solution that invites all parties into the change process. This inclusive approach draws on the latest academic research on leading organisational change and our 30 years of experience in the field.
Research shows that a high-involvement approach that uses dialogue between change leaders and employees decreases implementation time by 33% and increases employee engagement by 34% to 58%.*
Conflict
You can have the smartest people around the table, but if minor differences in opinion throw conversations off track and hinder progress, you’re not getting access to their best thinking.
When a challenging topic or conflict arises, natural defences and survival instincts kick in, making open and honest dialogue difficult.
When this happens, people can be either overly cautious and don’t speak openly or they get defensive and argumentative. Most people don’t have the awareness or skills to work through it, so creativity, collaboration, and innovation suffer. Imagine if instead of wasting time with ineffective conversations, your teams were capable of having open, productive dialogue that resulted in collaboration and finding the best solutions.
Your teams should be able to put their most difficult, painful, divisive issues on the table and work through them in fair and productive ways. Conversational Capacity teaches people how to engage in constructive, learning-focused dialogue when challenging topics or conflicts arise so they can make informed decisions and find the best solutions, even under high pressure.
Motivation
Optimal motivation is foundational to everything leaders at all levels need right now.
Mastering Motivation shifts the paradigm of motivation, helping people to understand people are always motivated and that is the quality of their motivation which matters most. When daily motivation is optimal, this leads to highly engaged team members who experience higher engagement (employee work passion) over time. Learners explore the six practical Motivational Outlooks along with how to apply proven practices for themselves and for others, based on the science of motivation. Participants learn the three psychological needs for motivation -
- Choice – to have choices, the perception of options and a sense of control;
- Connection – feel a sense of belonging and genuine connection, align goals and actions to their values and purpose;
- Competence – feel effective at managing situations and experience a sense of growth and learning