People Management Skills Training Course - Two Day

Introductions

The starting point of the course is this:
We all have an ongoing challenge.
We need to know the answer to the following question:

How can we get the best performance from ourselves and others?

We can do that only if we develop our people management skills.
We are here today to focus on how to develop people management skills.

Let’s do the people management skills questionnaire

What are your relative strengths and weaknesses.
Why are you here?
What do you want from this course?

We need to know how to...

Set and agree goals

People need to know what the goal is.
Without goals, there can be no plan, no organised action and no motivation.
Goals provide the basis for a plan, organised action and a high degree of motivation.

The first step to achieving a goal, is to set it.

How to set goals

An eight-step formula.
Goal setting workshop.

The proper use of humour.

How to use humour properly.
How to avoid the common problems caused by the misuse of humour.
The Smiling Assassin. The Social Bully. “Can’t you take a joke?”.
What you SHOULD laugh at.
And what you should NOT laugh at.

Positive mental attitude V negative.

What is the difference between optimism, criticism and pessimism?
How much of each type do you want in your team?
What is the right amount of optimism? Criticism? Is there a role for pessimism?
What are the effects of each?
How can you instil the correct amount of optimism?
Is there a legitimate role for criticism?
Is there a legitimate role for pessimism?

Affirmative directions

You need to get into the habit of giving only affirmative direction.
Negative directions, such as “DON’T PANIC!” puts into mind the very idea that you want the other person to put out of mind.
Negative directions cause confusion because saying “X is wrong” leaves completely unstated, what is right?
Exercise and practice turning negative directions into positive directions.

Performance management

Not everyone behaves in the way you want. So, you sometimes need to give people constructive criticism on their performance. The key word is constructive.

How to give constructive criticism

We will give you all the notes you need on how to give constructive, (Not destructive criticism) so that your feedback will feel more like help and less like an attack on their character.
Five specific examples for you to work through and develop your skills by doing.

Ensure that the last thing they hear from you, as they leave, is what you DO want.

Praise and appreciation

People skills include remembering to properly praise, appreciate and thank others for their efforts. Many people feel unappreciated; because their mangers forget to say the “few kind words” that make all the difference to how people feel.

It is crucial to NOT neglect to give a few kind words of encouragement, thanks, appreciation and praise.

Day One Summary

Personal action plans.

What have you learned and how will you benefit from it?

Close.

Question: How usefully do people spend their time at work?

We make the distinction between doing Busy work and doing Productive work.
In your place of work, are there any “busy but non-productive” people?

We identify the problem of “Busy but non-productive activity”, and we name the causes and write counter measures.

The three causes for being busy but non-productive are: S.O.S.

S.O.S. = Self. Others. Systems.

1. Self: Our own bad habits
2. Other people who take us off track
3. Inefficient systems.

We figure out what we should do about each of them.

Do high value work first - minimise the 'trivial many'

The importance of prioritising.

Many people don’t prioritise their work properly. So, they tend to be reactive, rather than strategic. We will show you exactly HOW to prioritise people's work so they will benefit from doing the right things in the right order.

Personal development questionnaire.

We will do a personal development questionnaire where we will each discover two things that we need to work on, and two personal strengths to build-upon.

Delegate the right task to the right person.

We all need to gain the willing cooperation of other people, through the art of thoughtful delegation. We will show you how to delegate properly. (And we will discover the excuses people use to avoid delegating, such as, “Its quicker if I did everything myself”).

How to handle interruptions and distractions.

One of the most important people skills is to be able to get the maximum value from any conversation, in the minimum time, without causing offense to the listener.
We will show you ways to get the best from every conversation.

How to manage emails more effectively

Top tips on how to manage both incoming and outgoing messages - We will discuss how you can get the best from emails.

If you push them too hard, they will push back.

How mental attitudes affect external results.

We will show you how mental attitudes tend to reflect themselves in external results.

If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost. If you think you’re outclassed, you are.

We will show how a strong mind-set acts as the starting point of all achievement.

Then we will go on to show you how to build the right mind-set by means of conversation control.

Conversation control

Whatever people talk about influences how they feel. You feel whatever you think about.

So, it is important to become fully conscious of the content of people’s conversation and to ensure that their conversation has good effects on the mind and mood.

Putting the same point in a different way. We need to notice the content of the conversation and to steer it away from destructive content.

We will show you how to do that.

The people management success cycle.

All successful people management is based on reiterating the same basic steps over and over. The steps are: Purpose, plan, action, feedback, change.

The direct opposite of the success cycle is the failure formula: Unclear purpose, Poor planning, Procrastination, (slow to respond), Insensitivity or Blindness to feedback, and Stubbornness; the refusal to change.

We will show you how to keep people succeeding by keeping them OFF the failure formula and ON the success cycle.

Ask the “8 success cycle questions” and the answers they give will keep them on the success formula cycle.

We will show you how to use the 8-success cycle questions.

Final summary and action planning.

How will you benefit from the training you today?