Leadership and Management Training Course - 2 Days

The purpose of leadership and management is to inspire the best performance from others, in order to achieve your goals and objectives.

To get the best from others, you must first get the best from yourself.

Leadership and management training is primarily about developing your personal skills, so that you can inspire others to give you their best.

The most important thing is to have a clear vision for the future, and a clear goal focus.

If we agree that success means, “the achievement of your goals”, then goal focus is the most important quality of the successful leader manager.

Most people know the SMART target model, but most don’t use it because it is too abstract.

We need to make SMART more usable. Eight-part SMART makes goal-setting a learnable set of eight questions.

Exercise: Develop your skills by doing a real life, practical, goal setting example.

Leaders do not only issue orders, they also develop the habit of gathering specific information by asking the right questions. We can use the SMART model as a formula for asking the right questions.

Every day, you leave impressions in the minds of others. What impression do you want to leave in their mind? How do you want others in your organisation to perceive you? What qualities do you want to be known for? Do you want to be motivating and inspiring and have a great leadership style?

Exercise: Develop your skills by doing a practical example of “Impression management”.

Humour is a double-edged sword. Humour can work both for you and against you.

How can humour work to add value to yourself and the rest of the team?
Have you seen the misuse of humour cause problems (particularly in a team leadership situation)?
What is the correct use of humour?
What is the misuse of humour?

Exercise: Develop your leadership skills by doing practical examples.

Leader-managers must NOT give any ambiguous or vague instructions. They should have a clear, rational leadership style.

Leader-managers must know how to communicate their message with clarity and accuracy. There must be no misunderstanding of the meaning of the message.

How to create definitions of all your key terms, using the C.G.4.D method.

Exercise: Develop your communication skills by doing practical examples.

• Affirmative language is talking about what you CAN and WILL do
• Negative language is talking about what you CANNOT or WON'T do
• Non-leaders spend too much time talking about what they won’t do
• Leaders spend most their time talking about what they will do
• Exercise: Develop your skills in transforming the conversation from the negative to the affirmative

Learn the Language of a Leader.

We influence each other by the way we speak. Unfortunately, we sometimes accidentally give negative suggestions in the form of negative commands. For example: DON’T PANIC! is a suggestion to PANIC.

Stop giving negative suggestions and be much more conscious of the way you word your message, suggesting only positive images to the mind. Talk about what you want, not what you don’t want.

Ensure that the last thing you say to them is WHAT YOU DO WANT.
Exercise: Develop your leadership communication skills by practical examples.

When in conflict situations, many people get too emotional.
How can you limit the damage that negative emotions can have on the conversation.
Don’t emotionalise the conflict; instead rationalise it.
We will show you how.

The self-image is the way a person views him/herself.
It is the basis of their character.

Never attack a person’s self-image.
Never attack a person’s character (identity).

Comment only on their behaviour, not their identity.

We will show you the difference between identity statements and behavioural statements.

Split language into two sets, objective fact-based language and subjective opinionated language.

When in conflict, use only objective fact-based language.
Do not use subjective opinionated language.

We will discuss examples and you will learn how to get rid of the dangerous subjective language.

We will take real life situations and script them.

Then we will run them as (optional) role plays.

You can practice if you want to, or if you don’t like role plays, you can learn by observing others.

It is important you put into practice what you learn.

There are big differences between “a reason” and “an excuse” for not doing something.

We will discuss what those differences are.
We give concessions only to reason-givers.
We don’t give concessions to excuse-givers.

We will discuss what happens if you give unearned concessions to excuse givers.

Many people spend too much time arguing over what has already happened.

We will discuss why this may be a waste of time.

We will show you how to get the conversation back to the future.

Often life is about finding a compromise solution that everyone can live with. BUT at other times, compromise is the worst thing you could do.

If you compromise on safety or if you compromise your integrity, then you could lose everything. We will discuss, when is it right to compromise and when you should not.

It is not only what you say that counts, but also HOW you say it.

We will discuss the proper use of voice volume, tone and pace.

We will discuss body language, eye contact, facial expression, hand gestures, and posture.

We will put words, voice tones and body language together, to form a communication style that is polite, assertive, professional and effective.

• Never passive
• Never aggressive

We will practice these skills.

We have spent a lot of time talking about how to give constructive criticism. Now we will talk about the social motivators of praise, appreciation and thanks.

We will look at why many managers forget or neglect to give proper praise and appreciation and how that omission costs them.

We will examine how and when to give praise appreciation and thanks.

We discuss the topics covered on Day 1, examine which were the most important for you, together with where and how you can apply them in your workplace.

Time management is the art of doing the most valuable things, in the most efficient order. Time managers do not do the easiest, or most pleasant things first, they do the most valuable tasks first.

What is the most valuable use of your time, right now?

Use the two principles of "deadline pressure" and "value" as key indicators.

1. Q1 Crisis: High value, late work
2. Q2 Productive: High value: preparation, prevention and planning
3. Q3 Busy: Low value busy-work
4. Q4 Fruitless: Waste of time activities, gossip

The danger is you become so busy, that you are no longer productive. Our enemy is the busy, but non-productive days.

1. Self: Your own bad habits steal your time
2. Others: Other people who steal your time
3. Systems: Inefficient work systems

Time Management Exercise

What can you do to minimise the damage done by SOS?

Questions designed to tease-out exactly how you could improve your time management skills.

Definition: Delegation is the act of entrusting a task to another.
Delegate the right task, to the right person, in the right way.
Exercise: What are the right reasons to delegate? What are the wrong reasons to delegate?

Effective Delegation

How to delegate tasks. Use the same formula we used to set goals.
Review of goal-setting notes. 8 Part SMART.

Four reasons why people who should delegate, sometimes don’t.

Definition: The art of putting tasks in the right order.
Prioritise your tasks by means of a decision matrix.

Five Types of decision matrix

1. Priority decision matrix 1: Prioritise by value
2. Priority decision matrix 2: Prioritise by logical sequence
3. Yes or No decision: Should I or Should I not?
4. If yes, then which one, what kind?
5. One problem – three causes – six solutions mapping

What are the advantages of using a structured approach to decision making?

You are continually peppered by interruptions, which you need to effectively manage.

Strive to make the maximum progress, in the minimum time, without causing offence to anyone.

The 80/20 principle (the Pareto Principle) states that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the content. 80% of the value of the interruption will be in 20% or less of what they say. Your task is to quickly discover the 20% of their message which contains 100% of the value.

You need to work out a formula of words that works for you.

How to use the Pareto 80-20 rule in conversations

How are you going to get the maximum benefit from any interruption, in the minimum amount of time, without causing offence?

Emails can be a distraction. How to minimise the problem - we will discuss how you can get the best from emails.

People are affected strongly by how they feel.
In order to get the best from people you must know how to manage emotions.
We will show you how to master your own emotions first, and then how to manage other people’s emotions.
You cannot positively affect others until you can positively affect yourself.
So, we start with how you can affect your own mental and emotional states.
Some people call this skill mindfulness.

Manage how you feel, then you can improve your productivity

The self-fulfilling prophecy shows how your thoughts, beliefs, actions and results relate to each other.
Whatever you believe will affect your results, because you are empowered or dis-empowered by your belief systems.
We will discuss the ways in which what you believe affects your personal reality.
And we will show you how you can change your personal reality.

Negative attitudes tend to create negative results.
Positive attitudes tend to create positive results.
We will show you exactly how to put limits on fear and anger, (negative emotions)
We will show you how to harness the power positive thinking and language.

Everything you say will either:

1. Make people feel better, or
2. Leave them unchanged, or
3. Make them feel worse

You don’t want to leave them unchanged. You don’t want to leave them feeling worse.
Everything you say should be geared to making people feel better.
We show you how.

There are many people who don’t know that they are having a negative effect on others.
We will show you how to transform their negative conversations, into something far more positive.
We call this “conversation control”.
It is a skill you must master.

Your feelings are also affected by your physical stress levels.
We will discuss how stress can be a positive and negative factor in your life.
We will minimise and manage the negative effects of stress.

Success is not an event. It is a process.
It contains five major steps.
Purpose, plan, action, feedback, CHANGE.

We will discuss how people react to change.

Everyone has to deal with disappointments and setbacks. Your job is to help them to recover quickly and to return tomorrow feeling stronger and to be ready with a new plan. We will show you how to build emotional resilience into the fabric of the team.

Your life revolves around your use of language.
If you talk to people in ways that are inspiring, supportive, optimistic and motivational, then you are much more likely to succeed.
We will discuss which kinds of words help to inspire.

We will discuss how you can control the conversation that you hear at work.
How to improve the atmosphere and team culture.

How you can put these ideas to work.