Exactly how I design the training programmes I do within an organisation depends so much on your particular circumstances and challenges that I cannot even begin to outline this here. Seminars range from two-day intensive clinics to full-range development programmes for all hierarchical tiers.
As a rule of thumb, though, it is these or similar questions that participants hope to get answers to.
The questions are not necessarily the same that the leadership development department would ask, but they all result from very real needs and concerns:
- How do I lead individuals?
- How do I lead groups of people?
- How do I master challenging conversations?
- How do I give feedback effectively?
- How do I motivate especially when the environment is very difficult, again?
- How do I receive honest feedback?
- How do I relay nonsense from above to my people below without starting to weep, or worse, laugh?
- How do I navigate the political terrain?
- How do I communicate the interests I represent?
- How can I be more persuasive in standing up for what matters to me?
- How do I resolve conflict when I am an involved party?
- How do I manage a conflict that I am drawn into trying to serve different interests, loyalties and hierarchies?
- How do I lead my boss?
- How do I survive and even shape change, especially if it is the third transformational tsunami in as many years?
I do not, by the way, purport to have the final answers to all of these questions. For sure, I have ideas, concepts, and anthropological as well as psychological experience.
And I can weave it all into a red thread in the tapestry of leadership. But sometimes it is even more important that you know this stuff about each other.
To know you are not alone, that you are not mad, that you can trust your perceptions, if not all the conclusions that you jump to.
To know that others, even though they work in different places, are faced with the same problems and concerns. To know that even something like a community of experience is possible.
