What can you do to help your managers become better leaders?
You can learn how to use your new camera by reading the manual. Is that going to make you a great photographer? Probably not.
I can explain to you how to ride a bicycle over the phone in 10 minutes. Will that work? Probably not.
Becoming a good leader is in the same category. You can read all the books and that may be a great start. It makes you more knowledgeable but it does not make you a great leader. Research shows that four things need to happen in order for you to learn a complex subject like becoming a better leader.
- Time
- Relevance
- Coaching
- Practice with reflection
Time: It takes time to develop new ways of being, and that is essentially what this is about. I can tell you what to do in a one-day workshop. But it is only when you practice over time that you integrate new ideas and skills into your daily behaviour.
Relevance: There needs to be a direct connection between what you are experiencing as a challenge at the moment and what you are learning during the training. That is what makes this relevant to you.
Coaching: We don’t change anything at all just because we read about it or even if somebody tells us to. We only change when it makes sense to us. If I can see that it is meaningful for me to make a shift, I will do so. But as telling does not work, we need coaching. A coach can help you see things from new perspectives and that can often make it meaningful to try something else.
Practice with reflection: And finally, you need to try it out. But learning by doing only works when we combine it with thinking about what happened. So we need to move through the learning cycle Experience, Reflection, New understanding/information, New plan as many times as possible.
This is the key to our understanding and sense-making.
These four elements are foundational to the process that you need to go through in order to improve. With that process in place, we can then introduce you to a number of key concepts that you not only need to understand but must integrate into your day to day behaviour.
The key concepts
- Understanding how your own mindset shapes the way you show up in the world (and as a leader)
- Powerful or Powerless – It’s a choice you need to make and then you need to understand how you use that choice constructively
- Group dynamics – Humans are a flock animals and the way we interact is governed by some basic deep-rooted principles. Once you understand how that works, you will be in a much better position to be the natural leader of the flock.
- High-performance team management – How we bring these key concepts into a practical day to day way of operating.
- The Leadership ABC – Summarising your learning and defining your next challenge. Learning never stops.
This is how we do it. You apply for a place on one of our leadership-masterminds. Why do you need to apply you may be thinking? Because I need to make certain that you are actually ready to learn, if not, we will both be wasting our time.
How do I know that you are ready to learn?
- If you can identify a clear gap between where you would like to be or what you would like to achieve and your current capacity or skill level to achieve that.
- If you are also ready to declare your incompetence: I don’t actually know how to do that (close the gap).
- And finally, you must declare your willingness to do the work in order to close the gap.
As part of your application to join this course, you will be asked to identify: What is currently your biggest leadership challenge? Why is this important to you and what would be the benefits of you actually solving that challenge? That will tell me the answers to the 3 points above and I will know if you are ready to jump into this.
I may approve your application as it is, or I may ask you some clarifying questions. Or, if I cannot see a clear challenge, advise you to wait till you are ready. Once your application has been approved, we will schedule a Skype call – your first coaching session. In that session, we will work on developing a deeper undertaking of your challenge.
If you have chosen the solo option for this course, it will be a session just with me. If you are part of a triad-mastermind, this will be when you meet your ‘three comrades in adversity.
Following the first coaching call, you will be assigned the first module to work on. This will typically be in the form of a number of videos, text and possibly a few external links that you need to have a look at.
You will have 2 weeks to work through the materials and send in your written assignment. I will give you written feedback on that assignment typically within 48 hours. We will then have the next coaching session. The theme for that session will be how what you learned the previous two weeks can be applied to your situation and more specifically, to your personal leadership challenge.
We will continue this rhythm of:
- Digesting new materials & reflecting (in writing) on what we learned
- Discussing practical applications in our coaching sessions
- Implementing what we are learning in incremental steps as part of solving our challenge on the job.
… Until we reach the end of the course.
The modules we will be working through follow the key concepts we already mentioned. During the course, you will experience your progress in very tangible steps:
- Feeling the pleasure of managing your own mindset
- Feeling more balanced, in control and self-confident
- Experiencing more productive meetings and briefings
- Experiencing how your team becomes more aligned and harmonious to work with
- Achieving clear results and improvements as a team
- Experiencing high levels of engagement on your team
- And ultimately, feeling a deeper sense of joy and pride in what you do.