Transforming Junior and Middle Managers in just 6 x 4 hour sessions. 

Session 1: Me and My Team
Focus: self-awareness as a manager

• Personality Types (Colours Personality Profile completed in preparation)

• Management styles

• Self-awareness

• Me and my teams – playing multiple roles in multiple teams

• What sort of manager do I want to be?

Session 2: Communication
Focus: Clarity and candour and effective meetings

• Who we communicate with

  • Our team

  • Our peers

  • Our managers

  • Stakeholders

• The “Radical Candor” framework – caring personally, challenge directly

• The importance of soliciting feedback

• Upwards communication

• How to give positive feedback that really sticks

• Meetings and your team – understanding the purpose

  • Stand-ups

  • One-to-ones

  • Other types

Session 3: Empowerment
Focus: empowering through delegation (not abdication) and management through a coaching style

• Effective Delegation

  • The delegation ladder

  • “Delegation for development”

  • “Process Partnering”            

• Mistake > Learn > Development: The importance of allowing mistakes (and when to draw the line)

• Managing with a coaching style

  • Coaching Models – GROW / CIGAR

  • Asking good questions

  • Listening - WAIT

  • Coaching questions

  • Clearing roadblocks 

Session 4: Developing Great Performance
Focus: developing ambition and driving growth in your team

• Understanding employees’ basic needs

  • Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

  • Gallup – Q12

• Skills vs Will matrix

• Comfort Zone vs Growth Zone vs Stress Zone

  • “Hooke’s Law” for growth and stress

• Sustainable growth

  • Keeping growth going

  • What does “capable” mean – Rockstars vs Superstars (Kim Scott)

  • Peter Principle and atrophy
     

Session 5: Generating Ideas and Making Decisions
Focus: identifying issues, creating solutions, making decisions

• What decisions do we make as managers?

• What stops us making good decisions?

• Simple vs Complex decisions – reversibility

• Type 1 vs Type 2 decisions – the role of heuristics (good and bad)

• Defining the problem

• The two BIG biases

• Techniques and tools

  • Arguing each other’s points

  • Pre-mortem

  • McNamara fallacy 

  • Estimating

  • Group size

  • Townsend Decision making principles

Session 6: The Resilient Manager
Focus: meeting the challenges of management and reflecting on the big picture

• What have we learned over the last 5 sessions?

  • Successes and challenges

• Facing the hard times

  • Making difficult decisions

  • Giving hard feedback

  • Overload

• Re-defining “Fairness” – for your employee, your team, the business and yourself

• Looking forward: peer-to-peer coaching conversations focused on “your next steps as a manager”

• Goals and commitments