“I’m finding it such a challenge to motivate and engage younger workers.”
“All the rules of business and management have changed since I entered the workforce. I wish I had some new tools and techniques to help me make sense of all this complexity.”
The global business environment has undergone massive change over the past decade. So too have the challenges facing individual organizations and teams. Little wonder that 20th-century management and leadership skills seem a bit dated, a little less effective than they used to be, when dealing with 21st-century concerns.These capability and capacity building programs in ½-day, full-day, and two-day formats, help facilitate engagement and strategic realignment among your workforce.Each can be customized for your unique circumstances, especially when deployed in the context of a transition or transformation project.
Appreciative Management Practices
“Deep within all of us beats a primal desire to contribute something of value to this world and to stand out as a positive person in the eyes of others.” Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, author of Shine: Using Brain Science to get the Best from Your People.
Every manager, regardless their organization’s size, type, or sector, must do some form of goal setting and performance assessment, acknowledgement and feedback, task coordination and delegation, individual and group motivation, personal and professional development, and sometimes correction and discipline.
When seeking scalable efficiencies – the 20th-century business operating model – these tasks orient themselves towards attaining stability, predictability, and control. Enterprises that embrace the 21st-century business model of scalable capability – the bigger you grow the more you know – employ an Appreciative Management Practices approach to these tasks. They achieve greater commitment, higher engagement, and more powerful motivation among their employees. What’s more is that they never have to have a “difficult conversation” ever again.
Coaching for Reengagement
Today’s managers and leaders no longer direct. They empower, encourage, and open paths. They no longer have all the answers. They come up with the inspiring questions. They no longer rely on hierarchical, carrot-and-stick authority to ensure that work gets done. They tap into their team’s signature strengths and core values enabling team members to always bring their best. They check in; they don’t check up.
Contemporary managers and executives have learned that a “coach approach” is among the best ways to build confidence, increase autonomy, enhance decision-making, reengage motivation, and simply help someone get “unstuck.”
Learning coaching skills, techniques, and the coaching mindset lays essential groundwork for non-coaches in every profession. Coaching for Reengagement enables you to open new lines of communication and be more successful with subordinates, superiors, customers, competitors—almost everyone you interact with, every day!
The Human Side of Contemporary Leadership
The 20th century business environment was complicated— really complicated. There was so much going on among customers and supply chains and plants and distribution centres and you-name-it that it was a challenge to keep track of it all. But that’s the point: We could keep track of it all.
Then came the millennium, fuelled by technologies that made our complicated but mostly predictable business world go haywire. Now, “stuff happens.” Unpredictably. Out of our control. If you try to fix something over here, then something goes wrong over there. It’s no exaggeration to say, quite literally: This. Changes. Everything.
By that I mean policies, procedures, and systems for deciding what should be done, how individual and group performance are tracked, how feedback and acknowledgement work in the organization, how tasks are delegated and coordinated, how to engage and motivate workers and managers alike, how personal development occurs, and how correction and discipline can be transformed from “difficult conversations” into empowering learning.
These ideas and practical approaches to these challenges are “The Human Side of Contemporary Leadership”—how people react to, and interact with, the values, structures, systems, policies, incentives, and demands that create and enact their workplace environment, both in groups and individually. Although organizational behaviour is often framed in terms of how individuals and groups influence productivity and efficiency in accomplishing the organization’s mission, the focus of this course is somewhat different—how workplace environments and interactions contribute to an organization effectively realizing its intentions amidst the complexity of the contemporary world, and thus, how Contemporary Leaders can themselves become most effective.
