Leadership and Team Training - Special Focus Areas

The special focus areas below take a deeper dive into areas of specific skill development. They can stand on their own as training programs, or be woven in with other material, based on clients' areas of interest and need. If offered periodically following core programs, they will facilitate the continuation and deepening of skill building and will expand the areas of benefit gained from the earlier training.

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• Building and Repairing Trust
• Capacity Management
• Conflict Management
  
• Conversations for Committed Action
• Conversations for Learning
• Decision-making and Decisiveness
• Delegation

• Dynamic Steering
• Influence and Engagement
• Manager as Committed Customer/Sponsor
• Managing Red Flags
• Stability and Change - a Polarity to Manage
  
• Stakeholder Engagement
  
• Strategic Thinking

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Building and Repairing Trust

• Understand the four basic assessments of trust 
• Practice using them to diagnose breakdowns in trust and identify what's needed to repair trust
• Learn to use the making and managing of shared promises as a practice ground in which  expectations can be managed, trustworthiness can be demonstrated, and trust can be built or repaired

Capacity Management

• Discuss the relevance of capacity management to today's workplace
• Identify and assess the individual skill sets and work habits that impact an organization's ability to manage within its capacity
• Practice estimating requirements and evaluating capacity before making agreements
• Anticipate and prepare for challenges (i.e., cultural norms and mindsets, and competing commitments) 
• Strategize on how to build capacity or manage within one's capacity

Conflict Management

• Map participants' use of five conflict styles against a range of workplace scenarios
• Identify and practice underused styles that could offer future benefits
• Develop an action plan for how to apply an underused style to a current or anticipated conflict

Conversations for Committed Action 

• Distinguish requests from demands, and recognize commitment as a game changer
• Identify and apply the essential elements of an effective request, and practice introducing them when they are missing
• Anticipate challenges, prepare for contingencies and evaluate readiness in partnership with others
• Practice inviting or exercising the full range of potential responses to a request, to avoid falling into an automatic and unreliable "Yes"
• Learn to listen for and explore mutuality of commitment to develop trustworthy agreements that position people for success
• Identify signs of disengagement and develop ways of checking in and managing towards a positive mood and fully engaged commitment
  

Conversations for Learning

• Develop the ability to comfortably and effectively harvest the post-action learning once a promise has been managed to completion
• Learn to face and learn from problems and unsatisfactory outcomes together, without damaging relationships
• Apply what's learned in a way that strengthens a team's capacity for future action
  

Decision-making and Decisiveness

• Evaluate the pro's and con's of different decision-making approaches in relation to leadership, team-building and organizational objectives
• Practice applying a range of different approaches to develop greater readiness for situational variability
• Utilize a 7-step decisiveness movement simulation to gain insight into one's own habits and patterns of decisive thought and action
• Develop individualized practices to strengthen one's capacity for decisive action 

Delegation

• Learn to use delegation in a way that develops others, effectively manages progress and frees up time for higher level or higher priority work
• Hone the ability to determine what work can (and should) be performed by others, as well as what work could (with support) serve as a good  developmental assignment
• Identify where promise-based management practices could improve the amount or quality of delegation that occurs
• Learn to turn delegation into an area of shared value creation and skill development

Dynamic Steering

• Develop the ability to utilize real-time information and respond to unexpected changes while keeping earlier strategic planning alive
• Learn ways to facilitate well-coordinated and dynamic adjustment of action and plans in alignment with organizational objectives
• Consider how and when to integrate these approaches into existing workplace practices

Influence and Engagement

• When others speak, learn to listen for and explore areas of shared care and common ground
• When you speak, practice exercising the power of your authentic voice and presence-full engagement
• While speaking, practice listening for others' readiness to engage
• Practice using these capacities to strengthen connection and influence others' willingness to engage in creation of a shared future

Manager as Committed Customer/Sponsor

• Understand what it is to be a committed customer (or sponsor) for the success of one's employees, and how this role can shift otherwise difficult conversations
• Prepare for and practice status sharing, action coordination and the management of unexpected challenges or change as a committed customer / sponsor
• Learn to evaluate outcomes, assess performance and declare satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) as a committed customer / sponsor
  

Managing Red Flags

• Develop skill and comfort in quickly declaring and addressing threats to the successful completion of promises
• Effectively develop and coordinate resolution plans for promises that can be brought back on track
• Practice renegotiating and revoking promises (for times when problems cannot be resolved) in a way that manages stakeholder satisfaction
• Identify action management practices that could improve shared management of progress
  

Stability and Change - a Polarity to Manage

• Learn to see stability and change as interdependent aspects of a polarity to be managed, identifying the upsides to maximize and the downsides to avoid at both ends of this spectrum
• Explore your own and others’ relationship to stability and change – How do you each tend to operate on this spectrum and what impact can this have on a team’s dynamics? What else might be possible that could better serve the overall good?
  
• Drawing on the Cynefin framework, learn to recognize four primary contexts within which stability and change manifest, and understand the impact this can have on management of this polarity
• Identify action steps that could help release and maintain the positive potential held within both sides of the polarity, along with early warning indicators that signal a need to readjust
• Apply what you’ve learned to how you manage a group or an initiative – What relationship to stability and change exists among group members? What could you do to better manage this polarity, creating the conditions that support the outcomes you desire?  

Stakeholder Engagement

• Identify the conversations necessary to effective stakeholder relationships
• Learn to listen for and explore areas of shared care as a grounding for shared commitment
• Develop an appreciative understanding of each other's interests, capacities, readiness, requirements and agreements
• Consider how to blend with different work styles and approaches and how to and benefit from differing areas of strength

Strategic Thinking

• Learn to assess and approach situations more strategically through use of selected constructs and methodologies, for example:
• Use the Integral Framework to see the interior and exterior as well as the individual and collective dimensions, and to source a more balanced set of responses or approaches
• Use Complexity Theory to identify whether a situation is simple, complicated, complex or chaotic, and to respond in a way that fits
• Use Polarity Management to distinguish problems to be solved from polarities to be managed, and to develop key indicators (+/-) for the latter
• Use Game Theory to identify unwinnable games, define new games, and strategize on how to play within existing games