Mitchell Phoenix - Leadership and Management Training

GOVERNING CHANGE DATES

Structure: Six full day seminars, one day each month for six months

Seminar 1 Wednesday 25 January, 2012
Seminar 2 Wednesday 29 February, 2012
Seminar 3 Wednesday 28 March, 2012
Seminar 4 Wednesday 25 April, 2012
Seminar 5 Wednesday 23 May, 2012
Seminar 6 Wednesday 20 June, 2012



Principal Focus: Leading, directing and mobilizing staff

Key themes:

Seminar One - Key and Fundamental Principles of Management
Seminar Two - Improving the Contribution of Staff and Others
Seminar Three - Leadership in Management
Seminar Four - Improving the Quality of Leadership Influence
Seminar Five - Dominating Change
Seminar Six - Managing into the Future

Course fees: £3650.00 exc VAT

Who will benefit? The Managers of Managers (Senior Level)

"Governing Change" is for managers and management teams who wish to capitalize on their experience and advance their leadership and management abilities. The focus is on the critical area of high quality communication and the management of relationships which take up a substantial part of every manager's time.

Click here to make a booking on this program

What is covered on this course? Click here for course outline

What results do delegates create when attending this course? Click here for sample results

If one defines organizational culture as the collective values and behaviors of every individual within a business, what influence does this have on overall performance?

When we overlay culture, whatever form it may take, onto strategy, leadership, communication, customer focus, continuous improvement and sustainability, to name but a few core business competencies, we can immediately sense the influence that culture will have on output. Organizational culture will determine levels of efficiency, teamwork, quality, speed of decision making, employee engagement, innovation and reputation. It will block or embrace change, it will build legacy or stagnate, it will inspire or depress. Ultimately it drives the results.

How much attention does business pay to organizational culture? What connections does it make to some of the symptoms of a strong or weak culture?

When any organization examines its levels of employee churn, absenteeism, sick leave, internal promotions, overtime, its value of appraisal, effectiveness of meetings, its customer relationships, the willingness of its workforce to contribute freely, it can gain a measure of how healthy its culture is. How does any business ensure a healthy culture?

There is a clue for all of us in the purpose of management, which is ‘to secure the future’. A healthy culture is a leadership responsibility. When we hear about setting a good example it is actually about exhibiting the culture of the business. Feedback, good and bad, is indicative of what is important to the organization. If the strategic outlook is customer focused or bottom-line oriented it will drive out decisions and actions accordingly. Culture can be built with consistent management style, common language, shared best-practice and guiding principles. Any company can achieve a strong platform for growth if it invests in it and has the buy-in of senior executives.

Rockerfeller once said that he would pay ten times the salary to someone who could influence people who were smarter than they were. That is the importance he placed on being able to influence. Culture is influence over the ability to deliver strategy through people and it is vital.

What is the impact of organizational culture on performance? Whatever you decide.

You’ve decided to do some management training with your people. The business case is clear and the necessary budget has been secured. If you don’t spend the money in the next couple of months it will disappear, so you sit down to make your choice.

You think that with stronger management skills you and your people will behave more effectively on an individual, team and organizational basis. This would be a fantastic business result. You search the internet for management training companies which can deliver business results… and to your surprise, everyone can. Every provider you look at shouts back at you about the “results” they create for their clients, like a flock of parrots that has learned to say just one word.

In fact, in the world of management development “results” has a range of meanings:

1. At the basic level, the “result” is that everyone who attended a day of training rated it highly on a feedback sheet – eg. as “very good” or “outstanding”. People had a good time, nobody tried to climb out of the windows.

2. The next type of “result” is that everybody learned something on the course. They learned what personality type they are, or that they annoy a colleague when they don’t turn on their out of office message. The link between the learning and the workplace is hazy, or based on firm promises to put an action plan in place one delegates get back to the their desks. Six months down the line, people are still annoying their colleagues by not turning on their out of office messages. Perhaps unexpectedly, much of the input on MBA courses falls into this category: interesting but not used.

3. Short-term behavioural change is the next category of “result”. Here, people adopt a new behaviour and stick to it for a while. For situations where longevity of application is not a factor, “results” in this area are useful.

4. Long-term behavioural change is the pinnacle of “business results”. This is rare, requiring all of the other three preceding “results” to be in place (no one will change their behaviour if the course designed to do this is making them want to climb out of the window). Along with these, any course operating at this level will create a deep understanding of management principles, such that they can be applied to any situation a manager faces. Managers take decisions with this new frame of reference in mind, and choose new, more effective behaviour now and in the long-term.

Next month: the clues that show which of the four types of result above a provider can deliver.

Lord Davies' report, Women on Boards, has highlighted a growing body of evidence linking the number of women on the senior management team of an organization with the strength of its performance. The following article explores why this might be the case, and what the implications are for decision making.