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

In 2010 - 11 Mitchell Phoenix have been working closely with Alderley Dubai, running bespoke in-house programs for senior and fast track managers both in the UK and Dubai. 

“The management team of Alderley Dubai were especially rewarding to work with. Their enthusiasm, diligence and application of ideas created the results that Nick and the senior team envisaged. In addition they made use of all the available strategies in Mitchell Phoenix projects, supporting each other, building team results and spurring each other on to deliver the maximum - a great group of people!” 
Kevin Yates, Managing Director, Mitchell Phoenix

Click here to read the case study

In discussion with a client the other day, he remarked on how many of Mitchell Phoenix's long-standing relationships are with companies in high growth; some of which have become household names during the 20 years we have been doing business with them. What is it about our approach and the results we create that suits organizations experiencing rapid change so well? Here is the answer.... click to read on

•Facebook has 700 million users; if it was a country it would be the third most populous country in the world, after only China and India

•Twitter has 200 million users

•Google Plus, launched in summer 2011, already has 10 million users

•You Tube has had billions of views

•Linkedin recently reached the 5 million mark

Some of every business leader’s target audience will be using social media.

What can social media do for businesses?

1. Satisfying Customer Needs

No matter what size your company, social media is a forum that allows businesses to conduct a direct, one to one relationship with the consumer. This can provide insights into how customers think and react. Social media can help businesspeople tailor their customer experience so that it fits client requirements well: because the customers themselves told the business what they wanted via Facebook, Twitter and all the other platforms. Click to read on

Few CEO’s Cite Paint-Balling as their Chief Leadership Influence

Rare quotations:

“I paint-balled my way to the top”

For comedians training is one of the most fertile areas of business life. The tenuous links made between a host of activities – from actors’ trust games to orienteering – and our working practices are funny because we can all recognise the scenario. Whether it is making the accounts team go through an army assault course or asking the production division to do a karaoke for leadership programme, everyone knows someone who has done something ridiculous in the name of development, or – worse still – has had to take part in something ridiculous themselves.

If you want a development activity which is useful, rather than simply entertaining, what should you look for? After more than 25 years in development, Mitchell Phoenix’ Kevin Yates concludes that there are four pillars of successful development programmes. “Look for expert facilitation, an unwavering focus on the creation of results, a structure which will allow the creation of results, and tried and proven content,” he says.

What should this content consist of? First of all it should be usable in the workplace. Under pressure in a real life work situation, anything overly complicated, such as a theoretical ‘model’, will be difficult to bring to mind or use. Second, content should be useful, so that when it is applied it will solve a problem and/or generate concrete results. This means the content should focus on how to conduct the key activities managers and leaders undertake. Whether the focus is delegation, persuasion, motivation or anything else, concrete detail on how to do each of these things is vital. It is not enough to define the problem, the content must take us towards the solution and then prompt us to take action back in the workplace.

“Perhaps most important,” says Yates, “is that the content is based on strong, ethical business principles which senior managers can relate to, and on which they can build. They must see clearly how what is being suggested to them fits with the business principles they already hold, or with principles they aspire to and are likely to adopt.”

This article follows on from Kevin Yates' previous post on the Four Pillars of Successful Management Development (see below).

Management Development and the Middle Ages


Businesspeople are good at measuring a return. Stereotyped from at least the Middle Ages as bean-counters with abacuses, the Blackberry-wielding modern version of the medieval merchant knows how much things cost and how many of them s/he is selling. You measure the impact of lean manufacturing techniques on the bottom line. You measure the ROI of developing and marketing a new product. You can even measure how much each individual salesperson pulls in for the business.  

But modern businesspeople are useless at measuring the return on investment in management development. Research conducted by DDI found that only around 25% of organisations formally measure the results of leadership development programmes. A recent IRS survey polled 74 organisations which ran management development programmes, out of which 13 said they were a failure, 22 said they hadn’t achieved a return on investment, and only six believed their programmes had been a great success. Both sets of findings suggest that today’s management development is a long way from the shrewd calculations of yesterday’s merchants.

What can the past teach us? In the times when Powerpoint, flip-charts and break-out groups didn’t exist, the closest businesspeople got to management development was the apprentice system. Of course, no-one would advocate asking managers to live in poverty for seven years, sleeping on their boss’s floor and only having Sundays off if they are lucky (if you recognise any of that, it’s time for a move - depressed job market or not). What is instructive about the apprentice system is that it asked apprentices to produce something to prove they had learned the skills of their trade. This “Masterpiece” was visible proof of whether the apprentice had become a master or not.

Management development programmes which do not create measurable results are like apprenticeships where no masterpiece is required. In fact, they are like apprenticeships where no work at all is required. What guildsman would accept an apprentice into the stonemasons’ guild without visible evidence that he could carve stone to an acceptable standard? As turnaround specialist Ross Stuart observes, “if you can’t see any results, you have to question whether there are any.”

Management as we know it did not exist seven hundred years ago, but Mitchell Phoenix’ Kevin Yates is convinced that we should judge the development of our managers by the same yardstick that guildsmen used: the evidence of our eyes. “Only by creating results in response to the live challenges of the workplace can managers truly measure their development,” he says, “and that’s the only way you will be able to accurately judge ROI.” Because of this, Mitchell Phoenix programmes are designed to create results from the first day. “Focus on results is one of the four foundation stones of successful management development programmes,” says Yates, “and in conjunction with a unique structure, robust content and expert facilitation, they will repay your investment many times over.”

I was recently invited to discuss the concept of best practice in training: what it looks like, how it works, the measurement of effectiveness and so on.  One of the aims of the meeting was to identify parameters through which the organization and design of training could be securely improved and rationalization carried out.

Between us we had a great deal of experience in the area of Learning and Development and all were keen to engage in the discussion.  What became apparent was the elusive nature of the answers to the questions raised.  For example: “What would you consider to be modern best practice in training?” Quickly we realized that different training requires different practices.

Training which equips others with a technical skill (banking, IT, insurance, engineering, etc.) requires the transfer of knowledge from the trainer to the delegate, and the subsequent application of that knowledge to a problem or process – simple cause and effect.  For example, compliance training involves the transfer of knowledge about compliance to the delegate, who then applies this knowledge to their area of the business.

Management skills and disciplines also require knowledge (most managers have this) and the application of that knowledge in the workplace. The difference is, that knowledge is applied directly to the people we manage, rather than to the systems, products or services under our control.

People react and respond dynamically and in complex ways – they are a more unpredictable variable than almost anything else in business. The training of managers demands a learning environment which can create understanding of people and how they behave in the workplace – not simply a transfer of knowledge.

What managers learn must then be practiced in the workplace, where they can grow their understanding through their own experience. Courses should be designed to facilitate this. Straightaway it is clear that knowledge transfer is not up to the task. Just as we can’t learn to swim from a book, so developing a manager’s understanding of how he/she can be more effective requires more active engagement than simply listening to a talk or reading an article.

In addition, consider the range of factors managers deal with:

• relationships in 4 directions (up to a boss, down to staff, sideways to peers and clients)
• the execution of corporate strategy
• the management of resources
• rapid shifts in external influences – customers, markets, money, people, competitors

all of which will defy the application of simple knowledge and yet can be resolved by broad understanding and good management.

As the conversation turned to leadership the game was raised another level. Here there was no doubt that understanding and effectiveness were the critical goals.  To create learning that delivers this level of effectiveness requires 4 elements:

Robust content that stimulates questioning, curiosity and deep understanding

Training based on output, not input – leaders and managers learn through their own experience and need training that causes a change in thinking, understanding and practice

A structure that promotes learning transfer – Short, intense and demanding seminars followed by a period where learning can be realized

Expert facilitation – not facilitation by experts - What’s the difference? Leaders learn from their own experience, not that of others.  Leadership learning occurs when people work on their own approach, not when trying to adopt that of others.

All Mitchell Phoenix programs are built on these 4 principles.