Leadership

This is one of the most interesting courses we offer. Great leaders transform businesses. Whatever stage you are at, be it junior employee aspiring to leadership, or a leader or manager aspiring to great leadership, this course has something to offer you.

We touch on leadership in many sections of these courses, but it is one of the most fascinating topics of management and business studies, so we take an in depth look here.

As always, to understand a topic it helps to take it apart and examine its component parts. Developing an understanding of what leadership is and what defines a great leader, will help you to be a better leader.

You will learn to hone and develop your leadership skills, and this will enable you to improve your leadership capabilities, and command authority and respect from your team.

We will examine the difference between leadership and management. Often you will need to be a manager, but not everyone is a leader as well.

We will address the issue of whether leaders are born or made. Can you learn leadership, or do you have to be born to it? As William Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” And so it is with leaders.
We will reflect on the Vision that sets leaders apart from managers. The Vision to see a problem on the horizon, identify a solution, and then implement it by signposting their Vision to the team.

We will talk about effective time management, delegation, and coaching so that you can develop a talented team and eventually free up your time to concentrate on achieving targets, identifying areas that can be improved, and achieving success for you and the business.

We will review management styles to help you manage your team’s performance. We will examine conflict management, equipping you with the tools to diffuse unpleasant situations within the team.

Ensuring your meetings are effective is an important part of time management, your own and your teams’. Other important tools are active listening and effective communication.

In my opinion, one of the most powerful tools at your disposal is learning to manage an effective Performance Management programme. Used poorly it is a serious demotivator but used properly this a fantastic way to manage and motivate a team to greatness.

And there is a quiz at the end, to test yourself and your new-found knowledge.

Managing People

This is a very helpful course for anyone who is currently managing a team, or someone who aspires to management.

One of my favourite definitions of management is “achieving things through other people.” People are the resource that you are managing, and it is crucial to get the right people in place, ensure they have all the skills they need and lead them to do an excellent job. The people are the business. The better the people, the better the business you will have, so you need the very best staff you can find.

Your job as a manager is to ensure the task is achieved, whatever that is – making or selling product, caring for people, designing space rockets, whatever. Then you must develop the individual members of your team and hone the team itself into an effective force to achieve targets.

For this, there are some skills that you need. You will need to know about staff recruitment and retention; how to make your company the employer of choice for the best talent around. High staff turnover affects operational performance, and this can impact on customer satisfaction, as well as being time consuming for management.

We will see that rewards, incentives and benefits can play an important part in retaining staff, and that there is scope here for companies to differentiate themselves as aspirational employers.

We will look at some interview and recruitment practices as well as advice on how to make your company attractive to potential employees. You will learn how to develop robust interview questions and understand why competency-based interviews are so effective.

We will analyse how to manage your staff’s performance to get the best out of them. Herzberg’s motivational theory is required reading for any student of behaviour in the workplace, as is an understanding of how to deploy influencing skills to persuade others to your way of thinking. A knowledge of conflict management in the workplace is a vital skill too. Leading virtual teams, delegation, coaching and succession planning are all covered too.

We will see the importance of building a relationship with each member of staff, with regular, even daily, communication. A manager should know a little about their ambitions -do they want a promotion or are they happy where they are because their caring responsibilities will not allow them to commit any further to the company? You will probably need to have staff undertake continuous development to keep up with recent technology and resultant changes in working. You can take a personal approach to each member of your team and their career development and recommend suitable learning for them. Even if they don’t want a promotion they may still appreciate the opportunity to develop their skills and contribute more to the business.

This is a suite of skills that will help you to manage effectively, develop leadership skills and become a front runner in the workplace. Learn how to make your company the “go-to “employer, the aspirational company for the most outstanding talent on the market.

The Human resource department is often given more prominence now than previously as we have come to understand the crucial role of employee motivation and its contribution to the business. In addition, many countries now have comprehensive employee legislation in place, the HR department will ensure compliance with that.

We will not touch on the employee legislation aspect of HR, as this is a global site, we literally have readers in every country in the world, so we can’t address the different legal and cultural implications across the globe.

The manager responsible for HR needs to have a good overview of the business, its strategy and objectives, to align HR policies with the strategy, ensuring the correct staff are in place to achieve company targets.

Employee engagement is an important target for HR too. If staff are engaged with the company, enjoy their work, are content in the work environment, and buy into the culture they will perform better, stay longer, have less time off sick, and be more productive and profitable for the company than staff who are not engaged. We examine the factors that can affect engagement, and action that managers can take to help ensure their team are engaged.

We examine management style, what determines it, how you can affect it, and which style is the best.

Workplace stress is another issue that managers should be aware of, their actions and attitude can make a dramatic difference to their staff’s experience of work.

Researchers at Yale University found that stress literally shrinks the size of your brain! Workplace stress is a very serious issue, managers can influence their teams’ stress level, and in my opinion have a moral obligation to do so. As a manager you can alter workload, postpone deadlines, and arrange for skills improvement if necessary.

The role of the supervisor can be difficult and demanding and require sensitive handling. The supervisor straddles the gap between the work force and management. They are the go-between, representing staff, their issues and views to management, and representing management to staff.

Performance Management is one of the most potent tools at a manager’s disposal, partly because it enables the cascading of company targets from the management team down to the individual staff member. It allows each person and their line manager to discuss their work situation, challenges, objectives and ambitions. Issues can be addressed, solutions found. The outcome should be an improvement in individual, team and company performance. We supply you with a suite of printable Performance review planning documents.

This course is an excellent grounding for anyone in management and taken together with the other courses on offer, will help develop your management skills and get the best out of your team.