Improve Your People Management and Build Employee Engagement

Learn the core elements of building team success--the mission or why the team exists; the design or what it does and how it organizes to accomplish it's mission; and relationships or how the team members communicate and work together to accomplish their mission.

The balcony is a metaphor for understanding your relationship to your team. You'll improve your team leadership (supervision or management) and add greater value to your team as you observe the day-to-day flow of work from "the balcony."

The best leaders (supervisors/managers) not only solve problems and manage the flow of work but also improve the methods, tools, and systems that enable their people to succeed. This, not day-to-day work, is how you add the greatest value to your team.

You move up to the balcony as you learn to ask the right questions. I offer you questions related to the three elements of the team model that will help you diagnose the current functioning of your team and understand the next steps in their development.

Identify your insights and apply the concept of leading from the balcony to your team.

You'll understand two of the five roles, those that we most often associate with good management and supervision.

In this lecture, you'll improve your people management by gaining insight into how using the roles of trailblazer, architect, and coach can make you a better leader.

I qualify the five roles and make distinctions to help you deepen your understanding and help you improve your management of people.

Learn how the five leadership roles fit with the team model we discussed in section two.

You'll gain insight into how you allocate your time between the five roles today and how you believe you could more productively spend your time in the future.

This lecture is an overview of many of the practices of the trailblazer as leader.

One practice of the trailblazer is to help one's team or work group understand how they contribute to the vision and strategy of the larger organization.

One important practice of the trailblazer is to ensure that the team has their own clearly defined purpose as well as guiding principles or team norms. I give you a process for accomplishing these objectives in this lecture.

A good team looks upward and outward. It knows what is happening in the external environment so it can continually adapt to changes and, thereby, remain relevant to customers and stakeholders.

Excellent teams or work groups know how to create a larger vision that inspires them to achieve new heights. You'll learn how to do this by going through this lecture.

You'll learn how help your team convert a vision into concrete and doable goals.

This is an exercise to assess your leadership as a trailblazer, your strengths and weaknesses and areas for improvement.

This lecture is an overview of the kinds of practices used by leaders as architects. Leaders not only make their teams more productive and efficient but improve morale and strengthen trust by following these practices.

Architects understand the resources teams need and continually monitor and acquire these resources so their teams can be most successful.

Good leaders seek to continuously improve their teams by benchmarking the best practices in many areas of team and individual performance.

Teams face real and perceived barriers which keep them from being their best. In this lecture, you'll identify many of these barriers and learn a process for challenging and eliminating them.

Some of the barriers that get in the way of team performance are conflicts with other teams or groups. In this lecture, you'll learn a method for working through these conflicts in a way that will improve your teams performance.

It's useful to look at work in terms of process--the interrelated steps or tasks that result in a deliverable to a customer. In this lecture, I teach you a simple method for mapping and improving your processes. Process improvement in vital to your team's success.

One of the main roles of a leader as architect is to analyze and improve the systems which support a team in accomplishing it's work. You'll learn a method for evaluating and making improvements to your systems and processes. Focusing on process improvement is one of your most important tasks as a leader.

This is an opportunity to reflect upon the tools from this section of the program and determine how you might incorporate them into your leadership behavior. 

This lecture is an overview of the coach role. You'll learn the tools and practices which leaders as coaches use to improve the climate of their teams and develop and grow their team members. One of your most important roles is to develop people through mentoring and coaching.

Teams and team members can only perform at their best if they know exactly what is expected of them. This lecture will talk you through categories and questions to make sure your team members can perform at the top of their abilities. 

Active listening is one of the most important skills a leader, at any level, can develop. I'll talk about the importance of listening and teach you the steps of effective listening so you can build greater rapport and better relationships with your team members.

Through mentoring, you help your employees improve their skills and abilities and prepare them for future responsibilities. I'll give you a process for holding mentoring conversations during this lecture.

Empowering your employees is expanding the scope of what people do and helping them make more meaningful contributions to the team/organization. This is more than delegating but is providing the clarity, resources, skills and authority they need to take on additional responsibilities.

This assessment will give you insight into ways in which you can improve your leadership as a coach.

In this lecture, I help you understand the process for translating what you've learned about the three high performance roles into an action plan to become a better leader.

In this exercise, you'll identify between three and five areas you want to make improvements as a leader.

In this lecture, I'm giving you a detailed template to convert areas for improvement, from the last exercise, into tangible and doable self-improvement goals.

I review the major concepts from the course in this lecture, as a reminder and way of putting it all together. My intent was to do a wrap-up and help keep the content fresh in your mind.