Managing Your Self: Key to Effective Leadership
What you'll learn
- How to manage our negative 'knee-jerk' reactions when mistakes are made and things go wrong–so we can keep ourselves, and our team members, focused on solutions
- How to correct team members, without demotivating them, when mistakes are made – so they want to keep working enthusiastically with you
- How to avoid anger, blame and criticism specifically – in order to prevent their destructive effect on team performance, and your personal performance as well.
- How to enhance your communication skills to ensure that you speak so others will listen, and listen so others will speak.
- How to avoid ‘Drive-by Delegation’ and ‘Hit and Run Coaching.’ (You’ll learn how short-term micro-managing yields long term results).
- How to work effectively with a diverse team of people who are different in a variety of ways.
- How to manage commitments (yours and others) to ensure that you can be trusted to do what you say you’re going to do–and so you can trust others to do the same.
- How to deal with destructive conflict. (We address conflict management in general, but concentrate more on ways to anticipate and prevent it).
Requirements
- There are no prerequisites.
Description
We’re all great leaders when there are no problems. The test comes when things go wrong; when mistakes are made, and when there are sharp disagreements. At these critical moments we need a set of powerful leadership skills that are little known and rarely taught. We need the skills of self-management.
The course opens with the foundation skill of reaction management. This is the ability to manage our ‘fight or flight’ reactions when things go wrong. This essential skill literally fills a missing link in human development. (We’ve jumped on ahead. We learn and teach communication skills; anger management; conflict resolution and problem-solving. But these skills are of little use in the heat of the moment – if we haven’t learned how to “catch ourselves in the act” of reacting – and how to step in and take control of our thinking and behavior when things go wrong.)
We address seven self-management topics in this course – all focused on key priorities of leaders in the workplace: Enhancing performance and productivity. Reducing the costs and consequences of employee turnover. Reducing the incidence of stress-related illness and absenteeism – and earning the committed engagement of ‘all’ your team members, so you can deliver the results you want and need – and achieve your personal goals as well.
Participants say the course is as helpful in their personal lives as in their lives at work.
Who this course is for:
- • Leaders in the workplace generally (while the course is designed for leaders at work, it will be helpful to leaders in every walk of life)
- • Parents, teachers, coaches - everyone who plays an informal leadership role
- • Leaders in government agencies and not for profit organizations
- • New leaders and future leaders
Instructors
- 4.5 Instructor Rating
- 13 Reviews
- 102 Students
- 1 Course
Neil Godin is one of Canada’s leading business and professional development trainers, speakers and writers. He has served a wide variety of clients in business, government and non-profit organizations for more than 35 years. While most of his clients are smaller companies and organizations, his corporate client list includes RBC Royal Bank (‘Relationship Banking,’ an approach to leadership and customer service now adopted by financial institutions around the world), McDonald’s (community relations), Telus telecommunications (leadership), Subway (staff attraction and retention), Shell (sales, service and leadership), and many others across Canada and the U.S.
Neil is a former journalist who began his private practice as a media relations consultant. Over the years his work evolved and expanded, first into marketing strategy, then sales and service, and finally into leadership, team building and personal development. Today, he provides clients with an array of fully integrated training and development services, with very special emphasis on ‘people’ skills – his burning passion in both business and life.
Neil began studying and teaching people skills early in his career, “when the light came on,” and he saw a universal disconnect – a huge gap between the language employers use – in slogans like, ‘Our people are our greatest asset’ – and how their people are actually treated. Since then his mission has been to help clients achieve their goals by closing that gap – by providing coaching in the skills of self-management; interpersonal communication; collaborative problem solving; conflict management, and (more important) conflict prevention.
While in training at the Center for Conflict Resolution in Vancouver, Canada, he had another ‘Aha’ moment. He learned how difficult it is to resolve conflict after it has broken out – and began to think about how much easier it could be to anticipate and pre-empt conflict – to “catch snowflakes” before things snowball into hostilities.
That led to an examination of the causes of conflict at work, and his conclusion that much of the conflict that destroys performance is actually sparked by supervisors and managers themselves. For example, when a manager mindlessly reacts with fault-finding, blame and criticism when a mistake is made – instead of deliberately attacking the problem – and protecting the person – they can provoke defensive excuse-making, which readily leads to conflict.
His solution: training in self-awareness, self-monitoring and self-management – combined with conflict prevention. These insights and skills are introduced at the start of the course, and are reinforced throughout.