Universal Leadership Skills
Background and description
Many people become leaders by accident - often because they were good at their last job and were promoted to a position where they became responsible for people. Often leaders are launched on unsuspecting followers with little or no leadership training. Yet, strangely enough, if you look in the business section of any bookshop, you will see shelves full of books about leadership.
Universal Leadership Skills cuts through all the hype. You will consider your existing leadership styles and practices and learn tried-and-tested models and skills to help you improve. The course combines education about the ideas and philosophies underpinning leadership with highly practical techniques that can be applied immediately back in the workplace.
Every leader should remember that it is YOU your people talk about in the pub with their colleagues and around the dinner table with their families when they get home. What would you like them to say about you as their boss?
Duration and who should attend
Duration
3-days
Who should attend?
| • | Chief Executives |
| • | Directors |
| • | Senior managers |
| • | Anyone who leads a team at a managerial level |
Universal Leadership Skills is not just for new or inexperienced leaders. Many previous attendees have been leading teams for many years and still found the course invaluable.
This is not a course for junior managers and people who do not line manage a team should not attend.
Style and structure of the course
Universal Leadership Skills is highly participative and practical. Participants are asked to apply what they are learning to their own real-life scenarios for each session. This includes the opportunity to pick the brains of the Consultants running the course and, of course, interact with the other attendees.
Participants receive our comprehensive manual, The Complete Guide to Leadership.
What participants will learn
What you already know about leadership
To get us going, we will start with an exercise in small groups to explore what ideas people have come across in the past, what they think the differences are between managing and leading and why leadership is important.
Leadership and management - the background to the ideas
A lecurette that includes:
| • | Where the ideas come from Early thinkers - Taylor, Gilbreth, Gantt - the early 20th century People thinkers - Lewin, McGregor, Herzberg - the mid 20th century |
| • | Why leadership is needed |
| • | The difference between leadership and management ...and the difference between management and supervision |
Leadership behaviours - leaders I have known and loved
An exercise in small groups where we start to explore what it is that leaders actually do. You will reflect upon people you have worked for in the past and then follow a structured remit to identify what these people did and didn't do to make them effective, ineffective, liked and disliked.
Motivation
As a consultancy, it is not unusual for the UIC to be asked for help in motivating individuals and teams. Most of the time we tell people not to bother. If you'd like to know why and what we suggest instead, this session will give you the answer and includes:
| • | The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation |
| • | How a leader can motivate people |
| • | Satisfiers and dissatisfiers in the workplace |
| • |
...followed by a practical exercise to identify satisfiers and dissatisfiers for the people who work for you.
Functional Leadership
This model has been around for a long time and is a basic building block in leadership practice. The model identifies three elements - task, team and individual. Participants complete a self-assessment questionnaire to establish where their current leadership preferences lie. We will then use the model to decide if your balance between the three areas is right and decide what to do to maximise effectiveness in each area.
Flexible Leadership
We now build upon the ideas of leadership style and put the idea that 'one style fits all' in the dustbin. After this session, if anyone ever asks you what your leadership style is, you will always answer "it depends"'. The basis of the Flexible Leadership model is that when you are leading an individual you need to adopt a leadership style based on the ability and competence of that individual and the nature of the task in hand. We will examine the resulting leadership styles and match these to your own real-life situations. Then we will identify the actions associated with each.
Leadership and quality collide
The quality movement in management is often seen solely from a perspective of projects, tools and techniques and training the workers. What is sometimes missed is that it has also redefined the job of a manager and that redefinition is all about leadership - of people, processes and projects. This session will explore the thinking behind the doing - what makes quality leadership different and the consequences on how leaders lead in practice.
Leading people
This is where most leadership courses start but we don't get around to it until day three! This is because we take a much broader view of leadership. How you lead individuals is only one aspect of the much bigger picture. We will introduce a series of key principles for leading people. We will also provide a person-by-person checklist to help you understand the people who work for you. Finally we will do some work around how to structure a 1-to-1 and performance appraisals.
Leading your team
This session is about leading your team as a group. We will have a look at when to promote individual effort and when to use the team collectively. We will also have a look at team meetings and briefings and how to maximise the use of this time.
Leading routine operation
All day-to-day work is carried out through processes. Some of these happen many times in one day, some happen once a year, some are well documented and understood, some are not, some are carried out exactly the same way by a variety of people, some depend on who is there at that particular time. One of the jobs of a leader is to understand and improve processes with the help of the people working in them. We will have a look at how to measure the performance of your processes and involve your people in improving them.
Leading projects
Traditional project management training focuses on either 'doing' or 'controlling' projects. Our experience has shown that 85% of projects run into trouble, not because of either of these, but because of their 'steering' and 'championing'. In this session we will examine the difference between steering, championing and doing. We will examine remits, choosing the right Project Leader, pre-project meetings, what level of support and involvement is required and so on. Again we will spend some time looking at your own real-life situations and applying what you have learned to these.
Download
Click here for the Universal Leadership Skills Briefing Note.
A public course back in October 1998
Of the participants, Fiona and Ian have both attended senior managers events with us in 2009, Leonie has sent one of her direct reports on the Autumn 2009 Facilitator Development Programme, Liverpool Housing Trust and South Yorkshire Housing Association are still clients. Not bad after 11 years.