Compact Management Training Modules

Giving Great Feedback

Giving someone feedback may have a positive or a negative impact, depending on how well it’s done. And that’s true of both praise and criticism.

The role of feedback to both develop and motivate your team
It’s important to focus on the behaviour not the person
Being able to measure impact means everyone will know what needs to change and when things have improved.
How and When you give feedback defines your role as a team leader

Effective Delegation

You can’t do everything and neither do you have all the answers. That’s the real motivation behind delegating tasks to others.

How to enjoy the benefits and avoid the dangers of delegating to others
A framework to use with both simple tasks and complex projects
Using a coaching approach to ensure real responsibility is transferred.

Building Influence

There are some steps you can take to establish good working relationships with both your colleagues and your clients. This includes understanding:

Where real authority comes from
How to quickly build rapport
The power of reciprocity

Setting Objectives For Yourself or Your Direct Reports

It’s useful to distinguish between targets and goals which you can’t control and objectives which you can control. It’s helpful to update and align job descriptions with objectives to check in with what’s really going on and what really needs to be done now.

Self-evaluation of skills against job description
Identifying top three development needs
Creating an action plan with milestones to review along the way.

Running Productive Meetings

Most people complain about too many meetings and too many badly run meetings at work. So it’s important to consider the following:

Auditing all the meetings you attend and run
Deciding which to keep and which to cease
Defining different types of meetings
Adopt different formats for meetings (who, when, how and why)
Refocusing away from Agendas and towards Outcomes

Overcoming Procrastination

Exploring the reasons why you delay some actions and recognising the distractions you deploy to defer having to start something. Then using a framework to begin and complete a task including:

Identifying what you’re afraid of
What’s the worst that could happen vs. what’s the best that could happen
The cost of in action
Creating a schedule to start and complete smaller steps for a larger project.

Better Recruitment

How to ensure you hire the best person for the role rather than the one you liked the most in the interview. A detailed format for the end-to-end process including:

Writing a Job Description/Job Notification
Structuring an Interview
Assessing Candidates
Making an Offer and Onboarding a new employee

Coming Up With New Ideas

New ideas don’t suddenly appear from nowhere. They emerge from unusual combinations of existing ideas with new information or new technology or new behaviours. There are techniques that encourage new ideas to emerge. They include:

The juxtaposition of known facts in random ways
Slowing down thinking, speaking and listening to improve the quality of each
Using the collective wisdom and diverse attitudes and experience of your team
“Pressure Cooking” after a period of rumination.

Selling Your Ideas (to your clients, customers or your company)

To convince someone to agree with you or to change their mind, you will need to use some or all of the tools below to sell your idea:

Have a Headline
Identify the Villain
Understand the Benefit
Provide a Menu
Believe it rather than just know it.

Presentation Skills

Most people claim to be uneasy about speaking in public but those same people are generally good at holding conversations. That’s the pivot to learn some key skills to become more confident at presenting your ideas.

Overcoming the anxiety of public speaking
Using your voice for impact
Telling a story
Some guidance for deploying PowerPoint

Adaptive Management Styles

While most of us have a default management style (which we may not even be aware of), it’s helpful to explore different approaches to managing other people in different situations.

Directing, Delegating, Mentoring and Coaching
Understanding the advantages and limitations of each
Exploring the benefits of empathy and “asking” rather than “telling.”

Listening Skills

While many people have had some training around speaking and presenting:

The most effective managers listen more than they speak
Like any skill it needs practice
There’s a big difference between Active and Passive listening
Seven steps to become an Active Listener

Collaborative Thinking

It’s unrealistic to think the team leader has all the answers. The combined thinking of all the team will always yield a better solution and one that everyone can buy into and everyone can execute. There is a framework you can deploy that ensures you will hear from everyone in equal measure (including the introverts). It requires:

Individual thinking in advance from all the team members
Active Listening from all the team members
A desire to build a solution rather than to choose solution

Implementing Change

Change is always difficult because of the fear of the unknown and the loss of what’s already been invested in. Addressing loss and fear will provide a catalyst to help someone change their mind and provide a framework to implement changes across a team, company or customer base. To get people to shift their beliefs and behaviours it is also useful to: