Team Building

Teams are essential building blocks in any organization. Usually, however, their effectiveness is constrained by the inablity of their members to clarify their relationships in a skillful way. As a result, most teams stay far behind their potential, thus hampering the performance of the entire organisation. In this training, we introduce a model for optimizing team collaboration, against which participants can try out how well they work together as a team under conditions of competition. We take a close look at the various team development phases and team roles. Participants will get the opportunity to reflect on both the level of development as well as team roles in their own team, and tackle their individual team challenges through collegial practice counseling. In addition, participants will learn how to provide each other with deliberate feedback, so as to quickly move on to focus on task accomplishment.

Target Group

Executives who want to improve the performance of teams for whose results they bear responsibility or of which they are members.

Benefits of Training

Participants will learn how to steer teams, keep clear of unnecessary conflicts, and understand their own role in teams.

Learning Outcomes

  • Participants know and understand a model for team development, learn the specifics of each team phase, reflect, in what stage their own team is, and work out meaningful action and behaviour for their own team in teamwork.
  • Participants understand why feedback is of such great importance for teamwork and know how to give and receive deliberate feedback.
  • Participants will learn the various team roles and know their respective properties.
  • Participants recognize signals that indicate the absence of a vacant team role.
  • Participants reflect which team roles are occupied by which employees in their team and which are not occupied (if applicable)

Seminar Methods

Lectures, learning through feedback and experiences of achievement, individual and group work, role-play, editing own practice cases. The seminar integrates participants’ real life work situations, in order to ensure the effective transfer of newly acquired skills and knowledge.

Materials

Participants receive additional information and details on the seminars, including practice worksheets.

Duration

Two days

Strategic Planning for Executives

Many people feel uncertain about planning and often the same mistakes are repeated. Many plans are therefore not implemented effectively. People can get disappointed with bad planning experience, making future planning efforts even more difficult. Designing and facilitating planning events, we can support leaders in providing a structure for planning, in which the relevant participants will commit to take action toward a joint vision of the future.

Target Group

Executives who want to get a better understanding of how to design successful planning processes and avoid common pitfalls associated with planning.

Benefits of training

Participants will develop an effective plan and take individual responsibility for its implementation. Participants will learn how to lead planning processes that have a lasting positive effect on the performance of people and organisations and the allocation of resources.

Learning Outcomes

  • Participants understand the nature of planning, i.e. making decisions whose consequences have a certain futurity
  • Participants understand why planning in uncertain, fast-changing situations should be strategic, i.e. medium-term
  • Participants know the criteria for successful planning
  • Participants know how to get and retain commitment from stakeholders
  • Participants know how to put a focal issue in global perspective
  • Participants learn how to make progress by discovering and building on what they have in common – rather than being distraught by differences
  • Participants understand how to treat problems and conflicts as information rather than action items

Seminar Methods

Lectures, learning through feedback and experiences of achievement, individual and group work, role-play.

Materials

Participants receive additional information and details on the seminar, including practice worksheets.

Duration

Two days

Leadership for Executives

Leaders can make a significant contribution to creating productive work environments. In order to do so, they must balance the expectations from above and below. If leaders manage to meet the needs of the organization, and also take into account the needs of employees, all parties will be more satisfied, and the organisation is more likely to do well. In this training, participants find out about major  leadership competencies and establish criteria for determining appropriate leadership styles. They discover the significance of personality types for everyday leadership and team collaboration and identify which potential conflicts exist between different personality types.

Target Group

Executives who want to deepen their understanding of the logic of leadership and management processes to guide their employees towards new goals.

Benefits of training

Participants will learn how to use modern management tools in situation-specific ways and improve their skills in goal-oriented steering of various forms of employee interactions.

Learning Outcomes

  • Participants reflect on and improve their leadership style.
  • Participants use their strengths, and know which of their weaknesses relevant to the everyday management they want to consciously control.
  • Participants acquire and deepen their understanding of rhetorical tools of communication and negotiation.
  • Participants learn how to use performance agreements as instruments of planning and as drivers of motivation.
  • Participants know the possibilities and limits of self and external motivation.
  • Participants know how performance review meetings should be optimally structured and carried out.
  • Participants will learn how performance agreements, reviews and feedback interactions complement each other in delegation processes.
  • Participants see how to improve fairness and transparency in the assessment process.

Seminar Methods

Lectures, learning through feedback and experiences of achievement, individual and group work, role-play, editing her own practice cases

Materials

Participants receive additional information and details on the seminars, including practice worksheets.

Duration

One day

Communication, Motivation and Appraisal

Communication skills are one of the core competencies of leaders.  Why are goals important? And how can objectives be agreed so that supervisors and employees alike know exactly what is to be achieved, and that staff will commit to crossing the finish line? Why do employees, who were previously enthusiastic, lose their motivation? And how can managers instil new motivation in them? Many executives delegate too little – among other reasons – because the release of responsibility to an employee is a lengthy process, during which supervisors sometimes think that it might have been easier to continue to do the task themselves. The theme of “assessment” is often discussed very emotionally. People often lament a lack of objectivity and manipulation. There is a risk that all participants develop a negative attitude to assessments, because it seems pointless to deal with judgments, which seem to be somewhat unreliable. Many leaders are faced with the problem that some employees perform their tasks with little commitment, so that quality and quantity of work results suffer. What can lead people to support unusual initiatives, and which factors instantly reduce the willingness to support such actions?

 

Target Group

Executives who want to deepen their understanding of the logic of leadership and management processes to guide their employees towards new goals.

Benefits of training

Participants will learn how to use modern management tools in situation-specific ways and improve their skills in goal-oriented steering of various forms of employee interactions.

Learning Outcomes

  • Participants acquire and deepen their understanding of rhetorical tools of communication and negotiation. The rhetorical instruments of “active listening” and “enquiry” are the most powerful tools for good communication.
  • Participants learn how to use performance agreements as instruments of planning and as drivers of motivation.
  • Participants know the possibilities and limits of self and external motivation.
  • Participants know how performance review meetings should be optimally structured and carried out.
  • Participants learn how performance agreements, reviews and feedback interactions complement each other in delegation processes.
  • Participants will learn how to criticize without hurting, formulate demands or requests in ways that expectations and desires will be met, and praise without shame.
  • Participants see how to improve fairness and transparency in the assessment process.
  • Participants will learn in an experiential exercise that goals are motivators that will enable people to achieve more than they had previously thought possible.
  • Participants learn, using an example from the everyday management, how cooperative agreements on objectives using the SMART scheme can be structured, so that (i) employees are motivated to pursue those goals, and (ii) it can later be verified along clear criteria, if the desired end results were achieved.

Seminar Methods

Lectures, learning through feedback and experiences of achievement, individual and group work, role-play, editing her own practice cases

Materials

Participants receive additional information and details on the seminars, including practice worksheets.

Duration

2 days