Good professionals know that their success depends on the results, but good leaders know you can only get there with the help of others. The Leadership Basics course provides you with valuable insights into workplace relationships and teamwork based on practical cases. Combined with practical tips, you’ll learn how to coach ‘winning teams’ and be the kind of leader that inspires and produces results.

Good leadership requires theory and practice

The Leadership Basics Course gives you the tools you need to be a better, more mindful leader. While learning about leadership styles and communication techniques, you’ll have the opportunity to put what you learn into practice through case studies and exercises that encourage learning from each other.

How could I have dealt with that issue more constructively? What gets my employees eager to participate? And why did I respond that way? New managers concerned with doing their jobs well are bound to have a few insecurities. That’s why this course focuses on mindful leadership.

The basics of mindful leadership

Being a mindful leader is about gaining and applying insights about yourself, your individual employees, and your team to boost performance and create a workplace that people are eager to be in. During the course, you’ll:

• maximise your strengths and improve your weaknesses
• learn how to resolve conflicts constructively
• discover how to encourage creativity and efficiency in your team
• find out how to help employees flourish where they are
• become more proficient at assessing employee performance
• learn how to effectively delegate

Below you will find the programme of this four-day training course

Day 1

First leadership exercise and debriefing

• Everyone has an idea of what leadership means. However, that definition is often lacking.
• The first exercise aims to define leadership and describe the various factors that could affect success or failure.

Constructive feedback

• Skills-building session on how to deliver motivating, constructive, and behaviour-driven feedback
• Topic covered early on day 1 to ensure that all future peer feedback during the course is useful to participants

Understanding your people

• Communication skills building session
• How to use active empathy to really listen and get to know people

Introducing strategic action

• Leadership exercise designed to show the importance of assessing your current position and setting priorities before jumping into action
• This session plants the seed of a strategic approach to leadership, which is reinforced during future leadership exercises.

Day 2

Adapting your leadership style

• Initial leadership exercise on discovering different leadership methods
• Includes advantages and disadvantages of the different leadership methods. How do they help you achieve tick box results, employee satisfaction, and develop skills?
• Case-based discussion to discover how and when you can apply these different methods to lead your team

Coaching

• Skills-building session
• How to help your employees find their own solutions to problems and come up with a related strategy for achieving specific goals
• GROW coaching model, applied immediately so each participant can see the value of a coaching approach and how a strategic approach to coaching works

Days 3 and 4

The topic order changes each time the course is conducted. However, days 1 and 2 always follow the approach above to ensure that certain deliverables are on the table before days 3 and 4 since they will be revisited in later sessions.

Motivation

• What do people really want from work?
• Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivators
• What are the different ways to foster and maintain motivation on a personal and employee level?
• Through peer discussions and workshops, participants will define concrete actions they can take concerning their actual employees.

Boosting influence through Commercial Communications

• Role-play exercise ‘Sell me a pen’ designed to show the importance of adapting your ‘pitch’ to your target
• What you need to know about people to present beneficial arguments
• Mini-exercise: How to present an idea as a benefit and effectively deal with objections

Change

• Role-play exercise: Get buy-in from someone for a specific new idea/approach = designed to show different change personality types
• Who are the best people to approach with something new and how do you deal with different change personality types?
• What happens when you introduce a change to your people? Which best practices can help deal with these issues?
• How to use the engagement cycle to adapt your leadership behaviour to different ‘change needs

Dealing with difficult leadership situations

• Role-play exercise + debriefing designed to provide an understanding of the results cycle:
• Situation
• Perception
• Behaviour
• Results
• How different perspectives affect your behaviour
• Different behaviour types you can exhibit when faced with difficult and conflict situations
• Assertive communication roleplaying

Teamwork

• Leadership exercise designed to reinforce a strategic leadership approach and highlight issues that come up during teamwork
• Note: During this exercise, specific elements are randomly switched to demonstrate how they affect motivation, reinforce change theory, and create ‘difficult situations’.
• This exercise usually happens on day 4 to refresh certain topics that have already been covered.
• What are the keys to effective teamwork?
• Through peer discussions and workshops, participants will define concrete actions they can implement in their own teams.

Delegating work

• ‘Inbox’ exercise as a workshop: How to decide who should do what and why
• Participants learn a simple process for defining which tasks should and should not be given to the team, how to define tasks in terms of required competencies, how to select the right people for the job (based on the need for tick box results, employee satisfaction, and competence development), assess risk, determine the leadership style required, and how to communicate delegation of a task.