What’s the difference between management and leadership? What’s your responsibility in your managerial role? How does authentic leadership look and feel? What’s the human and organizational impact of your leadership? And most importantly, what will your leadership legacy be?

You’ll be asked to take a long look in the mirror (proverbially speaking). When you’re promoted to a formal leadership position, you can expect a whole new level of scrutiny facing your performance. It’s an unfortunate truth that your weakness will likely be pointed out more often than your strengths. You must know your own weaknesses better than anyone else. Only then can you work on improving, and only then can you face your team with authentic humility. And to thrive in your areas of strengths, this, too, requires acute self awareness. You must lead yourself before you can lead others.

We intentionally start our managerial journey with teamwork. If you can develop a positive team culture, your team will in large part manage itself. We’ll start with the basics of how to set mutual expectations for collaboration within your team, thereby creating the foundation for productive teamwork. Then we’ll discuss the key elements of high performing teams, and learn ways to develop your team to exceed performance expectations.

The individual employee’s journey is complex. It’s your job to be navigating that journey before they’re even hired! Together we’ll explore every major employee phase, with a special focus on how to avoid the most common manager headaches. We start at the very beginning, how to hire smart! Then move onto onboarding, setting expectations, delegating while enabling autonomy, coaching for performance, and how to bid employees goodbye when the time comes. It’s a lot to cover in a short amount of time, so expect you might want to dive deeper on some topics later.

The higher up the organization ladder you find yourself, the lonelier it can feel. More responsibility often means fewer casual chit-chats at the coffee machine. Participants of our public trainings are invited to exchange contact information and set up future check-ins. These “trust pods” will be equipped with optional worksheets to guide them through future learning conversations amongst themselves. This network of support can continue indefinitely.

Regardless of industry or expertise, as soon as you officially receive the responsibility to manage people, there will always be universal common denominators of leadership you should understand. These common denominators we refer to as "Leadership Essentials."

Self-Awareness: When you step into a management position, you are almost simultaneously stepping under a microscope of scrutiny. Your weaknesses will draw far more attention than your strengths, and expectations on your performance will skyrocket. It is critical you honestly understand your own strengths and weaknesses so that others don't find them before you do.

It's also essential that you recognize that much of what you think your reality is, is actually your own subjective perspective. The ups and downs of human collaboration depend largely on navigating and leveraging diverse perspectives. First step to this? Understanding your own. We use Emergenetics as a simple-to-use psychometric to act as a mirror for you to understand your own perspective.

Understanding Leadership: Too often a promotion to management responsibility comes without a clearly defined definition of what this people-responsibility really means.

And in the exceptional cases where leadership expectations are clearly defined (bravo companies who have defined their "Leadership Principles"), you still need to define what leadership means TO YOU. Authenticity is key to your own engagement and the trust others will have in you.

Key Management Skills:

After managing self, comes managing others. Here are the elementary skills every manager should understand:

How to set goals, how to coach others, how to nurture a positive team culture, how to give and receive feedback, how to set up productive 1:1s, how to lead difficult conversations (incl. poor performance conversations and laying off with respect), and how to positively lead change.

Additional topics you can consider including are:

dealing with ambiguity, finding clarity on your team’s strategy, growing your team, influencing others, and managing "difficult" reports.

To start, we strongly recommend defining your company's Leadership Principles. Honing your individual leadership style is covered in the essentials, but having a unified leadership approach in your company is key to a positive and impactful leadership culture.

Once these are defined, we are happy to create a training curriculum around operationalizing these principles.

It's possible your industry or business requires special skills not included in the “Essentials” or “Leadership Principles.”

Maybe the skill of negotiating is critical, or frugality, or understanding diverse cultures... let us brainstorm together what your business needs and we welcome the task of creating a training around it.

And finally, your ideal culture (which should be anchored in your company’s values) should always be role-modeled by your leaders. While many companies have already defined their values, how to operationalize them in leadership behaviour is another task. Again, we welcome the invitation to customize curriculum around how leadership should rolemodel your company culture/values.