Case Study: Leadership Development Training at STL

Organisational Profiles

As part of our Public Schedule portfolio, STL offers leadership development to a range of organisations, from the leading brand in healthy drinks to one of the best-known luxury hotel chains.

Despite the different settings and company cultures, what they all have in common is that they have identified a ‘leadership profile’. Namely employees who are progressing into more challenging roles, be that as a team leader, project or people management roles, and who all require up-skilling to grow into their existing or forthcoming roles.

Benefits

Their HR/Learning and Development departments choose this particular course because they are, amongst other things, looking for the following benefits:

  • Identifying the skills and qualities that make a good leader, and how that differentiates from simply ‘managing’
  • Key strategies and tools to discover and utilise their employee’s leadership strengths
  • How finding a balanced leadership focus can improve productivity, team motivation and cohesion
  • A deep understanding of team dynamics and how to improve relations via coaching, mentoring, social events and offering feedback, amongst other areas
  • Performance Management; assessing and developing individual effectiveness by examining communication skills, rapport-building, time management, setting appropriate boundaries and developing natural assertiveness
  • Becoming an effective task leader by setting goals that are measurable, realistic and achievable, leading the planning process and maintaining control of the team.

We draw on cutting edge material at the forefront of leadership development to accomplish this, including the following principles:

  • Being guided by the Future you want and staying focused on your vision
  • Engaging others in productive and stimulating working relationships that make things happen
  • Delivering the results you need to really move your business forward
Learning Deliverables for Leaders

All taken from the excellent ‘Leadership Plain and Simple book by Steve Radcliffe (UK) and the newest research by Dr Sunnie Giles, who stresses the importance of making employees feel safe as a key leadership quality, rather than the more fluffy and ill-defined ‘being charismatic’ that we’re so used to seeing in standard leadership material.

These form a powerful backbone to the course, which in addition to our proprietary materials make for some very engaging discussions amongst the group. One of the biggest benefits of course, is precisely this – the fact that we have a number of delegates from different industries all openly sharing their thoughts, hopes, experiences and challenges around current corporate leadership.

As best-practice and problem-solving meshes with our materials, you can see light-bulb moments happening as delegates re-frame their current experiences with this new information and clearly see how they can put this into action to increase productivity throughout their areas of the business.

One of the areas that comes up time and time again is the need to be assertive and push back before they burn out. We now include that in our Leadership course as standard, and role-play scenarios to help emerging leaders become more resilient.

As the trainer, it’s always gratifying to facilitate Leadership development. As Forbes so accurately says “With an estimated $166 billion annual spend on leadership development in the USA alone, organisations must transform these mission-critical programs to create real and lasting impact.”

And that’s our key focus. With 80% of this course being practical, delegates emerge with a newfound confidence in their skills and often form lasting connections with their peers on these types of high-level courses.

Feedback

Our feedback has been excellent across the board with delegates saying;

“We received loads of practical advice, discussed examples, practised role-playing and delivering and receiving feedback/advice from the trainer. Thank you!”

“Alison is really an excellent trainer. Lots of experience, full of positive energy and pays so much attention to each of the members. I am totally impressed. Today I learnt not only communication skills but lots more. I see how much she engaged with the training preparation and how quickly she can react to our questions. She is very professional, it’s so nice to experience such a high level of presentation skill! Thank you so much!”

Finally…

As a training team, developing our future leaders is something that we are passionate about. This is one of our most popular courses, and rightly so. There are very real skills-gaps at a corporate level that urgently need filling, and the range of material offered by this course afford us real scope to over-deliver for our clients.

Learn more about our Leadership Development course or our full range of leadership skills training on our website.

 

 

Five Tips to run Successful Virtual Meetings

World leaders across the globe have recently chaired their first ever digital government meetings. Many Managers and employees are also leading and taking part in virtual meetings via apps such as Zoom, Teams, Skype or GoToMeeting. A number of staff might be doing this for the first time or the first time in a long while.

What can you do to ensure that your next virtual meeting runs smoothly?

This article will explore 5 tips to give you more confidence to lead productive and successful virtual meetings during the new normal: 

  1. Get everyone involved

Rather like in face-to-face meetings it’s critical that people taking part in the virtual meeting should be active participants. If not, there is no reason for them to attend.

An effective way to start your virtual meetings is using a short ice-breaker activity, such as asking everyone to share something positive that happened to them in the last week.

You should also use participants names as much as possible at the start of the meeting to engage their attention. As American self-development guru Dale Carnegie once said;

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” 

  1. Check the tech works

Some of your team will have more experience than others with virtual meetings and different levels of comfort with the technology. Be sure to provide clear instructions about how to join the meeting and think of common challenges people might face so you can predict problems before they happen.

Ideally you should ask participants to test their microphone and camera in advance of the meeting to reduce the chance of wasting valuable time with technical issues when the meeting starts. 

Person In Front Of Laptop On Brown Wooden Table
Issue-free tech = issue-free virtual meeting!
  1. Have a Plan B

Technical issues are unavoidable at times, so be sure to have a back-up plan in case there are too many problems with the platform you are using to conduct your meeting. This might mean having your colleague in IT or someone technically competent on stand-by to problem-solve any technical difficulties or to switch to another communication tool if your Plan A is not working. 

  1. Keep them brief

Similar to a daily scrum in Agile working methodology, a 10-minute daily virtual huddle can sometimes be long enough for team members to understand the plan of attack for the day. If necessary, you could have one slightly longer meeting each week. Overall, it’s best to keep virtual meetings as short as possible.

  1. Use video

Always ask all participants to turn on their video during virtual meetings. While you can’t meet face-to-face for the moment, seeing a video of the people you are communicating with is the next best option. Using video also has the added bonus of making sure that everyone is paying attention as you can see their body language and facial expressions!

Photo of a Surprised Woman
Seeing body language and expressions via video is important!

Conclusion

The ability to lead both face-to-face and virtual meetings is an important soft skill in a successful Manager’s toolkit.

During your next virtual meeting on Zoom, Skype or Teams try to use these five different strategies to increase your teams’ productivity. As a result, you might also find that motivation and engagement improves!

Also consider sending your staff on a virtual training course to help them brush up their skills and improve the way they run virtual meetings.