Management & Leadership - Bespoke In-House Training

Management & Leadership - Bespoke In-House Training

Overview:

Moving from Managing to Leading - should be the current focus of your development.

Not nearly enough focus has been given to what it takes to make the transition from being an effective manager to an influential leader. This is all the more surprising because most leadership roles are filled from the ranks of high-potential managers.

Even the most talented managers often find themselves blinded by unexpected aspects of their new role. Or worse, they find themselves feeling out of their depth – do some of your managers have this feeling?

Managers who have been successful typically “lead from their strengths” only to find their familiar approaches don’t work in this new context – sound familiar?

Through experience of management and leadership development over the last 20 years, we have found that understanding and preparing for this transition can help prevent months of frustration and lost momentum, not to mention talent loss.

The Transition

As leadership guru John Kotter pointed out many years ago, effective managers are experts at managing complexity and creating predictable systems.

They achieve results by systematically pursuing an often linear path from planning to execution and monitoring, given a specific goal.

While success often requires some creativity and flexibility, the best managers are often those who operate with deliberate discipline, including the practice of documenting and learning from past errors.

This ensures positive outcomes, particularly in a context where major challenges are well understood.

In the early stages of the transition, managers often encounter at least one of three distinct challenges.

Firstly, new leaders who are accustomed to being given goals from above may look in vain for such guidance in their new roles and find themselves stalled without it – this is often commonplace.

Secondly, new leaders who are used to having someone above them interpret messy data from an ambiguous environment may find themselves terrified at the prospect of having to direct followers onto a less than certain path – this can be scary!!

Thirdly, new leaders who are knowledgeable experts in their domains and thus able to direct others from that base of confidence may find themselves unsure of how to cope with their new dependence on direct reports.

These managerial expectations and habits, developed under the pressure for results and predictability, can act as significant barriers to successful performance in leadership roles.

As leading thinkers have noted, leading requires vision and its associated capabilities.

These include such capabilities as interpreting the present and predicting likely futures, assessing the organisation’s competencies and potential, deciding on a forward direction for the company despite uncertainties and capability gaps, and then mobilising the employees toward that new destination.

Leadership also requires a mind-set that is different from management.

For example, leaders tend to focus on reward rather than on risk, facing and managing the latter to achieve the former.

Managers are often risk averse, taking cautious steps to limit or control risk. Because they must take risks, leaders expect some of their decisions to be wrong and develop a thick skin to tolerate the occasional failure.

This is a luxury that most managers cannot afford, so few of them develop the resiliency they will need as leaders.

**Bespoke management and leadership development programmes, typically last from upwards of 2 days through to 7-8 days depending on the level of knowledge and skills needed to meet your current and future management and leadership requirements.**

***Flexible interest-free payment plans available***