Our Leadership and Teambuilding training courses are designed to improve leadership skills and allow our delegates to be able to lead successful and high performing teams. Our team building workshops are packed full of useful teamwork training exercises, tips and techniques that new and experienced managers will find essential in showing how to lead effectively and will put them on the steady route of becoming successful managers and team leaders. Delegates who have taken our Leadership and Teambuilding courses have now gone on to lead highly productive teams and improving productivity by becoming better managers, motivators, delegators and leaders.

Leadership and team building is a training course that is both challenging and practical. We aim to teach the fundamental ‘people management skills‘ in a positive and constructive environment. It has been designed to enable delegates to understand the basic fundamentals of strategy and motivation in team building. You will benefit by learning tips and techniques that will increase your competence and confidence when managing, influencing and leading teams and individuals.

Leadership Competencies

Research into the productivity of high-performance managers has found that they share common characteristics. These can be categorised as leadership competencies and are proved to be essential for a manager to lead a team successfully. We have listed these competencies below.

• Setting goals and objectives
• Thinking strategically
• Communicating effectively
• Managing time and priorities
• Achieving quality
• Taking ownership and responsibility
• Motivating and influencing
• Reviewing and evaluating

When they make decisions, they make them with the end in mind. This comes from a clear vision of what their organisation is trying to achieve. Here management must play a critical role in creating a mission statement that crystallises the company’s key business goals. This should not be framed and hung on the wall like a piece of office art, but instead must be communicated over and over again through memos, newsletters, and meetings. This helps everyone to make decisions with the end in mind.

They create action plans designed to implement the company’s mission. Typically, star performers establish precisely what they intend to accomplish in specific time frames, such as one month, six months, a year. Although they remain focused on these time-sensitive objectives, they remain flexible enough to change their tactics if business conditions or the prevailing economic environment change. For example, assume that a general manager is seeking to increase profits by 5 percent over the course of a year, mostly by increasing sales. Then bang, a recession hits in midstream. Rather than throwing in the towel, she sticks to her profit goal, but focuses more intensely on cutting expenses than on increasing sales. To do this, she reviews the company’s procedures with an eye toward engineering the assembly line to wring excess costs out of the system. In this way, the manager stays focused on her objective, but pursues new means of achieving it.

Turning intentions into actions, effective managers muster the resources necessary to accomplish their action plans. First, they determine what they will need – raw materials, additional employees, creative input, capital, alliances inside and outside of the company. Then they act to assemble these resources in a way that makes the work process more efficient.

For example, a sales manager who is determined to speed shipments to customers may create an alliance with the warehouse manager, promising faster sales and re-order data in return for accelerated order processing. The bottom line: there is greater collaboration among the company’s employees, resulting in the realisation of its goals and greater creativity. They recognise that influencing colleagues and motivating staff workers is integral to getting things done on time and to the correct specifications.

They are good at managing priorities to reflect the company’s objectives. Their thinking goes like this: “Here’s what I am going to do today. This task is a top priority not because it is the project I want most to clear from my desk, or because someone is pressing me to do it, but because it will draw the straightest line between my work and the company’s goals.”

They are skilled at balancing the quality/quantity equation that is inherent in all work. For example, a well-intentioned but relatively unproductive employee may take pride in saying, “I always do everything perfectly.” When management counters that the quest for perfection caused the company to miss the deadline for a key delivery, he returns to the same myopic theme: “Yes, but you have to admit my work was done beautifully.”

Recognising instinctively that this is unacceptable, the best performers strive to achieve the delicate balance between quality and quantity. This means doing the best work in the time frame and the quantities required to meet the customer’s expectations and the company’s strategic goals.

They take ownership of the projects and responsibilities assigned to them. Super managers always demonstrate a “can do” attitude. They rarely shun responsibility. Instead, they consider completion of a project to be a personal responsibility, and they work to influence others along the assembly line to help achieve stated goals (which, as we have noted, are always linked to the company’s objectives). Assume, for example, that your IT manager is asked to produce monthly reports tracking the company’s sales trends. Soon after the manager sets out to generate the data, he faces a roadblock: an administrator in the sales department is reluctant to release the necessary reports on a timely basis. Rather than pointing a finger at the administrator and taking a “don’t blame me” attitude, the IT manager goes through back channels to tap new sources of data, making certain that the reports are produced on time. Because he “owned” the project, he refused to let it be derailed. This resourcefulness and determination makes the super performer an unstoppable and powerful force for increased productivity.

By identifying the traits and characteristics of the super performers in your business and by seeking to train everyone in the skills they exhibit, you will be re-engineering your work processes (your invisible assembly line) for maximum productivity and profits.

Leadership and Team Building – 1 day course

Who will benefit from the course?

One of your main responsibilities, as a manager or supervisor, is to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of your team in relation to its goals and to provide the motivation and skills to achieve those goals. This course will help you to improve the direction, motivation and goal achievement of your team. The subjects covered will include:

• analysing your leadership style
• team development issues
• are you a leader or a manager?
• essential management skills
• setting standards and follow up
• developing your own leadership development strategy
• motivation theory and practice
• managing conflict
• appraisal/development skills
• analysing training needs
• decision making
• creating a team identity
• pre-empting conflict

Related information

Podcasts

Listen to our Leadership and Team Building Podcasts