Leaders may believe that taking time away from regular work for training could impact BAU.
It makes sense of course, maybe the team is understaffed due to vacancies and recruitment freezes, or everyone is just incredibly busy.
Let us imagine for a moment that a few days of training could step-change performance and increase productivity.
The question we might want to address though is how effectively everyone is working in the first place.
Here are ten simple barriers to effectiveness that management training can break down.
1. Employee engagement: If team members have any hesitations around their ability to perform their roles, or experience a lack of freedom to choose their approach or are not feeling at home or comfortable in the team or culture they will not perform at their best. Choosing our leadership style carefully can help but more importantly equipping them to feel more effective at what they do by offering support with their softer skills is often of huge value.
2. Lack of clear direction or buy in: If objectives are not understood, embraced or clearly prioritised employees can feel lost. It doesn’t take too much time to build a session around aligning the team to the core aims and building energy, passion and focus.
3. Communication and influencing: This is such a huge part of getting the job done effectively. Basic skills around listening, questioning well, building rapport, breaking down misunderstandings and managing critical conversations are often an overlooked development area. In short great communication, reduces assumptions, resolves politics, and increases effectiveness.
4. Change management: If we make changes, for whatever critical reason, to our priorities, goals, team members or processes we need to manage the change sensitively. For team members to adapt effectively and embrace change it needs to be understood fully, sold in and considered engagement efforts are required. Building a session around coping with change, helping others adapt to change or even simply explaining specific changes in an elegant way in key. People will resist change, they can be inflexibile and reluctant and it can breed inefficiency.
5. Keeping your best people: Those business who invest in their top staff build greater loyalty. Offering tailored support to support career development, learning new skills and management behaviours is one of the first things modern day employees look for now. When development and growth opportunities are offered employees feel appreciated. It is incredibly frustrating, costly and time consuming to go back to the market to find good people. It is far easier to keep them and a commercial mistake to save L and D costs in order to incur greater costs later with less delivery while posts are vacant and new team members get up to speed.
6. Decision-making skills: It is rare that the expert skill of effective decision-making is taught and employees can execute key projects in the most efficient way. Subjective bias around preferences, poor judgement, inadequate analysis or fear of the unknow can all impact the route employees choose. Practical skills can be taught quickly together with models for gathering evidence, weighing alternatives, and considering consequences.
7. Delegation and Feedback fundamentals: We have all had that experience where roles and responsibilities are blurred. The inefficiency and sense of ownership becomes opaque fast. Where we are feeling like we have insufficient autonomy to progress tasks alone, or even where we have insufficient guidance. There is a clear continuum of management communication stretching from “let’s do every step together” right up to “just do it. ” In each specific circumstance the task, individual and situation needs to be considered. Whether we are managers, colleagues or part of a cross-functional team we need the skills to determine how we delegate and collaborate effectively.
When it comes to feedback few of us exercise delivering messages in a considered way. When we account for feelings and the development of individuals adequately, we only need to offer each piece of feedback once. Embedding a culture of regular considered and open feedback enables greater team work, an improved sense of accountability and a more rewarding experience.
8. Conflict resolution: No one likes the butterflies in our stomach which follow the thought that we have created ill feeling or an uncomfortable relationship. Again it doesn’t matter if it is our line reports, our manager, our suppliers, clients or other stakeholders. The solution is the same, learning the coping skills to not take things personally, to stay calm, to ask questions and then to move to an effective resolution for all parties.
9. Stress and resilience: Life is not easy at home or at work. If our employees are ill equipped to cope with pressure and do not have ways to manage anxiety, stress and pressure they will never perform to a high standard consistently. If their well-being is impacted by work-load, complex project demands, or challenges at home it is our responsibility to support them. Human beings need to feel psychological safety and trust, they also benefit from having coping strategies they can employ during difficult times.
10. Personal growth opportunities Last but certainly not least : When we equip our people with the ability to be more strategic, to increase their emotional intelligence they will contribute a great deal more to our businesses. They will be more innovative, more calm, more responsive and more in touch with new business opportunities. The fundamental building blocks of self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, empathy and personal motivation represent the most powerful behaviours we can learn and apply in our teams and in our work day to day.
What are your thoughts on these areas of focus?
DO COMMENT!
Do you agree that time spent enhancing these skills will actually save time beyond the time invested in training?
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