People aren’t born with management skills. Those skills need to be developed. Have you provided your existing and emerging leaders with the management training they need to succeed?
The Usual Approach
Most organizations do surprisingly little to make sure their leaders are skilled and confident. Best case, they haphazardly approve manager-initiated requests to attend an off-site seminar or sporadically bring in a speaker to cover some topic that would be good for managers to know.
Worst case, they let new managers learn on the job, figuring they’ll either catch on or wash out. What they don’t anticipate is that they never do get it but remain in the position, creating all sorts of damage as long as they are in charge.
A Fresh Approach to Leadership Development
We’ve been doing leadership development for nearly 25 years. A successful leadership development strategy ought to create leaders who…
- understand the expectations of their role.
- know how to skillfully complete the key responsibilities that come with the position.
- have the courage to act when no one else will.
- take the initiative to make things better.
- work together as a team to advance the organization’s goals.
It was with these goals in mind that we developed The Leadership Expedition.
Here’s How It Works
The Leadership Expedition (LE) is a facilitated learning experience for supervisors and managers. The program can be delivered at your location or via webinar-style sessions, typically for a group of new or emerging leaders. These leaders learn as a team, attending all the sessions together and supporting one another during their time in the program.
Customized Program
The program is all about options. It draws from a catalog of 50 skill sessions grouped into nine series. Follow the links if you want to check out some of the possibilities.
- The Team Builder Series
- The Coaching Series
- The Effective Communicator Series
- The Meeting Leadership Series
- The Facilitation Skills Series
- The Work It Out Series
- The Change Series
- The Time Management Series
- The Personal Effectiveness Series
If there is a particular skill you don’t see, it doesn’t mean we can’t add it for your group. We continually develop new sessions.
Together, we determine which skills your managers most need to develop. We then build a program around those skills. The number of skills is a function of the amount of time you are willing to invest in your leaders.
To help people grow over time and practice the skills as they go, we recommend stretching the program over at least a year. Again, our focus is meeting your requirements. Duration and frequency can both be adjusted to accommodate your needs.
Here’s What People Like Best
Applicable
You’ve probably been to workshops in which the trainer says, “Today’s session will be a success if you walk away with just one thing that’s useful to you.” Then the instructor throws a lot of spaghetti against the wall, and it’s your job to see if anything sticks.
The problem with this approach is that while there may be some useful nuggets in the mix, you have to sit through parts you don’t care about. That wastes your time.
With a Leadership Expedition session, we hone in on the skills the participants are most likely to use. Our goal isn’t to provide knowledge. It’s to build skills and change habits.
Experiential
Adult learners don’t want to sit passively and be spoon fed a slide deck. They want to play an active role in the learning process.
LE session content is built collaboratively through each person’s participation. They ask questions, share opinions, practice, and offer feedback. The facilitator provides a few key ideas or techniques, but these sessions are designed for people who are willing to engage.
Upon completing a session, the participants are ready to use what they’ve learned. With practice, their skills and competence continue to grow. And with competence comes the kind of confident leadership that others recognize and ultimately want to follow.
Team-Based
By sharing the experience with the same people over the course of time, participants get to know one another and build trusting relationships. These relationships bear fruit later on when your company wants to solve problems that require cross-functional cooperation and collaboration. The Leadership Expedition folks know how to work together.
Between Session Support
We not only serve the group as session facilitators, but also as coaches and mentors. We take a personal interest in each participant, doing what we can to help that person build skills and confidence. This might mean offering feedback, doing some collaborative problem-solving, or responding to questions between sessions.
Invest In Your Leaders
The Leadership Expedition is an excellent way to demonstrate your commitment to the people who you need to step up and lead. If this concept sounds like the answer to your leadership development needs, we’d love to talk.