“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – (Abraham Lincoln)
All to often in business, leaders are reactive. They wait for end of year reviews to tell employees how they haven’t done things how they would have wished for the previous twelve months; they wait for annual employee surveys to find out what has been stopping their people performing optimally over the same period, or why talented employees are leaving. Customer surveys go out to collect information from people who are already disgruntled and unlikely to return. Leaders themselves don’t confront the issues in themselves that are affecting their own performance.
Proactive Leadership is about getting ahead of people, customer and business issues before they have become and endemic and need a ‘project’ or ‘workstream’ setting up to fix them. We teach leaders how to engage with people inside and outside of the business to understand issues as they start to form, not when they have bred and destroyed performance. We look at:
Managing People Performance – Often not what leaders want to be doing, and often they find it hard to confront those people who don’t perform or aren’t on board with your organisational vision, mission, strategy or values and behaviours. Addressing these issues can seem daunting, but it is crucial to the success of any business or organisation. Spending time and money getting the right people in is only half the story – making room for them by letting the wrong people go is just as important. We can help your leaders find the way to manage poor performers that they are each comfortable with, and that fits their authentic leadership style – but that gets the difficult job done and creates the space for success.
Talent Identification and Development – Great people make great organisations. You are working hard with your leaders and employees to succeed, but finding the stars of the future and developing the stars of today is what builds truly long term success, across not just years but decades and centuries. Our solution will show you how to make finding great people a process and not pot luck, and how to develop your rising stars in line with long term strategy, not short term resourcing needs.
Crucial people skills – learn how to authentically implement feedback, delegation and coaching into your leadership in a way that works for each individual leader and employee. Learn how not to rely on an annual employee survey to give you insight, but to work proactively with each member of your team to get ahead of issues and ensure your employees are engaged in your vision and enabled to make a difference.
Personal vision – a leader can only lead authentically and effectively once they have worked on understanding their own vision, and how that fits into the organisation’s vision. We work with leaders to understand themselves in a deeper way, and to work to share more of the sense of themselves with their employees, including developing a level of rapport where leader and employee can understand and engage each other in how the organisation links to the leader, and how both then link to the employee.
Building personal support – it is often said that it is not a weakness but a strength to ask for support when it is needed. However there are many leaders who struggle not only to ask, but to realise that they need support in the first place. This is often compounded by a lack of a support network, even when support is sought. We teach leaders how to recognise they need support, and how to build the network around them that they can lean on when the going gets tough.
Now take a look at our Delivery Model
