Front Line Leadership Program
Courses include: Expectations of a Front Line Leader | Winning the Day | Leading by Example | Leadership Styles | Motivating and Engaging Team Members | Effective Communication | Leading Change | Empowerment, Accountability, and Training | Addressing Behavior and Performance Issues | Managing Conflict Expand
Expectations of a Front Line Leader
Overall objective:
Understand what's expected of you as a leader and identify leadership skills to work on.
This module will enable participants to:
- Evaluate their skills and knowledge against the expectations of a front line leader.
- Improve relations between management and their team members by properly representing each side.
- Evaluate their message delivery between management and team members to help ensure the proper message is being delivered.
- Establish a strategy to be able to escape the leadership trap and gain time to develop and implement processes, strategies, and training to improve the performance of the team.
Winning the Day
Overall objective:
Create a sense of accomplishment and positive momentum in your team.
This module will enable participants to:
- Clarify expectations so their team knows what success looks like.
- Create a sense of optimism and hope in their team by addressing frustrations and obstacles and creating a brighter future for their team.
- Explain “why” to get better buy-in from team members.
- Build a process for shift starts and shift handoffs to maintain a seamless production and performance outcome from one shift to the other.
Leading by Example
Overall objective:
Create a culture of mutual respect so that your team will follow your example.
This module will enable participants to:
- Demonstrate their expectations through their actions.
- Treat their team members consistently to create teamwork and avoid feelings of resentment.
- Set boundaries to avoid personal relationships affecting their ability to lead.
- Build relationships with their team so they can achieve better results.
Leadership Styles
Overall objective:
Use the Coach leadership style to maximize both performance and team member satisfaction.
This module will enable participants to:
- Understand and identify the characteristics and impact of four common leadership styles:
- Autocrat, Caretaker, Conformist, and Coach.
- See each leadership style in action and understand what type of results each style produces.
- Aim to be a “Coach”, and then, as situations warrant it, flex into other styles.
Motivating and Engaging Employees
Overall objective:
Create an environment where your team members are motivated to do their best.
This module will enable participants to:
- Understand how they, as a leader, impact the level of motivation and engagement of their team.
- Have a positive perspective in regard to young workers by understanding that they have been raised differently.
- Create a welcoming environment by implementing simple steps to help retain team members and reduce turnover.
Effective Communication
Overall objective:
Communicate information, expectations, and feedback in a way that maximizes engagement and delivers results.
This module will enable participants to:
- Understand the various elements that make communication successful, so their team members take the action the leader desires.
- Use the appropriate words, tone, and body language, in written or verbal communication, to get their message across.
- Use open-ended questions and effective listening to engage and involve their team.
Leading Change
Overall objective:
Accelerate change initiatives by reducing resistance and increasing buy-in.
This module will enable participants to:
- Remain curious and experimental toward change initiatives.
- Have their team reduce resistance and increase buy-in by understanding the need for change, having confidence in their ability to change, and putting change into action.
- Develop a game plan to implement a change initiative.
Empowerment, Accountability, and Training
Overall objective:
Help your team become more self-reliant and engaged and increase their bench strength.
This module will enable participants to:
- Understand the difference between the comfort, panic, and learning zones, and help shift team members toward the learning zone.
- Help them identify how to empower their team to be more self-reliant, and free up their time for higher-value tasks.
- Increase the accountability of their team so they take more responsibility and increase their sense of ownership.
- Provide the necessary knowledge and skills through effective on-the-job training so they feel empowered and can be held accountable.
Addressing Behavior and Performance Issues
Overall objective:
Address behavior and performance issues constructively, to build up your team and ensure expectations are met.
This module will enable participants to:
- Take a strengthening and building approach to delivering constructive feedback.
- Demonstrate the courage to address issues promptly to avoid unnecessary tension or escalation.
- Select and use one of three methods to address issues and reinforce behavior.
Managing Conflict
Overall objective:
Resolve conflict constructively to achieve better results and relationships on your team.
This module will enable participants to:
- See that the best outcome to conflict is where all parties are satisfied with the solution.
- Determine how individuals react and how best to approach them to resolve conflict.
- Realize the root of most conflict is misunderstanding and that the solution is to build a common understanding.
- Help team members vent their emotions before solving the problem.
- Resolve conflict situations constructively and respectfully.
Courses include: Stress Resilience | Emotional Intelligence | Safety Leadership: Delivering Safety Feedback | Fit for Duty | Time and Priority Management | Problem Solving & Decision Making Expand
Stress Resilience
Expectations have never been higher for front line leaders as they pursue excellence in safety, quality, and production. Leaders can either succumb to the pressure or learn how to maintain high levels of performance against the backdrop of high expectations.
Outcomes:
- Understand the performance/stress curve and how to extend your performance curve under pressure.
- Self-evaluate and expand stress resiliency factors (includes diet, exercise, body quieting, relying on colleagues, meditation).
- Recognize that more difficult conversations are better had earlier in the day/week before stress and fatigue cause less constructive behaviors.
- Use active problem solving to deal with uncertainty and reduce stress.
Emotional Intelligence
Skilled front line leaders know how to control their own emotions and show empathy for their team members. In this session will help leaders understand how to keep themselves in a positive emotional state and connect with their team members effectively.
Outcomes:
- Increase your self-awareness as a front line leader.
- Modify your behavior and approach depending on the situation and the person you are interacting with.
- Read people more effectively and show empathy for their situation and point of view.
- Coach the behavior change needed to ensure the team member meets expectations in terms of behavior and performance.
Safety Leadership: Delivering Safety Feedback
Building a safety culture and providing safety feedback are essential responsibilities for front line leaders. This topic helps the front line leader develop the mindset and skillset to reinforce a safety culture and builds confidence in how to address co-workers or peers who might unwittingly commit unsafe acts.
Outcomes:
- Increase understanding of what motivates unsafe behavior.
- Recognize that safety is a combination of people-focus and compliance-focus.
- Demonstrate behaviors that increase trust and respect in the workgroup.
- Deliver constructive safety feedback even when the recipient is argumentative or defensive.
Fit for Duty
Front line leaders are responsible for the health and safety of their team. Part of that responsibility is to ensure that each team member is fit for duty. This topic focuses on understanding the factors that impact fit for duty and how to address any concerns that might create an at-risk situation.
Outcomes:
- Understand the leader’s role in ensuring team members are fit for duty.
- Recognizing situations and observations that reveal fit for duty concerns.
- Address situations that can impact a team members ability to perform their job safety.
- Take action to ensure that any team member who is unfit for duty is removed from at-risk situations.
Time and Priority Management
Being more effective at organizing daily and weekly work tasks will help ensure that a front line leader is able to complete high priority tasks even with the need to respond to issues and interruptions in any given day. This topic focuses on creating a practical plan for a given day or week, and identifying activities that are better performed at the beginning, middle and end of the day or week.
Outcomes:
- Prioritize activities that should be performed at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the day (or week).
- Consider that urgent issues and interruptions will consume part of your time as a leader and how to ensure important tasks get completed.
- Identify and reduce time wasters that reduce productivity and efficiency.
Problem Solving & Decision Making
Employee motivation increases and their resistance to change decreases when they are involved in problem solving and making decisions. Teams generate more ideas and better or different ideas because of their experience and expertise. In this session we’ll help the leader build their skills in helping their teams make better decisions and solve problems. A survival simulation is used to teach the core concepts.
Outcomes:
- Avoid feeling that you as the leader need to solve every problem yourself.
- Solicit ideas, solutions, and insights from your team.
- Learn how to avoid having one person dominate the team or have team members withdraw.
- Learn to make higher-quality decisions by identifying the problem, examining alternatives, and discussing consequences.
- Understand why leaders should speak last to avoid steering the team in the wrong direction or creating the sense that team input isn’t needed.
Courses include: Leadership Style Inventory | Collaborate to Win: Cultural Sensitivity | Safety Leadership: Creating a Safety Culture | Converting Problems into Action | Coaching for Performance | Your Leadership Journey Expand
Leadership Style Inventory
We will help the leader understand how their thinking and behavior is either helping or hurting their effectiveness.
Outcomes:
- Complete a self-inventory of thinking and behavior styles.
- Develop a greater understanding of whether the leader exhibits aggressive-defensive or passive-defensive behavior that detracts from their constructive approach.
- Improve relationships both personally and at work by using a more constructive approach.
- Gain insights into how to reduce defensiveness and be more constructive.
Collaborate to Win: Cultural Sensitivity
Leaders are responsible for creating a work environment that is welcoming and inclusive. This session focuses on creating better appreciation for tapping into diverse opinions and perspectives to create better performance.
Outcomes:
- Appreciate the power of diverse teams – more ideas and better ideas from different perspectives.
- Increase cultural awareness – similarities and differences in context, space and time.
- Accept and embrace differences by walking a mile in the shoes of others.
- Collaborate for success by solving problems as a team and creating a win, win, win outcome.
- Differentiate between misunderstandings and intent.
Safety Leadership: Creating a Safety Culture
The frontline leader has a crucial role in prioritizing safety and focusing on continuous improvement in safety performance. In this session we recognize key safety accomplishments along with the remaining challenges and opportunities to deepen the value of safety throughout the organization.
Outcomes:
- Reflect on safety accomplishments in the past year.
- Identify challenges and opportunities to improve safety performance.
- Discuss the supporting and opposing forces to improving safety.
- Identify how to strengthen safety as a value to the leader and the team.
Converting Problems into Action
Minutes matter, and being an effective leader means being able to convert situations and problems into an immediate action plan that is designed to recover from production interruptions that impact results.
Outcomes:
- Create a sense of urgency around actions that will help the team recover from production challenges.
- Create short- and medium-term action plans to bring results back to target without the unnecessary escalation of issues to senior leadership for resolution.
- Use the GROW Model to create an action plan and gain commitment from other functions and departments to allocate the needed resources and commit to hitting the goals.
Coaching for Performance
Leaders inevitably need to address gaps between current and desired behavior and performance. Using a simulation based on coaching a sports team, participants will identify the most effective coaching approach to use to maximize the team’s chance of winning and the participation and commitment of the team members.
Outcomes:
- Identify leadership thinking and action that supports or detracts from team performance.
- Learn from recognized coaches how they think in terms of team performance and build those insights into the team leader’s approach.
- Work collaboratively on how to bring a coaching mindset into the workplace to maximize performance and engagement.
Your Leadership Journey
Becoming a better leader is a lifelong journey. Leaders learn from both setbacks and successes. In this wrap up section of the course we give leaders the opportunity to reflect on the ups and downs of their career and the lessons learned along the way.
Outcomes:
- Recognize the value from reflection on setbacks and successes. Whether a given project or situation achieved the desired results, learning occurred. Using that learning to inform future efforts leads to compounded growth.
- Share key learning with peers and learn from their journeys.
- Support the growth and development of your team through their setbacks and successes.
Team Leader Essentials Program
Courses include: The Transition from Peer to Leader | Providing Peer-to-Peer Feedback | Managing Conflict | Providing Effective On-the-job Training Expand
The Transition from Peer to Leader
Managing the transition from a co-worker or peer to being a leader can be a challenge. Instead of being responsible for only your own safety, quality, and productivity, you are now expected to provide leadership to your team. This session helps front line leaders understand what is expected and how to be more confident, capable, and consistent in their role.
Outcomes:
- Understand how being a leader differs from being an individual contributor.
- Assessing yourself against the characteristics of an effective leader.
- Understand the expectations of a front line leader.
- Be aware of typical challenging situations faced by front line leaders.
- Balance leadership and friendship.
- Leading with trust and respect.
- Understand the working leader’s role in maximizing safety, quality, and productivity, while maximizing employee involvement
Providing Peer-to-Peer Feedback
Front line leaders can find it a challenge to provide feedback to their peers. Even without formal disciplinary authority or responsibility, the front line leader is still expected to have conversations with peers about safety, quality, productivity and behaviors. This session provides the skills to help front line leaders be more confident, capable, and consistent in providing feedback to the team.
Outcomes:
- Why it’s essential to say something when you see something.
- How providing peer feedback actually improves the morale and attitude of the team.
- Factors that impact the success of the feedback conversation.
- Using the B.E.E.R. method for providing in-the-moment feedback.
- Using the B.E.T. method to provide positive feedback.
Managing Conflict
Conflicts are an inevitable part of being a leader. Team leaders are usual the first line of defense when conflicts arise on their teams. This topic provides the skills to help team leaders be more confident, capable, and consistent in providing feedback to the team.
Outcomes:
- Realize the root of most conflict is misunderstanding and that the solution is to build a common understanding.
- Help team members vent their emotions before attempting to solve the problem.
Providing Effective On-the-job Training
The team leader often has the primary responsibility for ensuring that team members can consistently and confidently perform their job tasks. Given the pitfalls that accompany the buddy system, this session provides a basic structure for providing more effective job instruction training.
Outcomes:
- Use the Training Within Industry (TWI) framework to break down job tasks into easier to learn elements.
- Deliver training more effectively to support safety, productivity and quality.
Management Development Program
Courses include: Leadership Work Styles Assessment | Using a Coach Approach | Stress Resilience: Performing Under Pressure | Emotional Intelligence for Managers | Collaborate to Win: Cultural Sensitivity | Managing Up | Your Leadership Journey Expand
Leadership Work Styles Assessment
The style and approach of the leader ends up casting a shadow on their work team. That cascading impact creates a series of intended and unintended consequences. Given that most leaders want to create better results and a more constructive culture, this session will provide specific recommendations to increase effectiveness.
Outcomes:
- Complete a self-assessment of thinking and behavior styles.
- Develop greater self-awareness of strengths that contribute to current success and areas that can be further improved for even greater future success.
- Review specific recommendations to grow your leadership capability, confidence and consistency.
- Create a constructive impact on your team to improve performance and culture.
Using a Coach Approach
This session is a follow up to the highly impactful session from the Front Line Leadership course that illustrates the impact of leadership style on performance and team member satisfaction. If the participants are unlikely to have received that topic in a previous course, it may be repeated here. In either case, this session goes deeper into how the leader can more fully embrace a Coach approach with their team.
Outcomes:
- Clarify expectations with your team so they understand what winning means.
- Involve the team to increase the number of ideas, the quality of ideas and the buy-in to implement new initiatives.
- Build on positives (gains) instead of focusing on mistakes and build momentum that increases capability and confidence so your team can deliver consistently improving results.
Stress Resilience: Performing Under Pressure
Expectations have never been higher for managers as they pursue better performance and higher expectations for improvement. Leaders can either succumb to the pressure or learn how to maintain high levels of performance against the backdrop of high expectations.
Outcomes:
- Understand the performance/stress curve and how to extend your performance curve under pressure.
- Self-evaluate and expand stress resiliency factors (includes diet, exercise, body quieting, relying on colleagues, meditation).
- Recognize that more difficult conversations are better had earlier in the day/week before stress and fatigue cause less constructive behaviors.
- Use active problem solving to deal with uncertainty and reduce stress.
Emotional Intelligence for Managers
To achieve maximum performance and personal effectiveness, managers need to know how to control their own emotions and show empathy for their team members. This session will help leaders understand how to keep themselves in a positive emotional state and connect with their team members effectively.
Outcomes:
- Increase your self-awareness as a manager.
- Modify your behavior and approach depending on the situation and the person you are interacting with.
- Read people more effectively and show empathy for their situation and point of view.
- Coach the behavior change needed to ensure the team member meets expectations in terms of behavior and performance.
Collaborate to Win: Cultural Sensitivity
Leaders are responsible for creating a work environment that is welcoming and inclusive. This session focuses on creating better appreciation for tapping into diverse opinions and perspectives to create better performance.
Outcomes:
- Appreciate the power of diverse teams – more ideas and better ideas from different perspectives.
- Increase cultural awareness – similarities and differences in context, space and time.
- Accept and embrace differences by walking a mile in the shoes of others.
- Collaborate for success by solving problems as a team and creating a win, win, win outcome.
- Differentiate between misunderstandings and intent.
Managing Up
To achieve career success, leaders need to manage their relationships with the managers and executives they report to. In this topic, we help the participant develop practical strategies to manage the expectations created by the senior leaders at their site.
Outcomes:
- Identify what your manager expects of you.
- Communicating information up within the organization.
- Sell your ideas to get buy in from senior leadership.
Your Leadership Journey
Becoming a better leader is a lifelong journey. Leaders learn from both setbacks and successes. In this wrap up section of the course we give leaders the opportunity to reflect on the ups and downs of their career and the lessons learned along the way.
Outcomes:
- Recognize the value from reflection on setbacks and successes. Whether a given project or situation achieved the desired results, learning occurred. Using that learning to inform future efforts leads to compounded growth.
- Share key learning with peers and learn from their journeys.
- Support the growth and development of your team through their setbacks and successes.
Courses include: Accelerating Operational Priorities | Coaching for Performance | Building a Winning Team | Delegation for Empowerment & Accountability | Building Your Bench | Leading Leaders | Influencing the Leadership Journey of Others Expand
Accelerating Operational Priorities
Senior leaders have ambitious goals to drive business performance. To achieve those stretch goals, they need to help their teams understand the actions and behavior changes required to positive influence outcomes. This session will build the skills needed to translate and communicate goals into the required actions needed in the team.
Outcomes:
- Link behaviors and actions to goals and objectives.
- Identify performance gaps between currently observed behaviors and the actions needed to drive results.
- Develop a specific plan for direct reports and their teams to close performance gaps.
- Ensure alignment between various functions so they work collaboratively on priority areas.
- Identify factors that support and oppose the behaviors needed to achieve results in priority areas.
Coaching for Performance
Leaders inevitably need to address gaps between current and desired behavior and performance. Using a simulation based on coaching a sports team, participants will identify the most effective coaching approach to use to maximize the team’s chance of winning and the participation and commitment of the team members.
Outcomes:
- Identify leadership thinking and action that supports or detracts from team performance.
- Learn from recognized coaches how they think in terms of team performance and build those insights into the team leader’s approach.
- Work collaboratively on how to bring a coaching mindset into the workplace to maximize performance and engagement.
Building a Winning Team
Leaders can see themselves as rugged individualists who feel the need to solve every problem and make every decision. In this session we’ll explore why teams tend to generate more ideas and more diverse ideas. Participants will learn how to use a leadership approach that builds a stronger team.
Outcomes:
- Recognize the elements of an effective team.
- Assess the current health of your team and opportunities for improvement.
- Avoid the pitfalls that detract from team effectiveness.
- Implement leadership actions to strengthen your team’s effectiveness.
Delegation for Empowerment & Accountability
To achieve the desired results, leaders need to delegate responsibility, authority and accountability to team members. In this session we will provide a system for delegation and follow up that increases accountability without micromanaging.
Outcomes:
- Identifying what to delegate.
- Get team members to increase their level of self-sufficiency and autonomy so that goals are achieved.
- Learn to plan for successful delegation.
- Understand the key elements of empowerment.
- Understand how both positive and corrective feedback ties into accountability.
- Follow up without micromanaging.
Building Your Bench
The enduring success of any organization is to build the bench strength to support future growth. This includes developing the capability and agility of your team to adapt to future market demands and customer requirements. Done well, the outcome is a more engaged team that is better able to succeed in challenging situations.
Outcomes:
- Determine where each of your direct reports is on their career S-curve (Learning, Growing or Mastery) and help them transition to new challenges before they stagnate.
- Create a pipeline of future leaders to ensure key positions can be filled when needed.
- Create development opportunities for your team through job assignments and project leadership.
Leading Leaders
Leaders create results by aligning the efforts of the hourly and frontline leaders who report to them. In this session the participants will learn how to lead the leaders in their team and help build the performance of those leaders. This includes understanding how to communicate expectations, how to support improvements in their leadership approaches and helping direct reports create more effective leadership habits.
Outcomes:
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the leadership approaches in your team.
- Communicate expectations so leaders can cascade messages throughout their teams.
- Have effective conversations that align the leaders in your team to achieve the results you are accountable for.
Influencing the Leadership Journey of Others
The leaders and team members who report to you will experience inevitable setbacks and successes. Being able to help team members reflect on the learning from a particular outcome can provide valuable lessons that will create greater future success.
Outcomes:
- Help your team members reflect on setbacks and successes. Whether a given project or situation achieved the desired results, learning occurred. Help your team use that learning to inform future efforts and lead to compounded growth.
- Support the growth and development of your team as they navigate their career journey.
Plant Manager Development Program
(3 full-day or 6 half-day sessions)
Courses include: Thinking Strategically to Identify Key Initiatives for Plant Success | Focusing on Gains, Not Gaps Expand
Thinking Strategically to Identify Key Initiatives for Plant Success
It is easy for the plant manager to stay in reaction mode instead of setting a vision for future performance and identifying the strategies and projects to achieve the plant’s full potential. This session helps identify the highest impact strategies and build the commitment of the management team to achieve them.
Outcomes:
- List the challenges and opportunities that the plant is facing.
- Identify the realistic, ideal future state for the plant – the vision.
- Involve the management team in developing the key strategies and related projects that will move the organization towards the vision.
Focusing on Gains, Not Gaps
Most senior leaders focus on negative variances (gaps) and that attention on negative outcomes causes the organization to become negative. Instead, the plant manager should focus on gains to build on positives and create a sense of continuous achievement in the team.
Outcomes:
- Reflect on the positive plant achievements – where gains have been achieved.
- Reframe gaps into opportunities for additional gains.
- Implement positive communications throughout the plant to focus on the gains already achieved and future gains to be made.
Courses include: The Operational Priorities Accelerator Model | Assessing the Health of Underlying Manufacturing Processes and their Causes | Financial Acumen: Identifying the Operational Levers that Impact the Plant’s Financial Performance Expand
The Operational Priorities Accelerator Model
The plant manager’s primary responsibility is to align the functions and resources of the plant to deliver results. This model focuses the plant manager on achieving performance clarity, performance accountability and performance certainty.
Outcomes:
- Clarify the components of a winning-driven operation.
- Identify the factors that drive three outcomes: Engagement (people), Efficiency (process) and Economics (profit).
- Achieve Performance Clarity to move the organization from Confused to Crystallized.
- Achieve Performance Accountability to move the team from Reluctant to Committed.
- Achieve Performance Certainty by shifting performance from Sporadic to Embedded.
Assessing the Health of Underlying Manufacturing Processes and their Causes
The goal is to create robust processes that ordinary people can lead effectively versus unstable processes that require extraordinary leadership and heroic measures to achieve results. In this session the plant manager identifies the existing plant processes that are unstable to identify future continuous improvement and manufacturing excellence projects to stabilize those processes.
Outcomes:
- Create a list of high-impact projects for future continuous improvement and manufacturing excellence efforts.
- Develop a plan to communicate those efforts to build organizational awareness and track progress.
- Engage the necessary resources to implement the projects and build on success.
Financial Acumen: Identifying the Operational Levers that Impact the Plant’s Financial Performance
The ultimate measure of success is the financial performance of the plant. The challenge is understanding how to lead changes in approach and actions to positively influence the financial performance in future periods. Using actual plant financial reports, this session will help the plant manager to understand how to identify and communicate changes required to improve performance.
Outcomes:
- Read, understand, and interpret the financial report.
- Implement a total cost approach to make the right financial decisions for the organization.
- Identify the operational levers and supply chain elements that impact the financial statement.
- Develop an action plan and communication plan to get the organization engaged in driving financial performance.
Courses include: Aligning the Management Team to Achieve the Vision | Safety Leadership: Building a Safety Culture | Emotional Intelligence for Plant Managers Expand
Aligning the Management Team to Achieve the Vision
The plant manager is responsible for aligning the efforts of the management team to achieve the required results. This includes assessing the team’s current strengths and having high-impact conversations to achieve further strengthening.
Outcomes:
- Build a high-level talent map of the key functional areas to identify strengths and growth opportunities.
- Utilize effective one-on-one check-in conversations with managers to ensure alignment with targets and build on progress.
- Implement a systematic process of upgrading the performance of the team.
Safety Leadership: Building a Safety Culture
The plant manager plays a crucial role in prioritizing safety and focusing on continuous improvement in safety performance. In this module we recognize key safety accomplishments along with the remaining challenges and opportunities to deepen the value of safety throughout the organization.
Outcomes:
- Reflect on safety accomplishments in the past year.
- Identify challenges and opportunities to improve safety performance.
- Discuss the supporting and opposing forces to improving safety.
- Identify how to strengthen safety being seen as a core value to you as the plant manager and to the team.
Emotional Intelligence for Plant Managers
Maximizing the plant manager’s leadership impact requires the ability to influence others to achieve results. Embracing behavioral technology effectively builds greater commitment and drives performance. The focus of this module is on increasing self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy.
Outcomes:
- Increase self-awareness to recognize and regulate your leadership approach.
- Recognize and influence the thinking and performance of others.
- Build high performance teams.
- Build productive, high trust relationships.
- Involve others in collaborative problem solving and decision making.
Preparing to Lead Aspiring Leaders Program
(1 half-day session)
Preparing to Lead: Aspiring Leaders
This workshop is for team members who might be considering a future promotion to a leadership role or for high-potential employees identified by management for promotion. The goal is to help a future leader understand some of the expectations and challenges of making the transition from being an individual contributor to getting results from the efforts of others.
- Transitioning from Peer to Leader: As an individual contributor you are primarily accountable for your own work output and quality. As a leader, you become accountable for your team’s ability to perform, both in terms of output and quality.
- Balancing Friendship and Leadership: Relationships often change when you transition from a co-worker to a team leader or supervisor. It can be a challenge to balance your pre-existing relationships with your new leadership responsibilities.
- Expectations of a Leader: Participants will complete a self-assessment of their strengths as it relates to what is expected of leaders. The assessment also helps the participant understand the areas they will need to grow and develop to achieve success in a leadership role.
- Leadership Essentials: A review of some of the key areas that require proficiency and strengthening as a leader.
- Who Wants to Be a Leader?: Understanding that it is okay to focus on being a technical specialist instead of aspiring to lead others.
- Creating a Personal Development Plan: Identifying what to develop to position yourself for a leadership position if that is your choice.
Other Leadership and Development Topics
Courses include: Walk a Mile in My Shoes | Pit Crew Challenge | Training Excellence Workshop Expand
Walk a Mile in My Shoes
For your organization to achieve its full potential you need all the departments and functions to collaborate instead of competing. In most cases departments are not deliberately trying to make the work of other functions more difficult. This session helps team members appreciate the goals, frustrations and support needed by other departments.
Outcomes:
- Identify the goals, frustrations and support required by various functions in the company.
- Gain greater appreciation for how the various departments in the organization can work better together to achieve the full potential of the organization.
- Develop an action plan to support the needs of other department to help build a winning-focused operation.
Pit Crew Challenge
This experiential learning activity involves a real NASCAR-style race car. Using a driver, crew chief, and facilitator, participants will change all four tires under the clock, benchmark and improve their performance and learn unforgettable lessons about coaching culture, high performance teaming, continuous improvement, and customer focus.
Key Elements:
- Participants receive a safety briefing and training on the key job functions of the pit crew.
- Teams will take turns changing the four tires on the race car and debrief key learnings between each run.
- The emotional excitement of working on a real, running race car along with expert facilitation will create life-long learning that leader can utilize to drive performance in their work teams.
Training Excellence Workshop
- The Four Steps of the Job Instruction Methodology
- The Job Breakdown Worksheet: Clearly detail the major steps, key points, and reasons for those key points and so ensure a clear and logical training process.
- Clarifying your objective: what do you want participants to know, feel, and do as a result of your teaching?
- Asking vs. telling: ensure the SMEs are using questions to understand what the employees are learning and retaining and where reinforcement or retraining is needed.
- Relevant training scenarios so the participants can apply their learning
- Have a basic understanding of how and why adults learn.
- Know what Training Within Industry is and its role in the workplace.
- Understand the importance of preparation before training.
- Use the four-step method for instructing team members on new tasks.
- Master the art of breaking down tasks into manageable steps by creating clear and concise Job Breakdown Sheets.