Front Line Leadership Topics
Expectations of a Front Line Leader
- Recognize that the leader needs to maintain both a focus on results and on involving their team to drive performance.
- Reflect on the leaders you’ve worked for and the characteristics that made your best leader so effective.
- Evaluate yourself using a self-assessment (done in class) on fifteen leadership behaviors/competencies.
- How to avoid the leadership trap in which your team members bombard you with questions, decisions and problems they could be empowered to solve on their own.
- How to get your team started effectively at the beginning of their day.
- In a multi-shift environment, ensure shift handoffs more effective.
Winning the Day
- How to transition from being reactive to being proactive as a leader so that you can achieve improved performance in your team.
- Creating the sense in your team that you as the leader are working to reduce frustration and create a sense that your team members are supported in executing their job tasks.
- Clarifying in your own mind how you would like your team to perform in the future.
- Clarify your expectations of your team so they understand what “winning the day” looks like.
- The importance of explaining “why” when assigning work your team might resist or to get them to buy-in to the need to change.
Leading by Example
- Recognizing how your actions and behaviors set the example for your team.
- Ensuring that your words and actions are consistent.
- How to avoid perceptions of favoritism by applying rules consistently and giving your time, attention, and work assignments equally across the team.
- How to balance leadership and friendship, especially when in transition from co-worker to leader.
- How to treat your team with respect and earn their trust and respect.
Leadership Styles
- How your approach as the leader impacts both the performance of your team and their job satisfaction.
- Situational Leadership: When to strategically use a more direct style, a more easy-going style or a more detail-oriented or compliance style.
- In this session, we use an interactive activity to reveal how four leadership styles create different outcomes and satisfaction levels: Coach, Caretaker, Autocrat, Conformist.
- Focus on being more of a “coach” by clarifying expectations, involving your team and building on positives.
Motivating and Engaging Employees
- Reflecting on when you were the most motivated and whether you are providing these opportunities to your team.
- How your approach as a leader impacts the retention and turnover of team members, especially in the first few days and weeks of employment.
- How your beliefs about your team members influences their behavior and performance.
- The difference between what leaders think motivates their team and what really motivates their team.
- How to motivate a multi-generational team – the factors that are the same and those that differ across generations.
Effective Communication
- Thinking before you speak – what you want to communicate.
- The importance of small talk, being clear with your expectations and meeting the emotional needs of your team in your day-to-day communication.
- How to be clear about your message before you communicate.
- How to ask more open-ended questions to build greater buy-in to your team.
- The importance of focusing on what you want and avoiding “don’ts” that confuse your message.
- Improving your listening skills.
- How to conduct an effective shift-start meeting.
Leading Change
- Why, as the leader, you need to buy into change first.
- How to embrace a curiosity and experimentation mindset to lead your team through change initiatives.
- Understanding resistance to change and how to overcome it.
- How change can be a positive motivator.
- How to simplify the change, encourage the team and make it easier to change.
Accountability, Empowerment and Training
- Why most team members rely on the leader to make every decision and solve every problem instead of being more self-sufficient.
- How to get team members to take ownership of their work by applying positive and corrective consequences.
- Equipping your team for success: Effective on-the-job training and coaching to build capability and confidence.
Addressing Behavior and Performance Issues
- Understanding your role in the coaching, confronting and correcting process.
- Reasons employees don’t perform and how to correct and prevent them.
- Why it is important to say something when you see something.
- How to comment on a performance, safety or quality issue in the moment using the B.E.E.R. method.
- How to prepare for and conduct a conversation to address difficult situations and unacceptable behaviors.
- The importance of documentation.
- Delivering positive feedback using the B.E.T. method.
Managing Conflict
- Recognizing that conflict is necessary and expected when implementing change.
- Understanding that conflict, change and continuous improvement often co-exist.
- How to deal with emotional outbursts with your team members and focus on specific actions you can take to resolve the conflict.
- Understanding and dealing with defensive behavior in yourself and others.
- Remaining constructive when dealing with passive or aggressive team members and peers.
- How to mediate conflict between two team members.
Additional Topics
Safety Leadership – Level One
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.
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.
- Understand the hourly leader’s role in maximizing safety, quality and productivity, while maximizing employee involvement.
Leadership for Talent Retention
Front line leaders are surprised to know that the relationship they have with team members has a large impact on retention and turnover. By consciously creating positive emotional experiences for team members in their first few house, days and weeks with the company, turnover can be reduced by up to 20%.
Outcomes:
- Understand how leaders and skilled technicians impact a team member’s decision to leave or stay with the organization.
- Learn simple, effective leadership strategies and tactics that can make an immediate, quantifiable impact on retention.
- Develop positive leadership actions that influence team member motivation, attention to detail and productivity.
- Change your leadership approach to positively impact retention starting immediately
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.
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.
- Template and practice in conducting an effective feedback conversation.
Stress Resilience: Performance Under Pressure
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).
- Apply the concept of ego depletion and why you should have difficult conversations earlier in the shift if possible.
- Use active problem solving to deal with uncertainty and reduce stress.
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.
Coaching Mindset
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 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.
Safety Leadership – Level Two
The front line leader has a crucial role in helping achieve safety performance goals and ensuring team members don’t get injured from at risk behaviors. In this session we identify the successes to date and the challenges and opportunities to make additional improvements in safety and 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.
Leading with Trust and Respect
How the front line leader interacts with his or her team will impact the safety, behavior, and results of the team. If those interactions are perceived as disrespectful, the leader won’t get maximum effort and commitment from their team. This session will help front line leaders reflect on their own behaviors to show respect to their team and earn greater respect from their team.
Outcomes:
- Reflect on how respect and trust shows up in work based relationships.
- Develop or enhance leadership behaviors that convey respect, even in difficult situations.
- Remain respectful when under stress and pressure.
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.
Senior Leadership Topics
Converting Problems into Action
How the front line leader interacts with his or her team will impact the safety, behavior, and results of the team. If those interactions are perceived as disrespectful, the leader won’t get maximum effort and commitment from their team. This session will help front line leaders reflect on their own behaviors to show respect to their team and earn greater respect from their team.
Outcomes:
- Reflect on how respect and trust shows up in work based relationships.
- Develop or enhance leadership behaviors that convey respect, even in difficult situations.
- Remain respectful when under stress and pressure.
Conducting Effective Team Meetings
Getting everyone on the same page usually involves meetings. And yet many of the meetings that are conducted aren’t considered as being useful from the participants point of view.
Outcomes:
- Incorporate the ingredients of effective team meetings.
- Get better outcomes from meetings by ensuring the team stays solution focused.
- Increase the participation and involvement from your crew.
- Structure the discussion for success.
Delegation for Empowerment and 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.
Pit Crew Challenge
(This program has higher pricing due to equipment, transportation, venue, and crew costs - half-day duration)
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.
- 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.
Leading Leaders
Leaders create results by aligning the efforts of the hourly and front line 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.
Translating Goals and Objectives into Behavior Change
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.
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.
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.
Your Leadership Journey
As part of the wrap up of leadership training, participants will have the opportunity to reflect on what they’ve learned in the course. They’ll think about their leadership journey so far and look ahead at their development priorities for the future.
Outcomes:
- Identify their greatest gains so far in their leadership journey.
- Look ahead at the areas of leadership that require additional development.
- Reflect on the training they’ve received and the impact it’s had on their leadership development.