Learning with Shaping Change

Remote working is here to stay for the time being, and managing your team remotely is quite different from being co-located. Particularly in these times of heightened emotions in the community, staying connected while virtual is key.

This two-hour session for managers will equip you to most effectively manage your remote teams. 

• Effective communication with remote workers
• Team dynamics in the virtual world
• Managing poor performance
• Keeping your remote workers connected, engaged, and productive
• Utilising technology effectively
• Workplace set up
• Maintaining morale in difficult times

This two day workshop for women at all levels of leadership covers:

Values-based leadership: what it means to be an authentic leader

Identify how best to utilise your optimal leadership style within the context of your organisation

Manage emotions for positive and assertive communication and relationships

Develop techniques of persuasion, negotiation and influencing

Having difficult conversations with confidence

Using reflective practice to influence the quality of the culture through the quality of relationships

Career management practices and creating a personal leadership plan

Maximise relationships and networks for professional opportunities

Skills and approaches to manage your image and visibility without feeling you are “selling yourself”

Leverage team dynamics to enhance performance

Challenge, support and empower others

 Drive change and innovation

Embed a positive change culture in an organisation

Build resilience to thrive under pressure

Support your team and engage others to deliver

Share approaches to move your career forward

"I learnt a lot and it was a great reminder of an area which is lacking in my life. I went home and wrote out "who I am", and "what I do" and moving forward I will be saying it proudly and owning it. I guess I am always a little scared to share my outrageous ideas, for fear of mocking or failure. I have been purposely not making myself clear in my introductions. But no more! I am ready to proudly own my work!! Thanks so much!
Your feminine empowerment and passion really inspired me" - J.C.

This half day session for interview panel members covers the following topics:

Exploring candidate fit – questions to uncover if the candidate is competent and motivated to undertake the role and if the candidate is a fit for the team and organisation.

• Left brain (past performance in relation to actual job needs) and Right brain (the actual job requirements for thinking, problem-solving, creativity, planning and decision-making)
• Body language – what to watch for and how to explore incongruence
• Personality and fit for the team
• The role of emotional intelligence

The Halo / Horns effect – interview panel bias and how to avoid it.

• Uncovering your own unconscious biases
• Your personality and the pros and cons of “type alike teams”

Additional selection tools.

Did you know that coaching skills are fundamental to being a good manager?

In fact, 97% of organisations believe that coaching impacts positively on business performance.

But nearly half of the managers surveyed spend less than 10% of their time coaching others.

And there are a whole range of reasons for that, but one of the biggest is that managers don’t have an easy to follow road map for coaching.

Research shows that managers and leaders who become great coaches, can significantly improve employee engagement, reduce turnover, and positively impact the bottom line of their business.

In this program, you will:

• Discover an easy 4 step process for acing your coaching conversations
• Practice one of the most fundamental skills of coaching
• Learn the 3 P’s of effective coaching
• Leave with skills and tools to help you be an effective workplace coach

Whenever you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, it’s likely a crucial conversation is keeping you stuck. Whether it’s a problem with poor quality, slow time-to-market, declining customer satisfaction, or a strained relationship. Whatever the issue, if you can’t talk honestly with nearly anybody about almost anything, you can expect poor results.

Crucial Conversations teaches skills for creating alignment and agreement by fostering open dialogue around high-stakes, emotional, or risky topics, at all levels of your organisation. By learning how to speak and be heard (and encouraging others to do the same), you’ll surface the best ideas, make the highest-quality decisions, and then act on your decisions with unity and commitment.

We know that change is inevitable and there’s really no way around it. But people still fret over it, worrying about what’s lurking around the corner and wondering when the proverbial “other shoe” is going to drop.

In fact, recent research suggests that stress alone is behind 60% of all human illness and disease, with 3 out 4 doctor visits being due to stress-related ailments. Simply put—change, and the stress that it very often brings, is taking a toll on people every day.

Thriving in Change has been developed to focus on the individual process of working through change, and understanding how you can manage that process more effectively. 

This half day workshop is proven to help you cope better with change. Our facilitators will guide you through a 3 step system to coping with change. We help you unpack your reactions to change, understand yourself more deeply and create a powerful plan for building your resilience to change.

• Understand why change impacts you
• Understand and accept change
• Build resilience to change
• Use your strengths to cope in change
• Create a resilience plan

Emotions are important in work life. They drive motivation and commitment; they are an inherent part of negotiation, conflict, and change; they are fundamental to our lives and our relationships. Effective people are proficient at recognising, using, understanding, and managing emotions in themselves and others.

While there are many approaches to emotional intelligence and how to measure it, the MSCEIT is the original, scientific conception. It is based upon more than a decade of research by psychologists Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey. Mayer and Salovey are the originators of the theory of emotional intelligence. Theirs is an ability model of emotional intelligence and they define emotional intelligence as “the ability to reason with and about emotions”.

The MSCEIT is designed to assess emotional intelligence by measuring how well people perform tasks and solve emotional problems, rather than by their subjective self-assessment of their EI, i.e. it measures actual emotional ability by providing assessment of eight individual tasks in four central areas: the ability to accurately perceive emotions; the ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking, problem solving and creativity; the ability to understand emotions; and the ability to manage emotions for personal growth.

This one-day Masterclass will equip your people to recognise, use, understand, and manage emotions in self and in others and includes administration of the MSCEIT test.

One of the key drivers of organisational culture, and indeed the most important driver, is the behaviour of the leaders. Leaders shape culture through what they do, what they pay attention to, and how they reward and sanction. They are the role models for “the way we do things around here”.

The Life Styles Inventory (LSI) identifies the underlying thoughts and motivations that guide an individual's behaviour. Often referred to as personal styles, management styles and leadership styles, these represent the essence of an individual's effectiveness.

The quality of an individual's thinking and behaviour contributes greatly to that person's work performance. Fortunately, your leaders have the power to change ineffective thinking and behaviour - the kind that can paralyse an individual's effectiveness. But first they need to know if what they're doing now is supporting or detracting from quality performance.

The Life Styles Inventory (LSI) is based around the Human Synergistics Circumplex, describing constructive, passive/defensive and aggressive/defensive behaviours.

The LSI diagnostic is a 360 degree feedback tool, with feedback on the observed behaviour of the leader from up to 8 participants and a self-assessment of the leader’s intent.

The LSI provides for self-description (LSI 1) and feedback from others (LSI 2). Participants receive comprehensive resources to assist the change process.

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We’ve all been there, trying to reason with an incredibly difficult person. The situation proves frustrating, maddening, and sometimes even frightening. The truth is, you can’t reason with an a person who perceives themselves as under threat. However, there are proven techniques to better manage challenging situations.

In this 4-hour workshop we will cover the following:

• Dealing with challenging behaviour and situations
• Understanding aggressive-defensive and passive-defensive behaviours and how to respond effectively
• Stop Challenge Choose – a tool for staying calm in difficult circumstances

Over the last twenty-five years, The Leadership Challenge established a reputation as a research-driven, evidence-based leadership development model with a simple, yet profound, principle at its core: leadership is a measurable, learnable, and teachable set of behaviours.

In today's challenging and complex workplace, leaders are desperately needed from the front lines to the executive suites. The secret of high-performing organisations is that everyone within them knows that leadership-at-all-levels is expected and rewarded, and that individuals everywhere are responsible for making extraordinary things happen.

In this program, The Leadership Challenge®, I will guide you through the 5 practices of Extraordinary Leadership.

The program includes:

The Leadership Practices Inventory 360 degree feedback

Comprehensive coverage of the 5 practices

• Model the Way
• Inspire a Shared Vision
• Challenge the Process
• Enable Others to Act
• Encourage the Heart

Participant workbooks and learning materials. 

Workplaces are limited to members of the human race. The best way to achieve high organisational performance is to align our leadership practices to human nature. If we ignore or deny our nature then we may be unwittingly designing dysfunction into our organisation and inhibiting organisational performance. It’s a leadership choice using a predictive framework knowing what will work and what won’t.

There’s good reason why organisational challenges are uncannily similar from one organisation to another. Irrespective of their organisation, their industry or their country, leaders commonly complain of the same set of frustrating behaviours that limit their organisation’s performance.  

The solutions to these common issues will not be found at the organisational level. They can only be solved if we understand the human condition that both explains the behaviours and provides the solutions.

In the Hardwired Humans framework – a framework sourced from Professor Nigel Nicholson at London Business School – there are nine behaviours. In summary, the framework describes a species that is social, hierarchical, sensitive about social status, is a face-reading species, engages in gossip to share information and to bond, that has an emotional brain and where we use emotions to form impressions and make decisions.

The Group Styles Inventory™ (GSI) is the only research-based tool of its kind that provides a proven, valid and reliable measure of how people in groups interact with each other and work as a team. A further advantage for your team is the potential alignment (using the same circumplex model) with  organisational culture work and  work with your leadership team.

Extensively researched and internationally proven, this survey tool provides group members with a ‘safe’ way to talk about their behaviour and how it affects the group's performance. Through highlighting factors that are helping or hindering their teamwork, it empowers them to change the way they think and therefore behave – leading to better cooperation, communication and consensus, more innovative thinking and better-quality decisions.

Using the GSI (Group Styles Inventory) in a half day program we explore and debrief the following:

• Team effectiveness – using a simulation we will assess the effectiveness of the teams. In the simulation, teams that score higher when working together than working as individuals are effective teams.
• Group styles – using the GSI process, we will explore team behaviours and how the behaviours contribute to, or detract from the effectiveness of the teams.
• Agreed ideal GSI profile for the team

Team action plan – the team will leave with an action plan for developing group behaviours.

When someone first learns about a change they will instantly screen for what the change means to them. This instant screening is primarily to determine the likelihood of loss to the person. They will be most worried about whether the change has negative implications for them. If taken by surprise, their loss anxiety increases. 

People have very individual drivers for how they approach change, based on a combination of experience and personality factors. At Shaping Change we are accredited experts in how humans behave in organisational settings. 

This program will set up the managers and team leaders for success in leading change and combines theory and tools with facilitated discussion and action planning.

With good management skills, teams perceive change as a challenging opportunity, rather than a danger to avoid. Utilising a deep knowledge of human behaviour during change, we unpack the impacts of change on teams, we explore the role of the leader in a change process, and we use practical tools, templates and checklists to enable and empower your managers in leading and supporting people through the change. Participants will:

• Understand the Kotter model of change, and the Change Equation as tools
• Understand the how change impacts people
• Appreciate loss aversion and human instincts about change
• Understand how people react to change and why they resist change
• Utilise tools and methods to manage resistance to change
• Have tools to build resilience in self and in others

.There are two levels of this program - Leading Change for managers, and Leading With Authenticity in Times of Change for your senior team.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) instrument is a highly versatile solution that has helped millions of people around the world gain a deeper understanding of themselves and how they interact with others. Through the creation of a common language to easily communicate the complexities of an individual’s personality, the MBTI instrument provides the reliable insights you need to improve the performance of your people, teams and organisation. It supplies invaluable inputs for your ongoing team building, leadership and coaching, conflict management, career development and retention efforts.

The MBTI assessment uses a typology composed of four pairs of opposite preferences, called dichotomies:

• Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I)—where you focus your attention and get energy
• Sensing (S) or Intuition (N)—how you take in information
• Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)—how you make decisions
• Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)—how you deal with the outer world

The MBTI assessment combines an individual’s four preferences to yield one of the 16 personality types (e.g., ESTJ, INFP, etc.). Each type is equally valuable, and an individual inherently belongs to one of the 16 types.

The MBTI points of difference:

• Most widely used personality instrument in the world
• Demonstrates very strong psychometric properties, including high levels of reliability and validity
• Helps people understand individual personality type and its relationship to performance, team dynamics, and other topics
• Provides invaluable self-knowledge that extends well beyond any one training session

It’s an interesting fact that businesses often have way more strategic goals than is possible to execute. Yet we continue to load ourselves up with important projects, only to see many of them fade away, lost in the “busy work” of day to day operations. In this program, we draw on the learnings of The 4 Disciplines of Execution: by McChesney, Covey and Huling and break down the keys to getting the important things done.

• Focus on the Wildly Important
• Act on Lead Measures
• Keep a Compelling Scorecard
• Create a Cadence of Accountability