INDIVIDUAL
Training and development: There is probably no better investment in one’s people, as it ensures increased productivity whilst at the same time ensuring deep loyalty. Each one of us is a brand, and we are either appreciating in value or declining. By identifying how we can develop Future Fit staff, we can create a vibrant, learning culture that attracts and retains staff, whilst ensuring the businesses future sustainability.
All development can be delivered online through Zoom, or face-to-face, depending on the needs of the client.
We provide two streams of development:
- Staff development
- Leadership development
1. Future Fit staff development:
Often, we become overwhelmed by the complexity of the challenges facing us, or we simplistically look for silver bullet solutions. So how do we build these FUTURE FIT capabilities?
We need to think differently. In being able to envision a new reality, we can explore different options. Unfortunately, we often do more of the same at a higher tempo, making small efficiency gains and hoping it will suffice.
We need to be different. We need to learn how to change those things that are hardest, those habits that we have acquired over decades. Awareness is not enough, if it were there would be no smokers! Only with a deep understanding of behavioural change can we really create sustainable change.
We need to stay different. We need to appreciate that it’s hard being an outlier, and that to be one demands copious amounts of energy and resilience.
These FUTURE FIT capabilities fall broadly into three categories, each unique, important, and interdependent, namely Think different, Be different and Stay different.
THINKING DIFFERENT:
BEING DIFFERENT:
STAYING DIFFERENT:
- A highly pragmatic approach to the BIG challenge of our times, by looking systematically at our thinking, behaviours and context within which we operate.
- Deep understanding of the human psyche (leveraging off the latest research based on neuroscience and behavioural economics), which is the one constant in this challenging, dynamic and complex world.
- Focussing on your unique work contexts so that ROI is highly relevant and rapid.
- Multi-modal development. Applied theory approach with lots of experiential activities to embed understanding. Use of assessments for baseline and progress mapping, facilitator-led discussions and practical tools applied to real business challenges, experiential activities, case studies, self-reflection and finally deep goal setting to embed sustainable change. There are follow-up sessions post-workshop to assess progress and address application issues and change inertia.
Target audience:
- For those who want to move from survival to thriving in a highly competitive, dynamic and ambiguous world.
- This programme can be customised for intact teams, leadership programmes or staff in general.
2. Leadership development
We believe leadership requires people to be EXEMPLAR to earn followership; ENGAGE to maximise individual/team potential; THINK to ensure they make wise decisions and DELIVER so they create value. How we build this capability is laid out below and we can customise to your unique culture and context:
EXEMPLAR-EARN FOLLOWERSHIP
Leading by example (2-days):
Resilience (2-days):
Advanced resilience (1-2 days):
Reviewing your resilience profile scores. Exploring and deepening your understanding in the following resilience quadrants:
- Socio-emotional fitness: perfectionism, granting self-forgiveness, building psychological safety, influencing upwards, assertiveness and constructive conflict management styles.
- Mental fitness: harnessing the power of mindsets, ensuring you stay future fit and practising deliberate mindfulness. Spiritual fitness: perspective-gaining techniques.
- Physical fitness: boosting your energy through flow, circadian rhythms and the latest research on goal setting.
Ethical leadership (1-day):
Appreciating the social forces that subtly guide our ethical behaviour. Furnishing you with practical heuristics for assessing ethical behaviour and building an ethical culture.
Understanding the interplay between values, morals and ethics and how they can be badly manipulated. Clarifying the role of leadership in creating ethical systems. Combatting unethical behaviour in organisations.
EQ (2-days):
Building your EQ competency to ensure better self-management, effective collaboration and meaningful relationships.
Reviewing your EQ 2.0 assessment results. Exploring the 4 components of EQ, namely:
- Self-awareness: neuroscience of threat/reward, building coherent life-story and key learnings, masks and self-forgiveness.
- Self-management: delayed gratification, achievement and adaptability practices.
- Social awareness: building empathy and organisational awareness to facilitate cross-functional collaboration.
- Relationship management: influence, team-work, conflict and boundary management.
ENGAGE-MAXIMISE INDIVIDUAL & TEAM POTENTIAL
Engagement (1-day):
Understanding the science behind engagement (it’s so much more than motivation), and its impact on the bottom line. Learning practical tools that will boost engagement levels, and how to “DNA” it into the culture of the organisation.
What is engagement vs motivation? Clarifying the real value of work. Unpacking the surprising long-term dangers of workaholism. Focusing on both intrinsic and extrinsic levers of engagement. Enhancing under-developed engagement levers, based on the organisation’s results from your engagement survey.
Coaching and mentoring (1-day):
Coaching as a leadership tool for empowering continued high performance. Improving the ability to diagnose the underlying people challenges. Facilitating the appropriate course of action without providing the answers, but through wise questioning.
Leadership and the dynamic interplay with coaching skills. Identifying principles and phases of the coaching process. Practicing the GROW coaching model and associated coaching tools.
Candid conversations (2-days):
Building the capacity to have real, meaningful conversations that count. Providing practical approaches to embedding a culture of candour in the organisation. Action plan that embeds these new skills and focusses on a key difficult conversation the person needs to have.
Developing a deep knowledge at an:
- Individual level - Intra & inter-personal dynamics of difficult conversations, plus contextual awareness;
- Team level - pre-empting conflict, diagnosing dysfunctions in teams;
- Organisational level - identifying and strengthening red flag mechanisms, practices at a daily, weekly and monthly level that will ensure regular two-way, candid flow of communication.
Team dynamics (2-days = x 4 ½ days with intact teams):
Transitioning your team through the various stages, from the forming to the consistently high performing stage as rapidly as possible. Building excellence through the proprietary Dream Team development model i.e. team composition, cohesion, communication, collaboration and consistency. Experiencing team dynamics in action (simulations), and applying double loop learning to embed change.
Pre-surveying the team to assess where the biggest team needs are.
- Context setting: groups vs teams, high performing team dynamics and stages of team evolution. Each team evolution stage has key elements, for example –
- Composition: team purpose, ideal structures and power of diversity.
- Cohesion: establishing psychological safety to harness collective intelligence, team development and conflict management, managing virtual teams.
- Communication: overcoming information bottlenecks, running effective team meetings.
- Collaboration: crucial principles, intra and inter-team collaboration techniques, sound decision-making and accountability practices.
- Consistency: safeguarding against complacency, growing team resilience, instilling high performance rituals.
Change fit (2-days):
Unlocking the key mindsets necessary for change fitness. Practicing key change management principles and techniques at an individual, team and organisational level. Pragmatic action plans for changes currently being implemented or being contemplated by yourself.
Creating awareness and confidence to operate across the three levels of change, namely:
- Individual - neuroscience of change, building trust, ethical influencing, navigating leadership transition stages, coaching for change and overcoming immunity to change.
- Team - three techniques for stimulating contribution and acceptance of change.
- Organisational - stakeholder mapping, optimal participation matrix, identifying change readiness derailers, identifying reasons for change failure, understanding the leader’s role, accurately predicting the change projects likelihood of success.
THINK-MAKE WISE DECISIONS
Systems thinking (1-day):
Enhancing one’s ability to make sense of "mess" aka complexity. Developing systemic thinking skills to identify THE key variables, and how to act effectively upon them so that one is not paralysed by complexity or falls foul of shallow thinking.
Clarifying the story; defining the boundary question; extracting the key variables; building an inter-relationship affinity diagram between the variables; identifying the stakeholder value driver hierarchy; and finally, an action plan considering all the preceding analysis.
Simplicity (1-day):
Appreciating the necessity for simplicity, so we can be excellent by focusing on that which is most important.
Unpacking 3 key simplicity principles. Identifying which kind of challenge (simple, complex, complicated or chaotic) you are facing, and then using the appropriate approach for the context. Applying the following simplicity techniques to your real business challenges: problem definition, process simplification, decision-making and review.
Leading creative collaboration (1-2 days):
Maximising your creativity mindset. Cultivating a culture that encourages creative and innovative thinking by understanding the inter-play between innovation strategy, culture, skillsets and enabling tools. Practicing creativity tools for each of the creative collaboration stages.
Using the Innovation Index to assess where the organisation is in its innovation journey. Exploring your creativity mindset and how to stimulate it. Learning by doing, as you move through the three steps in the creative collaboration cycle:
- Definition and research - defining the real question using challenge definition technique, stakeholder mapping and empathy maps;
- Ideation - Brainstorming, SCAMPER, Process Element Table, Visually Identifying Relationships etc;
- Implementation – POINT evaluation tool for strengthening thinking, pre-mortems and prioritisation matrix for evaluating the quality of ideas. And finally, increasing the strength of your network so you can collaborate more effectively.
DELIVER-CREATE VALUE
Strat-execution (2-days):
Grasping the key strategic drivers of your business. Identifying key principles for execution in both one’s personal and work life. Clarifying the role of leadership in delivery. Understanding the organisation’s performance management process.
Building a bigger picture understanding of the businesses strategies and where you fit in. Unpacking the importance of both management and leadership in execution. Exposing myths regarding performance management (PM) and your own experience of PM. Exploring and applying the principles of the execution fit (FAME) model: Focus, Accountability, Metrics and Engagement. Building well-constructed PM contracts for self and staff. Learning how to manage under-performance.
Building a high-performance system (1-day):
Understanding the dynamics of a high-performance organisation so that they can be replicated or enhanced in a deliberate and systemic manner.
Defining high performance and its levers within your context. Unpacking a high- performance model by leveraging resources (accessibility, alignment and stability) and embedding practices (delivery, frictionless and renewal). Embracing leadership paradoxes that drive performance. Identifying and/or building red flag mechanisms to prevent performance hubris. Understanding employee wellness and its impact on organisational sustainability.
Recruitment and Selection (R&S) (1-day):
Training interviewers to accurately identify top talent. Appreciating the various methods that are useful in making an informed hiring decision. Becoming aware of the legal pitfalls in the recruitment process.
Legal traps and financial costs of poor hiring; practicing organisational, job-fit, motivation fit and competency-based interviewing techniques; overcoming cognitive bias in the interviewing process; proper reference and criminal checks; the role of psychometrics.
Industrial Relations (IR) (1/2 day):
Providing an awareness of the IR guidelines and requirements within which all managers need to operate, specifically relating to poor performance, misconduct and incapacity.
Providing a space where practical IR challenges via case studies or current issues are raised and expert opinion is provided as to the best approach.
- Make it hard: people might curse initially, but the sense of achievement when real transformational growth occurs trumps the short-term pain.
- Step change: what got you here, won’t necessarily work as you move up the ladder. Each transition requires new skills.
- Paradox of leadership: it is about embracing the inherent paradox and not being paralysed by it, e.g. leaders need both a task AND relationship orientation, facilitate change AND stability, think strategically AND act tactically, be courageous AND considerate in feedback.
- Silo-busting: one of the most under-rated benefits of in-house programmes is that it breaks down boundaries and builds enduring bonds.
- Learning eco-systems: learning is a process not an event, often occurring outside the lecture room. Therefore, we need to create supportive structures, real opportunities and simulations that embed learning.
- Context, context, context: build your interventions around your desired culture and business strategy, not other companies’ best practices, however admired they are.
- ROI: is taken very seriously – we will reimburse facilitation fees for any modules that don’t meet the overall attendees’ expectations.
- Learning eco-systems: we look at the whole learning system, not just training.
- Leadership models and tools: proprietary knowledge that provides unique insights and impactful application.
- Wise facilitators: international experience with deep local knowledge.
- Customisation: offerings tailored to your unique business context.
