How to be a great manager and team leader

How to be a great manager and team leader

by | Jul 23, 2021 | Blog, Training

Do you want to enable others to perform at their best? 

Would you like your team to share a vision and enjoy high levels of commitment and creativity? 

Do you wish you had some practical tools and skills to build ambition, support learning and achieve great results?

These two new courses have been designed for you…

Isabel Mortimer and Claire Antrobus are coaches who work with individuals, teams and organisations to enable them to achieve great results, develop people and performance and work collaboratively. We have designed these two one-day courses to offer you the opportunity to explore the coaching tools and skills we think are most helpful in managing individuals and teams. 

Our emphasis in on practical, simple and effective tools that can be used immediately in the workplace. Courses are accompanied by a course workbook including background information and further resources.

Isabel is an experienced performance coach, focussed on getting positive results for clients. She specialises in leadership development, cultural change, and enabling positive team dynamics.  She works with a portfolio of coaching and leadership programmes and has supported cultural exchange and team development work across a range of high profile organisations.  She is a fellow of the prestigious Clore Leadership Programme and is employed by The Clore Leadership Programme to help support fellows in developing as transformational leaders.

Claire helps individuals learn to change via coaching, facilitation and training focused on creating high performance. She has over 25 years’ experience in the creative, education and cultural sectors and currently designs and delivers training on developing teams, creating change and leadership for Clore Leadership Programme, HEY Confident Futures, engage’s Extend leadership programme and Leeds Arts University. 

How to be a great manager – 10 March, 9:30-4:30, online 

If you want to enable great performance, the ability to create productive working relationships with clear roles, responsibilities and boundaries is key. A great manager believes in your potential and creates opportunities for you to improve and develop, offering feedback and support. Whether you’re new to 
line-management or looking to refine how your work with others, this course offers you some practical tools and skills to become the kind of manager you’d love to have yourself! 

We’ll help you reflect your strengths and style as a line-manager, to identify what you find challenging, and also share some tools, skills and research that can help you get the best performance from yourself and others. As developing skills takes practice, we’ll also create opportunities to you to connect with others on the course and continue to develop your skills together after our session.

Topics we’ll cover include:

  • How to have more productive conversations
  • How can we set up working relationship to be more successful
  • The art of Active Listening
  • The benefits and techniques of different leadership styles
  • How to ask great questions

£125 standard price/ £105 early bird – book now to reserve your place.

How to be a great team leader – 31 March, 9:30-4:30, online

We spend most of our time working with others, rather than alone. With the rapid pace of change over the past 18 months, and with many teams increasing working remotely and flexibly, the challenge of creating high performing teams has never been more urgent or important.

Coaching enables us to perform at our best by creating a high trust and high challenge culture, supported by clear goals, high levels of commitment and regular honest reflection and adjustment. This one-day workshop introduces simple practical tools and techniques to enable you to create a coaching-based culture of high performance in your team or organisation.

Topics we’ll cover include:

  • What does great team performance look like and what can enable it?
  • How to stop getting in the way of your team
  • Reviewing and improving your work as a team using reflective practice
  • Creating shared vision and plans
  • How to set goals that are useful and motivating
  • How to make meetings more productive and focused

£125 standard price/ £105 early bird – book now to reserve your place.

Setting ourselves up for success

Setting ourselves up for success

by | Jul 21, 2021 | Blog, Collaboration

When working as a coach or facilitator I always ‘contract’ with people before we start work together: we agree boundaries, expectations and ways of working.

‘Contracting’ is the technical term for these conversations, but I prefer to think of it as ‘setting things up for success’ and it typically involves: 

  • agreeing honestly and as clearly as possible what is expected from one another
  • the purpose and boundaries for the work
  • identifying what behaviours will enable you both to perform at your best and anything that would be unhelpful, and,
  • how you’ll review how it’s going so you can adjust accordingly. 

We contract before we start work together, but also check-in how things are going periodically.

Before we start…

The kinds of questions we might use at the start of a project or assignment include:

  • What do we want to achieve? 
  • How will we know we have been successful?
  • What are our respective roles? What can we offer and for what do we accept responsibility?
  • What requests do we have of one another in terms of how we work? 
  • How will we know whether things are on track?
  • How do we want to handle things if it’s not working well for either of us?
  • What obstacles might get in the way of us working together? How can we avoid this happening? 

Are we still on track?

Review questions can be as simple as:

  • What do we notice about how we are working together? 
  • What is working and what is not working?
  • Is there anything you want more or less of from me?
  • What do we want to change to make this relationship have more impact?

Taking 5-10 minutes to include some of these questions in our meetings with others can help ensure we get off to the most productive start with new projects, or review and realign those already underway.

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