Leadership Development Archives - Page 8 of 8

Communication, HR, Leadership, Leadership Development, Learning & Development, Organisational Development

How Long Should a Leadership Development Programme Be?

How do you decide how long your leadership development programmes should be? This is a challenge in many organisations, and there are usually two deciding factors involved: The budget you have available for the specific programme How many days you think leaders will be prepared to invest in attending the workshop(s) If you’re like most HR and L&D professionals I meet, you already recognise that – usually – neither the budget nor the time available are sufficient to really get ...

Coaching, Communication, Leadership, Leadership Development

Why We Shouldn’t be Developing Leaders as Coaches

I ran my first coaching skills programme for leaders way back in 1992. At that time the concept of managers coaching was still new, the GROW Model for coaching was a bit ‘out there’ and I recall lively debates around whether or not coaching was a good thing. In the intervening years, coaching has become a flourishing industry and managers are expected to coach peers and bosses as well as team members. Sometimes, they’re even encouraged to coach themselves! But ...

Communication, Leadership, Leadership Development

The Key to Making Communication Training Stick

“I used to think of going to comms workshops as a real waste of time. Just something that got in the way.” The manager wasn’t joking. I’d just finished running one such workshop. According to this manager, he had been ‘sent’ on all sorts of workshops and courses, learning any number of different tools and techniques to improve the way he communicated with his team. He’d even half-heartedly put some of them into practice – for a while. But there ...

Communication, HR, Leadership, Leadership Development, Performance Management

10 Questions For Effective Performance Review Conversations

If you are a regular reader of the CommsMasters blog, you’ll already know that I have a strong negative reaction to overly-structured, form-focussed performance review processes. Instead, the critical focus should be on the conversation that takes place between the leader and the direct report. The most effective performance reviews get the direct report talking a lot, with the leader encouraging useful reflection through the questions asked and adding their own feedback and views where these can add value. The ...

Communication, HR, Leadership, Leadership Development, Performance Management

4 Ways To Help Leaders Fall In Love With Performance Reviews

Hands up all you leaders out there who look forward to the annual round of formal performance reviews. And hands up everyone in Human Resources who enjoys the annual game of chase-up-the-leaders-who-haven’t-done their-performance-reviews. No one? Really? It’s surprising how this most innocuous of leadership practices can turn fully-grown professionals into sulky, rebellious children at least once every twelve months. (For all those businesses where there are also formal reviews every six months or even every quarter, this resistance/chase-up spectacle can ...