Solving Problems

Supervising for Success
Developing your front line leadership skills

Leaders are blessed with their own distinctive gifts and skills. Many times these gifts serve them well.

At other times, leaders rely too much on what feels comfortable to them at the expense of what is truly effective.

Our experience at over twenty years of leadership development shows that people who develop their skills in five core areas are able to manage high performance teams that deliver substantially improved results.

What You Will Cover

To develop high performance leadership you will focus on:

Courage: Practicing the strength and character it takes to face and act on meaningful challenges in support of people and purpose.

Compassion: Caring for other people, their feelings, needs and dreams.

Creativity: Distilling and developing ideas into innovative products and services. Keeping an open mind and exploring new territory constantly.

Clarity: Refining, improving, analyzing, and covering details clearly, openly, honestly, and with absolute integrity. Reducing ambiguity and eliminating hidden agendas.

Centering: Staying focused and grounded in the face of conflict, stress, and challenge.

You’ll be able to:

Discover your strengths
Develop your capacity
Optimize your results

What to Expect

You’ll take advantage of your natural gifts and strengths while developing the ability to grow and utilize the other essential leadership skills.

Who Should Attend

Supervisors, front line leaders, and team members seeking a leadership position.

If you are interested in developing your leadership skills, this workshop is for you.

What You Will Cover

Develop more motivation on your team
Create deeper conversations, more powerful presentations, and more productive meetings
Resolve conflicts more effectively
Improve team member productivity and performance
Build a strong, cohesive, collaborative team
Achieve your supervisor goals
Lead with more clarity, courage, creativity, and compassion

Length of Program

Two days

For more information on how to bring this workshop to your location, please contact me:

doug@dougsmithtraining.com

Comments

Celebrate Progress

When was the last time that you were frustrated in trying to learn something? If you can't remember, maybe it's time to learn something new -- something tough and challenging. Truly worthwhile endeavors are often struggles. The satisfaction comes not only in the final result, but also in the progress toward that final result. The best way to avoid a sad let-down once a goal is achieved is to enjoy the journey all the way thru. Celebrate your progress! Not so much that you feel finished, but enough so that you feel able. Celebrate progress, and then keep on progressing. As that beat poet and philosopher Harry X. Tudas once said, "Feel in the groove but continue to improve." -- doug smith

Feedback Takes Practice

How good are you at providing feedback? If you're not sure, ask your team members. If you are good at it, they'll tell you. If you're not good at it, then maybe they will and maybe they won't. Feedback does not come easy. Skillful, useful feedback that improves both performance AND self-esteem is a delicate balance of recognizing positives and occasionally providing insights on areas of improvement -- all placed into the context of why it matters. Without the "why" -- why the feedback matters, why the improvement matters, why the performance matters, all the feedback you can muster will only fluster whoever you provide it to. Tell them what they did that was great, ask how they could make it even greater, and share with them why it all makes a difference. Because unless it really makes a difference who cares? Feedback, like any skill, takes practice. -- doug smith

Leadership Warning

If you visit the dark side, don't get stuck there. -- doug smith

Start Positive

I went thru a grumpy period in my life. It was like a rut that was so deep no light could get in. It fed on its own bumpy grumpiness until that's all I could feel. Yuck. Forget that now. Now, I start with a positive thought. I could be wrong about finding the silver lining, but I've learned that I won't see the silver lining unless I look for it, and that's the place to start. Even the smallest positive effort has a positive impact. Let's start there. -- doug smith

Pausing Purity

Judging someone does not change them. Still, don't high performance leaders need a sense of judgment? Forgiving someone does not correct the fault. Still, isn't forgiveness necessary for a growing leader? Changing does not change the past. Still, leaders always change. Purity is a tough standard to match. Maybe pause perfection long enough to improve. -- doug smith

Building Discipline

It would be easy to skip my morning, or afternoon, or evening push-ups. Heck, I did skip them for most of my life. But regular exercise is a discipline that won't do itself. We don't have to like or enjoy discipline-building habits in order to need them. The drills prove, over and over, that we do. Start small if you need to, but definitely start. -- doug smith

Get Ready

Leadership: you can plan the very best plans possible and still miss. Whatever you were expecting, get ready for a surprise. Is that sometimes annoying? Sure -- and if we frame it cleverly enough, the surprises can also be energizing. They are coming anyway, let's make the best of it. -- doug smith

Know Why You Do What You Do

Remember that advertising slogan for a very questionable publication that kept saying "Inquiring minds want to know"? We all have inquiring minds. We all need to know. And what we need to know the most is why. Why do we do what we do. What makes what we do cool, important, necessary? It's never just a job. It's never just an interaction. There is always a reason why. Know why. Figure out your why. Identify your mission. Then roll with it. -- Doug Smith P.S. My good friend David Spiegel has pointed out that Simon Sinek is a great source on WHY. Here's the video where I first was drawn to his thinking on this:

Push Beyond

Standing still is not an option. We can pause, we can relax, and we can certainly breathe, but there is work to be done. There are problems to be solved. There are goals to achieve. The status quo is not for you. High performance leaders push beyond the status quo. -- doug smith

#ethics21 Leadership and the Duty of Care

I've been casually following a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) structured by Stephen Downes , Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care . While it is mainly focused on how ethics applies to analytics (particularly Artificial Intelligence) and learning, it strikes me as relevant to well, everything. In particular, leadership. Leaders must make decisions guided by their ethics on an almost daily basis. As the discuss in #ethics21 has pointed out, though, while it may seem clear what ethical behavior means, it is much more complicated than that. Ethics, when examined with any level of curiosity, uncovers more questions than answers. Maybe that's best, but it is also challenging. I did take one course in ethics in graduate school working on my masters in Organizational Leadership. Every course, though, contained ethical overtones. I learned that leaders must examine their motives and reconcile them against their values while behaving ethically. I learned that there are many more sha

High Performance Leadership

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