Management and leadership skills training course
Private one to one training in Hong Kong
This leadership course will develop your skills and thinking capabilities to become a more effective leader or manager.
The training consists of various interrelated modules that focus on leadership and managerial functions like creating visions, strategy, planning, system management, human resources development [hiring, firing and training], coaching, motivating, negotiating, meeting management, relationship building, communication, presentation, recognising and dealing with different personality types, managing change etc.
The training is especially valuable for managers, business owners and executives, government employees (civil servant and non-civil servants), job seekers and promotion interviewees, salespeople, teachers, coaches, parents and university students.
In the leadership training we will focus mostly on the mindset level because that's where improvement has huge impact on your leadership effectiveness.
Secondary: skill level. Skill level learning will help you find solution and execute things better, understand processes.
Thirdly: techniques and how-to-do, step-by-step procedures.
To manage and lead yourself and others you need to master all three levels (mindset, skill set and techniques) and you need to take actions guided by them.
Management is maintaining the operation. So if there is a problem it is a managerial task to get it fixed. Leadership, on the other hand, is about change, seeing a different outcome, life or relationship, communicating to the idea to people and working on the execution.
So while managerial roles mainly focuses of shorter period and more reactive, but there is also planning of course, leadership is for longer term, strategic and relate to significant change in purpose, structure and resources.
Small business related management level topics
- Marketing and sales
- Human resources management: delegating jobs, hiring and firing, motivating and tracing employees
- Business communication and relationship building strategies
- Managing emotion and stress
- Strategic thinking and planning
- Self-development and personal growth
- Time management (which is actually self management because there is nothing to manage about time
- Understanding personality types and how to utilize this information
- Life management so you do not become the slave of your own business but you enjoy your work
- Negotiation and creating mutual interest and synergy
- Managing information effectively
- Metrics. Measuring and analysing business performance
- Preparing for catastrophes and expecting the unexpected. Risk management.
Understanding the concept of leverage and learning how to use it is one of the most important mindset and skill to become successful in your career or business.
Using other people's time, expertise and money, as well as technology is the way to break out of your limitation and accelerate your success. Leadership is one of the most important type of leverage: how to organise people’s to work for the same goal, your goal.
However, using leverage has its cost and risk. If you hire the wrong person, if you cannot pay back the borrowed money or if you invest in technology that becomes obsolete as soon as you start to use it, you pay a very high price.
Leadership mindsets, concepts, principals
Here are some of the many concepts, principals, frameworks and mindset that we are going to go through in the leadership workshop.
System thinking
The opposite of system thinking is when you investigate, analyse and think of things as isolated entities, independent of their environments. It also includes using over-simplified cause-effect models.
System thinking gives you a tool to see and deal with the complexity of any real life situation. Just think about your family, your organization, a country, an air conditioner unit as a system. System thinking is a huge topic that includes a lot of concepts which it's built on.
One of them is the holon, which gives us the perspective to see everything as a functional part of one or more larger whole and at the same time seeing its interacting components, too. That is, everything is a part and a whole at the same time.
System thinking is a practical tool to understanding everyday situations like group dynamics, office politics, relationships between people and influencing them.
We are going to learn about a lot of powerful concepts that are part of or related to system thinking. Here are some: interaction and inter-relatedness, emergent property, emergence, positive and negative feedback loops, the replacement of simple cause-effect thinking, cybernetics, leverage.
Leverage
The concept of leverage is itself a big topic within system thinking. Leverage is anything that if you use successfully, you can enhance your results, profit and success.
Leadership is itself a leverage. Using people's time and expertise wisely can multiply your effort and opportunities. Another example for leverage is using other people's money to finance your own business.
In any system there are several possible leverage points where you can intervene to effectively enhance the long-term performance of the system: paradigms, objectives, the rules of the system, the structure and processes of the flow of energy, information and knowledge, delays in positive and negative feedback loops, buffers and capacities and parameters.
Strategic thinking
Strategic thinking as opposed to short term, instant gratification or narrowly focused thinking.
Most people most of the time are driven by emotions, short term pleasure seeking or pain avoidance attitude and think in a too simplistic way about complex issues.
Strategic thinking incorporates several concepts including complexity thinking, personal and corporate mission statements, which are not the usual empty slogans but the most important values or objectives in the life of a person or organisation. Strategic thinking relates to system thinking, objective and goal setting, planning, willpower, habit change etc.
Statistical and probability thinking
Sometimes we automatically think about a topic as black or white, which is an over simplification of a complex situation. For example, "People will not like this product". Whereas in reality different people have different opinion about anything.
Statistical and probability thinking mindset is a way of thinking in probability distribution. Instead of seeing a group of people or possible events as a homogeneous mass, it is more informative to cluster the elements into sub-groups and describing the properties of the sub-groups and weighting them with their size, value or importance.
Scenario planning
Statistical and probability thinking leads to the concept of scenario planning. It means that you have not only plan but several possible inflexion points depending on important future events.
The traditional planning is based on stability and that the future is predictable using present or past information and trends. Scenario planning prepares for unexpected changes and sets up monitoring systems and evidence procedures to get warning signals so that leadership can respond quickly to change.
Absolutistic vs relativistic views
Almost all cultures through history have strongly favoured thinking in absolute terms, "Right and wrong. Good and bad. The Truth. Be confident. Have a strong identity. Believe in yourself. Believing in fixed ideas and world views."
As a leader you need to develop the relativistic mindset even if you are using absolutistic ideas towards the outside world for mass control or leading a group of people.
You are going to learn about multiple perspectives, multiple mental models, epistemology and how your mind creates certainty to mislead you.
Questioning our own beliefs, actively searching for better ones and giving them up if we have found more accurate ones is one of the rarest human endeavour.
The training is suitable for you if you want to learn individually or in a small teams with your friends or colleagues. The classes are is in English and the location is in Kowloon, Hong Kong S.A.R.
