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Communications Skills for Managers
Both Leadership and Management Skills have their place in the right time and context. And reduced to their simplest level, both are dependent on your ability to communicate. In fact, the inability to effectively communicate with your staff is the root cause for almost all employee turnover.
Effective communication begins with a well written job description, so the new employee has no surprises. This job description can then become the basis for monthly “catch ups” with staff to ensure that they (and their KPI’s) continue to tick along nicely, so you as their manager have no surprises. This then seamlessly rolls into your company’s performance review process.
But truly effective communication is much more than a tool to be used to manage performance. It is the heart of a robust employee engagement process when you include the staff members career development (both verbal and horizontal), their underlying motivators and their strengths.
Communication Skills for Managers is a two day course (which can be run contiguously or broken down into 3 or 4 segments spread across a number of months) designed to give you a framework for effective communication as well as the skills and tools needed to have truly meaningful and productive conversations.
What we cover:
Module 1:
Focused Communications Framework
Introduction to a structured framework to be used from the day the new employee starts to the day they leave, whether that’s in 6 months or 6 years. We cover:
- Frequency: the importance of monthly structured catch ups
- Objective of Job: How to craft KPI’s which are relevant to the company and department, actionable and accountable.
- Career Development: how to understand what the staff member wants to grow within their career and how you can provide those opportunities internally instead of having them look externally - even in the smallest of companies.
- Underlying Motivations: Dan Pink synopsizes this concept brilliantly in his book Drive. He says everyone is motivated by three things; Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Learn how to discover your staff’s motivations and how to provide what they need in each of these areas.
- Strengths: According to Gallop, teams whose members play to their Strengths most of the time are:
- 50% more likely to have lower employee turnover
- 38% more likely to work on high productivity teams
- 44% more likely to earn high customer satisfaction scores
- Learn the definition of a Strength and begin to understand how to identify your own as well as your staffs’.
- Learn the 80 / 20 rule and why spending time with exactly the opposite people you are probably currently spending your time with will exponentially increase productivity, free your time and reduce stress levels for you and the entire team.
- Introduction to dealing with difficult people
Module 2:
Understanding Differences (Presented by Leading Communications and Diversity Expert Lynne Schinella)
- Understand the 4 different personality profiles and how they behave under pressure
- Recognise how personal values and points of view influence behaviour
- Develop positive influencing strategies to deal with your “Squeaky Wheels”
- Increase skills in respecting differences and working more effectively with those not like yourself
- Increase skills at remaining cool under pressure
Module 3:
Deep Dive into Strengths
During this module you will take a deep dive into your own strengths and be given tools to help your staff discover theirs. You will also learn what weaknesses really are; apply a step-by-step process to identify them; and take away practical strategies to minimize the impact they have at work. At the end of this section you will have a much better understanding of how to exploit your and your staff’s strengths, mitigate weaknesses and make small changes to your work week that will lead to big changes in job satisfaction, results and stress levels.
Real Play
The last part of this module will be devoted to playing out real live scenarios. Communications challenges that the participants are dealing with. Through a combination of exercises, group brain storming and role playing will will workshop real solutions.
Module 4:
Deep Dive into Critical Conversations
A critical conversation is any conversation where the stakes are high and / or emotion is high . It’s a conversation you know you have to have, but may not look forward to or may be nervous about. It may involve your delivering a tough message. Alternatively it may involve your receiving one.
Examples of critical conversations include:
- A performance review
- Issuing a warning
- Negotiating a raise
- Presenting a business case
- Announcing a restructure
- Delivering negative news
In this module we explore:
- Ways to manage stress before and during Critical Conversations
- How to handle emotions
- Techniques to make your point logically and effectively so that the message is heard and understood and able to be action upon instead of reacted to
- Solutions to move forward - even when a way forward seems impossible
Real Play
The last part of this module will be devoted to playing out real live scenarios. Communications challenges that the participants are dealing with. Through a combination of exercises, group brain storming and role playing will will workshop real solutions.