Leadership & Partnering
The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
Leadership and Partnering Workshop
Have you ever worked with people you don’t report to, or who don’t report to you or your own manager? Frequently, these working relationships include people from different business disciplines, or who represent organizations that have different perspectives that clash with your own ideas about how things should be done. Sometimes called cross-functional teams, these groups lack traditional hierarchy. The members of the team are often confused over who’s actually accountable or responsible for leading the way. This can prove paralyzing and lead to nothing getting done.
Making it more complicated, you may not speak the other guy’s professional language and this can create even more chaos. Amidst the confusion, there’s a high risk you’ll fail to capitalize on your combined knowledge and experience. Inadvertently, you might squander the opportunity to create something better because there’s a mire of mixed communications. Although it’s tempting to retreat to your own silo and avoid conflict – with the right skills you can cut the Gordian knot and lead the team to the desired destination.
The Leadership and Partnering Workshop is designed for mid-level personnel who must work with and influence others whom they do not supervise. The workshop teaches the advanced level skills required to be more effective in working in partnership with others.
The four days of instruction, multi-experiential interaction, simulations, and practice are conducted in two separate two-day sessions. Each session will cover five content units. The workshop can accommodate up to 40 people.
Workshop Content
Session 1: Days One and Two
1. Transforming Organizational Relationships – We start with a lively simulation in which participants experience how unexamined assumptions and inferences about others up, down, and across organizational lines often lead to misunderstandings, foster turf battles, and hamper individual and organizational effectiveness. Participants will explore strategies for breaking free of old habits that may prevent them from getting the results they want.
2. Credibility – What causes some people to be more credible than others in organizations? Participants learn how to gain credibility for themselves and ensure open hearings for their ideas.
3. Listening – To be successful in organizations we need to be able to listen attentively, to accord others the full hearing we wish for ourselves, and to understand – if not necessarily agree with – another person’s point of view. Participants practice listening in different modes and learn what kinds of listening are appropriate in different situations.
4. Using Personal Strengths in Relationships – Based on the Strength Deployment Inventory, participants identify their strengths and learn when and how to apply them appropriately rather than under- or overuse them, and thus become more effective in forming productive work relationships.
5. Leadership Styles – Based on the extensive research of Daniel Goleman, et al, on which leadership styles are successful in which situations, participants will reflect on the leadership styles they tend to use and under-use and which might be more effective in their organization’s culture.
Session 2: Days Three and Four
6. Strategic Thinking – Before we can lead effectively we must formulate our ideas and reach agreement with others about effective strategies and actions. In this segment, participants learn a new, more organic architecture of strategy that fixes on a goal while at the same time allowing for course corrections in the moment.
7. Mutual Influencing – Using a model drawn from the concepts of Inquiry, Advocacy, and Integration, participants will role-play realistic situations that occur at your organization to practice mutual influencing skills.
8. Group Decision Making – The key to smart partnering is in the processes people use to make decisions and to achieve widespread support for those decisions. In this unit, participants learn various methods of group decision-making and the conditions under which each is most appropriate.
9. Managing Conflict and Resistance – Conflict and resistance to change are inevitable – and healthy – in a project of any complexity but if ignored or mishandled, can doom a project to failure. In contrast, working through conflict and resistance can generate better options and build widespread support. In this unit, participants learn their preferred style of dealing with conflict and develop strategies for managing workplace conflict and resistance more effectively.
10. Developing and Supporting New Ideas – Human beings have a tendency to fall into habitual patterns of thinking – achieving a surprisingly high level of comfort even with behaviors that don’t serve us well – and to resist and reject unfamiliar ideas and ways of doing things. Yet in a partnering relationship, all must work together to consider new approaches. Participants learn how to generate new ideas and nurture them within the organization.
