Maximise Your Leadership Skills

Addressing specific workplace challenges

The challenges that women leaders face in senior positions are many and complex. Women in management roles don’t have different development needs from their male peers, but do have different contexts.

Often, female executives find themselves as the lone senior women within a predominantly testosterone-driven organisational hierarchy, without the support system of mentoring relationships readily available to male counterparts.

Executive coaching assists in addressing specific workplace challenges, honing leadership and management skills, implementing change and driving teams to maximum effectiveness – and additionally , it provides senior women with a supportive confidante, room to reflect on challenges faced and scope to discuss solutions and formulate a plan of attack. It also drives positive self-belief and provides aspirational women leaders with a developmental tool to help them successfully progress within the executive talent pipeline.

Online Assessment

Completed in about 15 minutes, the online questionnaire comprises adaptive testing to ensure precise insights into each individual. Based on over 40 years of research, the assessment is straightforward, easy to use and fast to complete. On completion of the questionnaire a personalised profile is produced for each individual.

Your Profile

Really deepens both your understanding of the DiSC model and your own self-awareness. It provides insights into other peoples’ behaviours and gives you strategies to improve interactions and performance in the workplace. In addition, 1 to 1 coaching can maximise its effectiveness for you.

Group Workshops

Bringing together all your team’s profiles within in-house workshops helps you explore working relations with colleagues and more fully understand team dynamics. Understanding each others’ needs, behaviours and values helps build a stronger, more connected team.

Follow Up

Building on your Workplace Profile, a full range of additional resources are available to dig deeper into your management and leadership approaches, drivers, values, organisational insights and culture.

What’s in it for you?

  • Improved self-awareness and insight
  • Enhanced leadership and management skills
  • More confident communication and better working relationships
  • Improved decision making and problem solving
  • Enhanced personal impact and performance

What’s in it for your organisation?

  • More effective and insightful people management
  • Emotionally intelligent leadership
  • Improved ownership and empowerment within the business
  • Better retention of key people who feel more valued
  • Enhanced relationships between departments and individuals

Day 1

  • Stepping into the role – from friend to team leader
  • Understanding the role in the work environment; bridging personal barriers
  • What are your responsibilities and what’s your team leader style – how do others see you?
  • Effective communication – how well do you communicate at all levels?
  • Your personal communication skills – assertiveness; handling conflict and disagreement
  • Personal effectiveness and leading by example – essential leadership skills for team leading

Day 2

  • Motivation – understanding what makes people tick
  • Planning and organisational skills; delegating effectively
  • Understanding teams and effective teamwork – setting objectives
  • Understanding teams and teamwork – what makes a successful team? Building team spirit and giving feedback

Day 1

  • Leadership – What do we expect from our leaders today?
  • Leading by developing your team’s potential, achieving objectives and keeping people on board
  • Planning, organising, and prioritising; Monitoring how the team is doing, their requirements and communicating progress upwards

Day 2

  • Getting the best out of people through communication and briefings, recognising contributions and gaining commitment.
  • Building positive relationships within the team – recognising everyone’s potential and input
  • Assertive thinking, understanding behaviours and body language; matching body language with behaviour.
  • Giving constructive feedback; disagreeing, making requests, and sharing opinions supportively and assertively.

Day 3

  • Leading a team – barriers to team working; how teams form and behave; what makes a high performing team.
  • Understanding motivation – and applying the techniques in the workplace.
  • Developing others – identifying training gaps; organising on the job training; tips for effective coaching.
  • Conclusions – review; action plans; moving ahead.

Essential Leadership Lessons

Are you a leader or a manager? Have you ever considered whether there’s a difference? This workshop focuses on enhancing your management skills by broadening your leadership approach.

Self-awareness, emotional intelligence and the ability to adapt your style and build positive relationships at work are crucial to your effectiveness as a leader. This one day session will help managers explore and understand how to better inspire and lead their team, create a motivating environment and drive success at work.

An Introduction to Coaching for Line Managers

If you’re serious about maximising your people’s potential, then you need to know how to coach them. Coaching, as a management approach, focuses on personal development, to improve an individual’s performance and help them become more confident, competent and capable team members.

Managers who are skilled at coaching create an environment where their people can flourish, stretch their abilities, take the initiative more often and fulfil their potential.

An effective manager-as-coach asks questions rather than jumping in to provide answers. This doesn’t mean not imparting knowledge to your team – in fact, coaching helps create a learning culture in your organisation if it’s done well - it’s about achieving the balance between sharing information and encouraging others to discover it for themselves.

It's not easy.

Discover Your Disc Style

Ever wondered why you just ‘click’ with some people – even strangers, when you first meet them? Yet others, even those you’ve worked alongside for years, feel more distant and harder to connect with?

Everything DiSC is an easy to use, personal learning tool that measures an individual’s preferences and tendencies based on the DiSC® model. This simple yet powerful model describes four basic styles: D, i, S, and C, and is the foundation of the Everything DiSC suite of profiles.

It helps shed light on why we get on well with some people, yet find others more tricky or awkward to connect with.

If you’d like to understand how to connect better with people generally, how to improve working relationships with your colleagues and how to build stronger bridges with the people you find more challenging than others – then this is the workshop for you.

Connections That Count, Influencing With Purpose

Influencing isn’t just for salespeople. We all need to influence and persuade whatever job we do, whether we are in sales or not.

Influence – the ability to impact agendas and outcomes and bring other people on board - is ultimately the tool people use to get things done and is, without doubt, a key component in career success.

In today’s workplace influencing and persuading are essential items in the toolbox of managers, team members, suppliers, customers and stakeholders. We may need to persuade colleagues to do something for us; influence customers in meetings; persuade a manager that our ideas are valid; influence team decisions; or persuade an interview panel that we are the best person for the job.

Managing Yourself and Your Emotions at Work

Emotions can run high in the workplace and the triggers that set them off can be very different for each of us.

From a sharp exchange with a colleague, to a sudden email from a senior leader asking to meet; from a challenging team meeting, to a 121 you’ve been feeling anxious about.

If you’ve ever found yourself wishing you could turn back time when you’ve either over-reacted or failed to act, or that you’d handled a challenging situation differently or that you’d been able to speak up more calmly under pressure, then this programme is for you.

Getting to Grips with D&I For New Leaders

Now that you’ve stepped into a team leader role, it’s essential that you have an awareness of what is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of Diversity and Inclusion – including the language used, treatment of employees and understanding fundamental legal boundaries.

As D&I ensures fair treatment and opportunity for all, it helps create an environment where everyone feels safe and improves performance by encouraging people to fulfil their potential.

It aims to eradicate prejudice and discrimination on the basis of an individual, or group of individual’s protected characteristics.

Bouncebackability – Building Resilience at Work

Increasing emotional resilience isn’t about becoming superwoman or superman…it’s about improving how you handle what happens to you.

Emotionally resilient people still have problems and setbacks but find their own unique way of balancing positive and negative feelings and experiences to develop their resilience.

Resilience is about the strength that builds through coping well with tough demands and difficult circumstances. And the capability that is developed in this way is key to coping with everyday problems and challenges – not just extreme situations.

Confident Communication at Work

So much of your personal success depends on your ability to communicate. In fact, often it's not what you say but how you say it that matters.

But key communication skills like rapport building, conversational techniques and assertiveness are rarely taught at school, college or university - and we end up in the workplace trying to deal with many kinds of people in many kinds of situations! And if we're not mindful and adaptable, generational differences can also add to misunderstandings and miscommunications.

If you've ever come out of an interaction wishing you'd either said something differently, or that you'd spoken up more, or wished you'd said no...then this workshop is for you!

Leading Your Team through Change

Change is such an emotive subject – people are difficult to read and their reactions to change can be unpredictable. Sometimes those we expect to embrace change the most can dig their heels in – and those we expect to fight it can jump to get change started!

Yet in today’s ever-changing business world, a team or individual’s ability to positively adapt to change can be crucial to the organisation surviving and thriving.

As leader, supporting your people as they work their way through the change process and the emotional rollercoaster it brings is crucial. Too often change is dropped on people at the last moment, when a more strategic and timely approach would help drive momentum more positively.

Giving Feedback That Counts

Letting people know what they’re doing well and where they need to improve is key to helping people maintain and further enhance their performance and contribution to the team.

Most managers agree with this in principle, yet often feel uncomfortable getting the message across in practice.

Giving feedback sensitively, constructively and in a timely manner is essential though – both for the individuals receiving the feedback as well as for line managers to connect with their team members and help them maximise their potential.

From Friend to Team Leader

This two day management training programme is full of practical learning, tips, techniques and guidance to equip you with the skills essential to step up into the role of team leader.

  • Understanding the role in the work environment; bridging personal barriers
  • Your team leader style – how do others see you?
  • Effective communication – how well do you communicate at all levels?
  • Leading by example – essential leadership skills for the workplace; delegation
  • Motivation – getting the best out of individuals and the team; understanding what makes people tick
  • What makes a successful team? Building team spirit and giving feedback

and more...

Powerful Presentations

Why oh why are so many work presentations so boring? Don’t fall into the vortex of mind-numbing business presenters…be brave, be bold!

Increasingly more and more professionals have to give formal presentations – to provide information, as part of the sales process, for management purposes, in meetings and even interviewing procedures.  

Isn’t it time you stopped to analyse and develop your presentation skills to give a more professional first impression to people that matter?

This two-day participative workshop will take you through all the steps necessary to give effective presentations – from planning, through design to delivery.

Handling Imposter Feelings

We’ve all been there. Hearing that niggling voice in your own head that you’re not up to the job, have fluked your success and are about to be found out!

This one day workshop will help you deal with, control and even embrace your imposter feelings.

  • What is it and when does it strike?
  • Thought patterns
  • What you can do about it
  • Managing your inner voice
  • Moving forwards

Let’s Talk… Effective 1 to 1s and Performance Reviews

Every manager can see the logic in having 1 to 1 reviews with their team members…but why do so many feel so awkward doing it that they just avoid them?

This one day workshop will help ensure you are confident and competent at handling 1 to 1s, addressing both positive and negative aspects of performance at work meaningfully, so you can connect with your team more successfully.

  • Overcoming awkwardness and concerns
  • The dos and don’ts of 1 to 1s
  • Praising meaningfully
  • Helping poor performance and building on successes
  • Thinking creatively about personal development
  • Identifying and agreeing next steps

Successful Supervisors

A three day programme focussing on team leadership and people management skills; this programme will help first line team leaders/supervisors to work with their teams to encourage flexibility, motivation and a positive attitude to work; it will enable them to enhance their interpersonal skills and improve teamwork.

The programme actively encourages our attendees to recognise their strengths and build on them, whilst also identifying areas for further development and establishing personal action points that can be put into practice in the workplace.

Developing Assertiveness at Work

A one day workshop to build confidence and develop a natural assertive communication style with all people across the workplace.

  • Understanding self-esteem
  • How and why does our behaviour change?
  • Maintaining a calm confidence even under pressure
  • Positive body language and verbal traits – looking and sounding assertive
  • Recognising and dealing with other peoples’ behaviours

Assertive behaviour is the key to increasing your personal power and developing assertiveness can be influential in making things happen for you. Your ability to behave assertively affects everything you do or don’t do – from dealing with everyday activities and individuals to making major life decisions.

Get Organised - Prioritising and Delegating for Managers

Before you head up a team you only need to focus on your own workload. Once you take on responsibility for leading a team, you’re involved in their workload as well as your own – so it’s essential that your prioritising and delegating skills are up to scratch.

It’s not always easy delegating – especially if you were promoted from within the team you’re now leading! Understanding what needs to be done by when, where your time, effort and resources need to be spent and how to ensure you’re delegating properly – and not dumping or micromanaging – is key to your ongoing success.

So You Want To Be A Manager?

Ever fancied sitting on the other side of the desk? Feel you’ve got potential to lead, manage and motivate a team? If your sights are set on leadership, this one day introduction to management is just for you.

Delivered as 2 x half day workshops, this programme is designed to give aspiring managers a real insight into the role and responsibilities of leading and managing a team; equip them with an understanding of the key skills and characteristics needed to be successful leaders and help them put together an action plan focussed on their next steps.

We’ll explore how to change perspective from ‘me’ to ‘the team’ and getting the balance right between getting things done and keeping people onboard.

Train the Trainer

A one day whistle stop session for anyone whose role includes training and developing others; how to design, deliver and evaluate a training session at work.

  • What works and what doesn’t
  • Golden Rules of Training
  • Holding attention and keeping it alive
  • Adapting to other peoples’ learning styles
  • Stepping out of your comfort zone
  • Evaluating success – did it do what it says on the tin?

Let’s Talk… Difficult Conversations

A one day workshop to equip you with the mindset and skillset to handle conversations where either the topic may be sensitive or the individual personally challenging for you. This skills workshop focuses on assertive mindset and behaviours, taking a respectful approach to tough conversations, challenging individuals and awkward situations. It will help managers enter these interactions with a more confident, practical and mindful approach.

  • The right frame of mind and approach
  • Checking your emotions
  • Conversational techniques and tips
  • Influencing and rapport building
  • Relationship management and the way forward

Clear, Confident & Collaborative: Maximising Team Communication

This one day skills workshop will help managers review and refocus their communication approach, drawing on their strengths as communicators and developing a strategic communication plan for their team.

  • The role of the leader as communicator, influencer and listener
  • The communication process – simple, just not easy…
  • Overcoming barriers and focusing on your purpose
  • Organisational communication – keeping everyone informed – management, your team, individual team members and ensuring smooth flow lines
  • Creating an open, collaborative culture in your team’s workplace
  • Building rapport and dealing with different personality styles

Skilful leaders make sure they’re getting the right message across, at the right time, to the right people, in the right place, in the right way.

Client Feedback
Testimonials

Dr. Amanda Goodby,
Senior Scientific Research Manager

“I cannot rate Marie’s DISC workshop highly enough. Marie made the session fun, interactive and interesting, all of the team thoroughly enjoyed the day and was a talking point within the team weeks after the session. Everyone was provided with an extremely detailed DISC profile and Marie provided a full explanation of each section of the report, interspersed with interactive activities to help with the understanding and how it translates in real life situations. The session helped the team understand themselves and each other better, which has resulted in improving communication and team morale. I will definitely be using Marie again for other team development sessions.”

Dominic Hale,
Head of Sales

“I thoroughly enjoyed the DiSC workshop. I think the biggest shock is getting your results. The more you look into the findings the more you realise how close to reality it is. You have to be fully truthful when answering the questions to start and also be in the ‘correct’ frame of mind to make sure you answer everything as you would day to day.Marie makes the results finding session fun and interactive.”

David Hull,
UK Head of Health & Safety

"Attending the “Everything DISC workshop” was very beneficial to me and my team. A fun yet informative workshop that gave great insight into the various characteristics that make up our diverse team. We have often referred to our individual profiles and traits in meetings and scenarios and it has benefited me personally when working with new peer groups."

Steve Williams,
HR Manager

"I recently attended a DISC workshop hosted by Marie as part of our management development training which I have been running in order to understand our leaders’ styles.   The course was very interesting and revealed a range of styles; some of which were most surprising!   I would highly recommend Marie who delivers the training in a fun, inclusive and humorous way. All of the managers on the course got something from the day."

Rob Simons,
Head of UK & International Sales

"Marie delivered an Everything DiSC workshop to our UK Sales Team during the pandemic period. The workshop came at the perfect time during a challenging period and assisted us in strengthening our skills to face new challenges which could lie ahead. The material and delivery of the workshop was of high calibre and Marie put everyone at ease throughout. The workshop created a strong team unity as we developed an understanding of the different personality types, alongside a deep learning of our own behaviour. Individuals have built a level of self-awareness and accepted the positives of their DiSC type. These skills have enabled us to build positive relationships both internally and externally leading to higher performance. Everyone left the workshop enthused and have continued to use the new skills personally and professionally. Overall, we owe a lot to this workshop, and I would recommend it to all teams regardless of size."

Contact Us

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Tell us more about your training and development requirements. We’ll be delighted to discuss your needs and deliver a programme for you.