Our Management Training Courses

By introducing our Management Training courses to your staff we help ease the negative effect of change on both managerial and supervisory personnel. The change in job responsibilities, the change in personnel, job duties, and the rising challenge of developing subordinates are specific goals of our learning systems courses. We are highly successful at helping Managers and Supervisors learn and adapt to the necessary skills and proper behaviors to be successful at work as well as in their personal lives.

For more information on our management training courses please contact us.

As a part of our management training courses, Managers and Supervisors will learn how to:

• Minimize the chance of miscommunication by understanding what people are really saying, and why
• Deal with difficult people, manage tense situations, and resolve conflict
• Make use of proven active listening skills to improve your ability to gain helpful information
• Be able to facilitate, guide, and close discussions in one-on-one or group settings
• Improve understanding and communication by giving and receiving good feedback
• Use ideas submitted by a member of the team without causing other members to be defensive
• Develop a comprehensive team building strategy that improves productivity of the whole team
• Emphasize the value of working toward common goals without devaluing individual accomplishment
• Define and set up a method to track staff activities
• Be able to manage time and work assignments effectively
• Conduct team meetings that capture and hold the audience’s attention
• Interview and hire the right person for the right job
• Save time and work more effectively through the use of a clear time management plan
• Understand and comply with proper hiring and managing requirements
• Communicate effectively with both superiors, peers and subordinates
• Become effective coaches for their work team
• Conduct accurate and difficult performance appraisals

 

There are eight signs that are leading indicators for a project that can be expected not to reach its goals and targets in a timely manner. These eight signs are:

1.The project-team appears to be dealing with a very broad range of issues
2.The project team does not seem to be spending much time together
3.The team is spending a lot of time carrying out "interviews"
4.The team does not appear to be doing any meaningful analytics
5.The team has very limited interaction with you(and other sponsors )
6.Key stake-holders, who's by-in will be required for the project to be a success, are not aware of the project
7.The project is not meeting agreed deadlines
8.It is difficult to pin the team down on any meaningful conclusions
This article will highlight how best to deal with the eight of these signs, a situation where it is difficult to pin the team down on any meaningful conclusions.

Why is it a problem that the project you are sponsoring is not developing (preliminary) conclusions? A key assumption is that the project is meant to develop conclusions and recommendations. There may be projects that have been given a responsibility for "collecting all information". However, in my opinion such a project would be very wasteful. There may be projects that have been asked to only collect data and analyze data about a given issues. In my opinion this is a wrong way to set up a project, as it is impossible to carry out any meaningful analysis without having a goal and a set of hypotheses leading to conclusions.

Assuming that the core reason for the project is to develop conclusions about a key issue, then it is naturally a problem if the project team does not seem interested in doing so. In addition, this is often a fairly scary problem, as it will typically come to light late in the process (sometimes not until the final presentation). This problem therefore can, make most, if not all, of the effort and resources that have been invested in the project a waste.

What can you, as the project sponsor, do to avoid this problem? The most important input from your side is at the beginning of the project. You need to start the project off with clearly defined goals, and deliverables that are very explicit regarding the type of conclusions and recommendations that you expect. You will also need to follow up on the project regularly (default is weekly) to ensure that the project is sticking to its plan and going in the right direction (i.e. will it be able to deliver the required conclusions and recommendations).

These regular meetings should also be used to ensure that the project team is working with hypotheses. Doing so will enable you to test whether proving the hypotheses will bring the team closer to its final goals. In addition, and even more importantly, working with hypotheses will enable the project team to work much more effectively and efficiently. Finally, you should force the team to test its conclusions in a Blue Team. This is a meeting with experts who are not directly involved in the project where key ideas and potential conclusions are tested, and the participants are asked for input on key issues and complications.

The previous suggestions assume that you are starting up a project or are fairly early in the process. What can you do if you are at the end of the project, and the team does not seem to be close to developing any conclusions? This will require some fairly intense input from your side, as you will need to sit down with the team and go through the overall process of the project. You will need to start with a review of the key starting points for the project, and then discuss and agree the goals and deliverables that were given to the project. These should be presented as clearly leading to conclusions and recommendations.

You will then need to go through the work that the team has carried out and find the key data points that have come out of their analytics. These data points should be discussed with the team with the goal of agreeing what they mean. This should then be developed into (preliminary) conclusions. These conclusions then need to be stress-tested. Are they robust? Are they well-supported? If the answer is "yes", you and the team can start thinking about the communications phase. If the answer is "no", you need to check how much time is available, and agree the very specific activities that will make the conclusions more robust. The work that the project team carries out in this phase should be followed up very intensely to ensure that every moment is spent on work to make the conclusions more robust.