2.147 Leadership Development Workshops: Build Stronger Leaders and Teams

This episode is a special one as it also marks five years of the Find Grow Keep podcast!  

In this conversation, we explore why leadership development workshops are one of the most practical ways to lift performance, strengthen culture, and improve retention, especially in small and medium sized businesses. 

In today’s episode, you will learn about: 

• What leadership development workshops actually are and what great workshops include, from skill building to practice, coaching style support, and feedback 
• Why leadership matters more than ever, and how many culture and retention issues are actually leadership capability gaps 
• The outcomes you can expect when workshops are designed well, including clearer communication, stronger decision making, better team cohesion, and fewer escalations back to the business owner 
• High impact workshop topics that consistently deliver results, such as active listening, difficult conversations, feedback, team effectiveness, emotional intelligence in practice, problem solving, and self leadership 
• Who should attend, including current people leaders and emerging leaders, and why shared language across leaders matters 
• Formats that work for busy businesses, including half day workshops and practical series that build capability over time 
• How to tailor workshops to your culture and real workplace scenarios so the learning sticks 
• How to build buy in and think about ROI, including what to measure and how to create follow through 

If you would like support designing leadership development workshops that fit your team and your business, book a free discovery call here: https://meetings.hubspot.com/ronita-fourie 

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Visit amplifyhr.com.au for more insights and resources.  

Get our free eBook packed with practical strategies to attract, engage, and retain top talent. Perfect for business owners and leaders focused on building a thriving team. Download it at amplifyhr.com.au/downloadable/find-grow-keep

Transcript

Welcome to Episode 147 and today also lands on the five year anniversary of starting this podcast. So if you've been listening for a while, then thank you. I know there is a lot of content out there, the fact that you spent some time with this podcast and then practical steps to create a better workplace is something that I'm really grateful for. So to celebrate, I wanted to talk about something that has come up quite a bit over the last five years. It also makes a tangible difference to team culture, performance and retention, and that is leadership development workshops, and specifically how these workshops can help you build stronger leaders and stronger teams without derailing your day to day operations. Now a lot of businesses don't actually have leadership problems. They have support problems because we often will promote great technical people, the ones who get results and they're reliable, but then we put them into a managing role, and we expect them to just know how to have tricky conversations, to just by osmosis, understand how to deal with performance issues, how to motivate a team, or navigate conflict or keep everyone engaged. But if no one's ever taught us how, there aren't a lot of people that can just naturally do that. So today I'm going to walk you through what leadership development workshops actually involve, why leadership matters more than ever right now, the real outcomes that you could expect and how to get buy in. So it's not just seen as something that's nice to have. And I'm also going to share some workshop topics that are consistently the ones that I would say are the best to give to new leaders. So starting with, what are leadership development workshops? You know, people here that were workshop sometimes they picture a full day of theory and PowerPoint. That's not what I'm talking about. A good leadership development workshop is structured, and it's practical training that helps leaders to build the real skills that they can use immediately. And usually it maintains across four different key elements. First is skill building. So this is where we teach simple frameworks and tools in plain language. So we don't want to be overly academic. We just want to talk about what works in the workplace. Second is practical exercises. So we want people to practice, put it into the way that they would do it in their work, and not just listen to someone else talk about it. So actually going through real scenarios, role playing conversations. The third is mentoring and coaching style support, so that could be peer coaching in the room, could be some guided reflection, or it could be follow up sessions, depending on the programme. And fourth is feedback, because leadership is one of those things where we all have blind spots and feedback helps leaders to see what's landing what's not and where to adjust. So when workshops are done, well, then they are tailored to your business. They're not generic. They're tailored to your context, your leaders, your values, your challenges, because you know someone in a leadership role in a blue collar business out on a trade site, is going to have very different challenges to someone sitting in an office in a professional services firm. The principles are the same, but the examples and the pressure points are very different. So for example, if you've been listening to this for a while, you will know I love the whole brain thinking model, and I've been working with it for now almost 25 years. But every session that I run is different, and even in the just the last few weeks, I've created one workshop for an executive leadership team where we designed it around two people in the executive team combining to deliver a company project. So we spent half a day together, refreshing the whole brain thinking model, sharing how everyone prefers to think the work elements they prefer, and then getting into the steps for how to apply that to those accountability pairings and how to have uncomfortable conversations with their team members and stakeholders. Now another workshop a week later, still using the whole brain thinking model, but it was through a creative thinking lens. So we took a real business challenge at an initiative, and we worked that through using the whole brain thinking model and creative thinking to develop concepts that they could then pilot. So although the basis that whole brain thinking in this instance might be the same the way it is designed for different kinds. Companies and situations, it's going to be different every time. Now, leadership matters a lot right now. It's always mattered, but the current workplace environment is so different to what it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, expectations have changed a lot. People want clarity, fairness, meaningful communication. They want to feel supported. They want development. And people are far less willing to stay in an environment where their manager is reactive, unavailable or inconsistent. And so a lot of retention issues come back to the leader, and it's not in a dramatic way. It's often just in small ways, managers who avoid conversations, who don't set clear expectations, who might be technically brilliant but don't understand people dynamics, or a new manager who's overwhelmed and so becomes short and rushed and inconsistent, and all those things reduce employee engagement over time. So when we invest in leadership capability, we're not just building skills, we are strengthening the whole system, because better leadership supports better communication, better team cohesion, better decision making, and that flows into performance, culture and retention. So let's talk about outcomes, because leadership workshops are not just about giving people information, they are about changing behaviour. So the benefits that we want to see is improved communication. Leaders learning how to listen properly, how to ask better questions, how to be clearer. That can reduce a lot of misunderstandings, more confidence in decision making. A lot of managers second guess themselves or they delay decisions because they don't want to do the wrong thing. So workshops give them a process. They learn how to think it through and then act stronger team collaboration, when leaders know how to create clarity, handle tension, build trust, teams become more connected and more productive and more consistency across leaders, instead of every manager doing things their own way, workshops create a shared language. People start approaching feedback, one on ones and performance conversations in a consistent way, and finally, less reliance on the business owner or the CEO. If you are in that role, it can feel sometimes like everything escalates to you. So leadership development is one of the most effective ways to change that, because you're building the capability of the other leaders in the business. In terms of workshop topics when you're starting leadership development, there are some topics that I think will make the biggest difference. What is active listening? Sounds simple, but can change a lot because people listen to respond and not to understand. So leaders who can start to engage in active listening will create trust and psychological safety difficult conversations and feedback. You know, it's one many people avoid. So we want to give leaders a clear feedback framework so they can stop procrastinating, get issues resolved earlier, don't turn things into resentment. Team effectiveness, so covering things like role clarity, decision making, Team norms, how to create a culture of accountability, emotional, effective leadership. So how do we use EI in practice, recognising triggers, staying ground and managing reactions, leading calmly under pressure, problem solving and decision making. So leaders need tools for thinking, prioritising and making decisions with the team, especially if things get messy, and, of course, self leadership. So how do we manage our own time, boundary, stress and workload so that we don't burn out and take the whole team with us? Now, you don't need to do all these at once. You know a better and a more simple approach is to choose one or two core areas, build capability, and then layer in the next topics over time. Now, who should attend? A question I get asked a lot, who do we actually include in these workshops? And my answer is, anyone who leads people now or is likely to in the next one to two years. So current people, managers, supervisors, team leaders, coordinators, middle managers, and you can also include those emerging leaders. Ideally, your business owners or your CEO attend the sessions or open the sessions to let everyone know their outcomes they're looking for. Why you're investing in the sessions. This signals that leadership matters around here. It's not just something, you know, we send people to do. It's actually how we operate and helps create a shared language across the business. Now, in terms of time out of the office or out of the work, I understand, but having leadership development doesn't mean taking people out of the business. Weeks. Now, most workshops are half day, full day. Over the last few years, we've had an increasing demand for two hour sessions. It really doesn't matter designed well, the length of the session isn't so important. It's more about having it designed well and intentionally. And you may even have some programmes run as a series over a few months, which can work better, because people can learn something, apply it, and then come back and build on it. And the style should be quite interactive and practical. So we want to have short concepts, real examples, practice discussion, action plans. And the goal out of each session is that people leave with one or two things that they're going to implement in the next 30 days. And workshops can be in person or virtual. We've seen an increase in in person workshops, but sometimes a mix can work as well. Having an in person kick off to build momentum and then shorter virtual sessions to maintain progress without as much disruption. Now, workshops should be customised to your workplace culture, because leadership training is far more effective when it reflects how you want leadership to look like in your business. And customization usually means three things, using your language and values so leaders are practising leadership in the context of your culture, using real scenarios from your workplace, so the conversation and role plays reflect what they're actually dealing with on a day to day basis and aligning with your existing processes. So the workshop tools support your one on one's performance reviews, goal setting, communicate the rhythms. So a simple rule of thumb is to keep a strong core framework and then tailor the content to your environment so that it can be immediately usable. Now, in terms of getting buy in and measuring ROI, it's one of those things that people say, Yes, leadership development is very important, but it can always get pushed down the priority list. So a few ways to make the case start with thinking about the cost of not doing it. So what's the time spent fixing issues, rework for miscommunication, performance problems, dragging out for months, conflict in teams, losing good people because of poor leadership. All of those things are a huge cost. And then if you link it to business outcomes, your leadership is not soft. It drives productivity, retention, execution. So the way that we link that is through measuring it so tracking things like an improvement in employee engagement, better performance, conversations, reduce turnover, faster onboarding. There's lots of different ways that we can start to measure that, and a simple one is just ask leaders to commit to one action at the end of each workshop and then follow up, did you do that thing? What does that mean? How did that change you as a leader? By doing that? And this is where we can really start to see that ROI, because leadership is built through practice, not just insight. So if you invest in leadership development, you are going to see more confident managers who know how to lead, not just do the work, better communication and fewer people issues bubbling up under the surface, higher engagement and retention because people feel supported and developed more consistency in how leaders manage performance and expectations and a stronger pipeline of future leaders. So you're not always scrambling when someone leaves. And above and beyond all of that, you're going to have a healthier culture, because leaders are equipped to handle change and pressure without burning themselves or their teams out. So if you've been thinking about leadership development workshops, I want to leave you with this question is not whether your leaders need develop, it's whether you're willing to leave leadership to chance, because when leadership is left to chance, culture will become inconsistent. Communication breaks down, and retention becomes harder than it needs to be. And if you'd like support designing leadership development workshops that are practical and tailored to your business and built for real world application. We'd love to help you. Can book a free discovery call, use the link in the show notes, and just quickly, if you've been here since the early episodes, or even if you just recently found this podcast, thank you for being a part of it, and I hope that you have found this episode useful, and if so, please click subscribe, share it with a fellow business owner or manager who's also building their team this year. You can also show us the love by leaving a rating or a review over Apple podcasts or Spotify. Thanks so much for joining me. If you have any feedback questions or I do. Future episodes head on over to amplifyhr.com.au or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can start a conversation.