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Pain Killers & Performance Boosters
People are often regarded as being the most important asset of any organisation or business. When everything clicks with them it’s like taking vitamins and getting a feel good ‘dopamine’ boost. They are motivated, loyal, highly skilled, positive, healthy and perform at their full potential, which is good for business.
However, people can also be an organisation’s biggest headache causing significant problems which require the rapid application of pain relief to avoid problems getting out of control. Moral is low, stress levels high, there is more conflict than collaboration, skills drop and ultimately business performance suffers.
Most of the work I do involves applying pain relief to people problems or creating vitamin boosters which supercharge people’s capabilities so they optimise their performance.
In today’s edition of Breakthrough Leadership I talk about why it's important to invest in your people and the different types of tailored solutions that can be created and delivered to support organisations transform their leaders and teams.
Why bother investing in your people?
“Keeping and growing your people is one of the soundest investments a business can make. A recent study by McKinsey shows 94% of the UK workforce lacks the skills they will need by 2030 to embrace new responsibilities and perform well in their job”Organisations that don’t dedicate time and resources to their employees' professional development are much more likely to experience ongoing problems and real pain, in particular with:
Low employee loyalty: losing key talent and then replacing them is costly. It takes time and resources to recruit, train new hires and get them productive again.
Poor staff engagement: disengaged employees can create a toxic environment where rumours and gossip show up because they don’t feel fairly treated.
Skills gaps: organisations that do not upskill their employees regularly to keep up with the rapid pace of change hinder their growth and fall behind the competition.
Low levels of moral & motivation: when employees can see you are not interested in their career paths or their development they will be less motivated to perform well.
Customer dissatisfaction: unmotivated, disengaged and poorly trained employees will result in poor customer experiences hindering your organisation’s reputation.
Overwhelmed and stressed: Many organisations promote employees to management roles without giving them any training or support setting them up to fail and burn-out.
Question : If you think forward 6-12 months what challenges are you going to regret solving right now?
These are the problems you can’t live with any longer and you need to quickly apply pain relief to.
Think of the business KPIs that will suffer as a result of not taking action and the knock on effects of this.
“Research by Gallup and Korn Ferry shows that a company scoring in the top quartile in employee engagement sees on average a 17% increase in productivity, 21% increase in profitability and an 89% increase in customer satisfaction.”Investing in employee training and development has many positive impacts on an organisation:
Increased Productivity: Well-trained employees are more efficient and effective, which leads to cost savings and higher output.
Improved Quality of Work: Training reduces errors and rework leading to higher quality output.
Better Client Satisfaction: Well-trained employees provide better services and experiences, which leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
High Employee Satisfaction: Investing in training demonstrates that you value your employees' growth and well-being, which can lead to greater job satisfaction and loyalty.
Development of Future Leaders: Training can help develop and nurture talent and potential future leaders.
Better Work Environment: Consistent training can help employees work more effectively, which can create a more welcoming and valued atmosphere and culture.
Employees feeling valued: Communicate the benefits of employee development to help employees appreciate the company’s investment in their development, particularly when they are actively looking for learning and development opportunities.
Question: What vision do you have for your team over the next 12-24 months and what is required to get there?
Defining your vision and the current gap will help you understand the steps you need to take to transform and lead the changes required.
Identify which KPIs will benefit the most and the positive effects this will have across your business and beyond.
Common reasons clients reach out for support:
Clients often experience real challenges and problems in their business and need to remove the pain quickly to move forward. These are examples of typical challenges clients have wanted to discuss with me:
Gaps in Crucial Skills: organisations or their employees identify skills they want to develop. These skills often include presentation & communication skills; managing difficult conversations; leadership strategies; commercial skills; building healthy routines, building a resilient mindset; improving culture; and managing teams. Gaps in skills often hinder the employee confidence and their performance.
Gaps in Capabilities to Lead Change: organisations want to ensure their leadership team have the skills and tools to lead their teams through periods of significant change, particularly where uncertainty, instability & volatility exist. Poor change leadership causes transformation programmes to fail and set a business back.
Poor Engagement and Toxic Cultures: teams struggle to communicate and engage constructively, creating conflict and a toxicity. This reduces trust in teams causing collaboration to drop off and hinders business performance.
Limited People management capabilities: organisations promote successful employees into management roles without giving them appropriate people management experience or training. This can often back fires by negatively impacting the team performance and new manager’s progress, reducing overall team moral.
High Expectations and Pressure: Investors (e.g. private equity), partners and interested parties expect high growth, regular status updates and full commitment from the leadership team to deliver, no matter what. This puts enormous pressure and stress on them impacting the wellbeing of key individuals.
Immature Sales capabilities: some sales team develop organically with a mix of different experience and skills as businesses grow. With growth comes the need to align sales methodologies, skills, tools and techniques to maintain consistency and sales performance across larger teams. Commercial activities can get out of control and hinder progress without proper support and development.
Individuals struggling to progress: successful individuals recognise they need professional, independent support to take the next step in their career development. CEOs, a senior leadership executives, or young ambitious leaders of the future typically want support to help them clarify their direction and choices, build confidence and skills, knock over barriers to progress, create balance and energy, and take positive action.
What Solutions are out there to help?
"Thank you Mark. A brilliant programme that has built confidence in the group to drive change. You are the master of what you do."There are many training, development and coaching solutions out there. I wanted to share with you specific solutions I tailor for clients based on many of the problems and opportunities I’ve mentioned above. It’s useful for people who have not worked with me before to understand how I engage and what the different services are that I offer.
Understanding what’s right for you
Initial Exploration Call or Meeting: the most important aspect of all the work I do is to deeply understand the client’s situation and perspective at the start of any engagement so that I can create a tailored programme that works specifically for them. In particular:
What is the driver for change and why did they reach out to me?
What pain are they experiencing and why is it important to remove it?
Where do they want to go in the future and how do they want to get there?
What specific outcomes do they want to achieve and what would success look like?
Complimentary Experience: Some clients want to directly experience my training or coaching to ensure we are a good fit, so I will often factor this into initial client engagement where required and tailor it to their specific situation.
Heads Up and Freer - Training, Development and Coaching Solutions
(1). Bespoke Leadership Development Programmes:
"Hi Mark, I just wanted to drop you a note to say that the leadership coaching works (but I'm sure you knew that already). I'm on a two day workshop at a national security event and to be honest I'm probably the least qualified in the room. However, using the skills you have shown me, I have realised that I do have a voice to be heard and (more importantly) how to frame my comments to their best effect when considering the type of people in the room. Many Thanks"
These programmes are designed for organisations that want to develop their senior leadership team and require specialise external support.
Individual or small groups: The programme is designed for individuals or small groups of leaders and typically runs over a 6-12 month period at a pace tailored for the client and their business.
Assessments & Profiling: Each individual has a scientifically validated profile assessment completed to enhance their self-awareness. Leaders get an “Emergenetics” thinking and behaviours profile and an “Energy Leadership Index” assessment. Both include a debrief to fully understand the profile assessments and how to use these as a leader with their team.
3-Stage Leadership Framework: I use a proven 3-stage framework which includes a range of modules and topics across (1) Leading Self, (2) Leading Teams and (3) Leading organisations.
Leading Self: this module focuses on improving self-awareness of individuals and a team to boost their engagement, communication and performance. Modules include (i) Emergenetics; (ii) Energy Leadership and (iii) Personal Branding.
Leading Teams: this module focuses boosting skills to manage a team effectively. Modules include (i) Coaching & Communication Skills; (ii) Building a High Performance Culture; and key (iii) Commercial Skills.
Leading Organisations: this module focuses on enhancing leaders abilities to successfully lead an organisation over a sustained period of time. Key modules include (i) Leading Change; (ii) Strategic Thinking; (iii) Inclusivity and (iv) Sustainability.
Action Learning & Coaching: To underpin and embed learnings into your organisation “Action Learning” sessions can be facilitated to empower your leadership teams to regularly engage, collaborate and drive change together, recognising the power of their own networks. 121 Coaching is also available to support individuals.
(2) Individual leadership and executive coaching:
A programme of, typically, at least 6 individual coaching sessions, including a personalised “Energy Leadership Index” (Eli) assessment.
"You completely changed my current outlook on life. You guided me through my mind so I could move forward"Eli Assessment and Debrief at the start of the programme. This helps leaders understand how they show up on a good day (Energetic Profile) and a bad day (Stress Reaction) and the impact different energy levels have on their thinking, behaviours and actions.
Goals and Outcomes: Leaders identify the critical goals and outcomes they want to achieve and the coaching sessions work towards these in partnership with the client.
Typical client challenges: Clients often want to Progress their Career or Pivot; Take on a new Leadership Role; Start a new business; Better understand their Leadership style and impact; Boost their Confidence; and Overcoming mental blockers that hold them back.
Leadership Skills and Mentoring: Some leaders identify leadership topics or skills they wish to develop during the coaching programmes e.g. coaching skills for leaders or change management skills. In these instances sessions can be tailored for the client which are more focused around learning and mentoring rather than coaching.
(3) Sales Skills Training programmes
“Brilliantly delivered – thinking outside the box in a structured way”
“Structured, and excellent way to understanding the concepts, Thanks Mark”
“The use of real customers and scenarios worked perfectly with me”One-off sessions or 3-6 month programmes. Here are a range of sales training skills and modules I worked with clients on to provide simple sales methodologies and frameworks to boost their sales team's performance.
Sales fundamentals: creating a mindset for success and understanding core techniques to bring value, trust and momentum to your sales deals.
Design Thinking: using a highly collaborative and creative sales process to build long term partnerships for complex problems and organisations.
Consultative Selling: using the buying process to optimise your sales impact from identifying urgent needs, to mastering a sales pitch and closing a deal.
Negotiation Skills: tools and techniques to boost the value of the deals you negotiate and your ability to achieve better outcomes.
Outreach: identifying new opportunities and reaching out to new contacts. Being relevant, insightful, influential and building trust to break into an account.
Strategic Account Management: account planning tools and techniques to manage complex, high value accounts and build sustainable long term value.
“Thanks for the great insights over 4 days - wonderful sessions. I truly admire your calm and composed demeanour. It brings a sense of clarity and focus to every session, making it easier for us to absorb the knowledge. Your guidance feels both empowering and approachable, which is a rare and valuable quality in a coach.”
(4) Communication Skills Training:
A range of one-off interventions aimed at boosting particular comms skills for groups of 10-20 individuals in an organisation either face to face or virtually.
“Very good content and effective breakout sessions. Mark ran it really well and was a fantastic facilitator.”
“Excellent clarity, weaving behavioural insights and knowledge to provide practical tools I can use in life and business.”
“Thoroughly enjoyed the high amount of interactions with breakouts. Very clearly presented with clear and to the point slides”Common skills gaps I have worked with clients to overcome:
Presentation skills: developing compelling messages & content, improving your delivery skills, and landing your messages to achieve your outcomes.
Storytelling: understand how to create a story and activate the emotions of your audience, to make your communications stand out.
Building a Personal Brand: understand why your personal brand matters, what you want to stand for, and how to go about building your brand.
Listening, Questioning and Coaching Skills: learn how to get curious with your customers by asking powerful questions and actively listening as well as empowering your teams to grow.
Body Language: better understand the power of your body language and the potential it has to transform how you communicate.
Cultural Awareness: international teams need to understand different cultures and how this impact language, behaviours and communication.
Internal communication: understand how to engage and communicate better within your organisation and foster greater engagement.
External communication: clarify your critical business outcomes and how communication strategies and campaigns can help achieve these goals.
(5) Business Skills Workshops:
A range of one-off interventions aimed at boosting particular skills for groups of 10-20 individuals in an organisation either face to face or virtually.
“Mark’s workshop was well structured and covered a wide range of topics in great detail – Super helpful!
“Great programme – very useful. Mark provided several additional bits of reading material as well as great tips and advice to manager several scenarios.”
"I found it really insightful, especially our discussion about signalling & check-ins / check-outs.”Here are examples of sessions I have successfully run for clients:
Managing Conflict & Difficult Conversations: Tools and techniques to overcome these common and reoccurring problem for organisations.
Communicating with impact: Building a strong personal brand and utilising communication skills and techniques to enhance your impact as a leader..
Leadership Mindset: Exploring how to develop a mindset of Responsibility, Resilience and Rigour to achieve exceptional results and stand out.
Energy Leadership: Understand how you “show up” (Energetic profile & Stress reaction) & it’s impact on your team’s engagement and performance.
High-Performance Routines: Optimise your performance & well-being using a 4-stage process – Prepare, Perform, Transition & Recover.
Leading Change: Best practice leadership models to mobilise your teams and build high performance team during complex transformation.
Strategic Planning: Use the 3-Horizons strategic model to explore different future visions and potential actions and outcomes to maintain growth.
Building a Progressive Culture: Define your organisations values, beliefs and behaviours and create role models to foster and embed your new culture.
Commercial Acumen: boost your teams core commercial skills to allow them to identify opportunities, understand your business costs and mitigate risks.
Team Building: a wide range of fun creative activities to foster greater engagement and team collaboration, particularly when creating and building new teams.
🙏 Thank you for reading this edition of Breakthrough Leadership.
💯 I hope you are able to take some insights away to help you find ways to apply painkillers to those urgent people problems that need fixing as well as finding ways to applying vitamins to boost your leadership capabilities and team performance.
💯 If any of the programmes I discuss in this newsletter resonate with you and you want to learn more please get into touch:
email: mark@headsupandfreer.com
mobile: +44 7843 510858
website: www.headsupandfreer.com
Book a Leadership Call: www.calendly.com/headsupandfreer
Finally, if you’ve experienced ground breaking interventions which have helped your team transform their performance and have a story to tell please let me know, particularly if you’d be willing to record a Podcast episode with me.
Breakthrough Moments Podcast: www.headsupandfreer.com/podcast-breakthroughmoments
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