Read more on our Antidotes to Austerity series of workshops.
The customer comes second because……
Customers-first would seem to be a self-evident focus for organisations, especially in a recession. Yet amidst the rush to do this are we missing something even more obvious than a focus on customers? How can putting your customers second really be best for them?
The missing advantage
Businesses have always known that they need a competitive advantage: focusing on how you add value by what you do compared to other organisations. In the 1990’s this first advantage was joined by a second, the advantage of collaboration. Collaborative advantage generates benefits by doing better, or by creating more value together (with other organisations) than could be done separately. However, there is one advantage that has been largely overlooked. In the context of austerity it might just be the advantage that makes all the difference.
Resourceful leadership
When budgets are tight and resources are constrained, it’s understandable to feel that your ability to lead is being limited. In such situations it’s more than likely that you’re being asked to make resource savings. Before jumping to difficult but predicable decisions to cut resources, make sure you’ve tried resourceful leadership first. This session gives you six resource strategies to release resources when budgets are tight.
Re-energise your teams
If you have re-organised or re-structured, one of the first things to suffer is the effectiveness of teams. You need to get teams working quickly, to recover the enhanced performance benefits they bring. Teams don’t just happen, they need to be built. In a recession it’s far more likely you’re either re-focusing your team on new challenges, taking over an existing team or re-forming a team. This workshop can help you with each of these situations. In the rapidly changing and challenging dynamics of today’s environment, flexibility and responsiveness are critical. Effective teams can make all the difference. Teams may not be the answer to every organisational problem, but they could be to most.
It’s all about performance
What is the biggest challenge facing managers today? The most obvious answer might be managing changes, re-structures, and resource-constraints. However, the real issue is not how to manage any or all of these factors. The biggest challenge facing managers today is managing the outcome – their effect on performance. The key to delivering services in the current, difficult, operating context is a renewed focus on performance.
Regaining your business “mojo”
When times are tough how can you grow your way out of a recession? This session reviews the strategies businesses use to grow in a recession. In a recession it’s easy to lose your “mojo”, meaning your inspiration and motivation. How can you regain your business mojo? How do you “find the magic in what you do?”
Extreme thinking – releasing creativity
Thinking differently about a situation is often the prerequisite to finding a creative solution with which to move forward. One way to do this is to go to the extremes – thinking big and thinking small. Try thinking of big changes to help you do things differently. What if you doubled your number of customers, or halved the time it took to process a service? At the opposite extreme, thinking small can have a similar effect. What small changes can the most impact on your service? What might constitute a “tipping point” in your service area? This workshop will also address the power of ideas to help shape the future, with suggested steps to help you test new ideas.
Tipping point leadership – find the glass
Is it possible to achieve change quickly? Can this be done even when it may seem difficult, and the size and scale of the change agenda seems to weigh heavily on you? How do you overcome hurdles such as being stuck in the status quo, constrained budgets and staff motivation and morale issues? Competing tensions in work often result in the need to make compromises. It’s usually just too difficult, or even impossible, to ensure that competing demands and priorities can all be satisfied. Something has to give – or does it?
Re-thinking motivation when times are tough
Performance is much more than just turning up to do a job but for many people this is what work seems to have become. Your job as a manager is to engage your colleagues so that they want to do much more than just turn up. How do you actually motivate people to make a difference, to perform? It’s all well and good trying to motivate when work is going smoothly but how do you motivate when things are difficult? This workshop will help you to think about motivating in challenging situations with seven strategies to re-focus motivation.
Manage your own performance – think energy
If you are going to ask others to challenge austerity, you need to ensure your own performance is up to the task! We all know that managing effectively can be hard work – both demanding and a balancing act. But if you’re going to ask others to rise to the challenge, you need to think about your own resources and energy to manage during turbulent times. In this session you will explore some critical ideas to help you deal with the demands of your job, and to get that balance just right. The session introduces 5 ways to manage your own personal energy at work.
For more information on this series, or on how we can adapt them for your own organisation, contact us here.