The skills to build a more effective business
There's seldom been as much pressure on businesses to be as effective as possible. There's always the pressure to cut - but what about building on what you have?
28 July 2011
When times are tough, there's often a need to cut things back - to make sure that the business is running as leanly as possible. Fair enough, it's satisfying to remove the non-essentials from a business and see a few percentage points' improvement on the bottom line. But a more effective - and sustainable - strategy is to improve your output, by improving your people.
Cutting people doesn't make the remaining team members more effective - indeed, it makes life much harder for them, as they have to pick up the slack left behind. Yet most people could make a greater contribution to their organisation, by either improving the skills they have or by learning new skills.
There's never been a more compelling case for improving the skills of an organisation. Despite training representing an outlay, it's an outlay with a return - one that is both immediate and sustained. With the right training, people can undertake everyday tasks faster and do them better. They can also begin to undertake entirely new tasks.
So which skills are the best to learn? There are many everyday tasks for which people have little formal preparation - it's often assumed that people are either good at them, or they're not. Take presenting. How often have you heard the phrases "gift of the gab" and "can sell snow to Eskimos"? While it's certainly true that some people have a natural aptitude towards speaking, it's also true that this skill can be learned by those who don't immediately seem to have a natural gift. (And, for those who do have a natural gift, their abilities - and predictability and consistency of their results - can almost always be improved.)
At e-academy, we've assessed the skills which are generally most useful to an organisation's workforce and expanded our portfolio of training courses with a range of new titles:
- Dealing with difficult situations and conflict management
- Introduction to managing people
- Managing change effectively
- Managing performance effectively
- Managing time, working with deadlines and getting results
- Negotiation skills
- Presentation and facilitation skills
- Understanding how we communicate, by increasing self-awareness
The course topics chosen are designed to have the maximum positive impact on an organisation's mainstream activities - in business terms, targeting training where it's likely to have the best impact in terms of positive return. This makes the courses useful to the widest possible audience - for people at most organisational levels, not just management alone.
Here's how our courses are designed to provide a tangible benefit to organisations:
Dealing with difficult situations and conflict management
Managing problems quickly stops them escalating into time-consuming (and therefore costly) disputes/debates - and leads to an answer which is typically more beneficial to the organisation.
Introduction to managing people
Managing people is a skill in itself, yet frequently people are put into a leadership position without the right skills, or because they are a good practitioner in a specific field (for example, a sales person becoming team leader). This course provides the essentials for those in their first leadership role, so they don't have to 'learn as they go' and can lead more decisively.
Making a change to a business can be extremely challenging - for those at the 'coal face' there's not only the process of managing the change itself, but also dealing with resistance to the change. This course - designed for managers, supervisors and team leaders - helps people to implement much-needed change as quickly and efficiently as possible, with the least amount of disruption.
Managing performance effectively
A key part of being a manager or team leader is to assess the performance of others and then to guide the development of those who report to them. This course helps people to more objectively appraise the performance of others, give feedback in the most constructive way and support people as they grow.
Managing time, working with deadlines and getting results
Even the most talented person can find it difficult to prioritise a busy workload - especially when there are conflicting goals (with the temptation often being to work on that which is most rewarding first, or that where the stakeholder is screaming the loudest). This course helps people put a real structure around how they approach managing their own time and helps them understand how people typically create time-management issues for themselves. The goal is to make each person more effective, by enabling them to plan and manage the tasks allocated to them with far greater efficiency.
Negotiation takes place at many levels within a business - by its very nature, the outcome of a negotiation can be positive, less positive or even negative; it shouldn't be left to chance. This course is designed to help people more confidently negotiate and more consistently reach a more positive outcome.
Presentation and facilitation skills
Business presentations - they can be long, dry and dull, yet often important decisions rest on them. More often than not, a presentation sells an idea, business goal, strategy, product or service. This course is not a 'how to use PowerPoint' course - it's designed to help people understand how to set clear outcomes and objectives for a presentation and then to achieve them with confidence.
Understanding how we communicate by increasing self-awareness
By better understanding the communication styles of ourselves and others, we can communicate far more effectively, saving time and money - and again, typically reaching better outcomes for the business.
If you're not sure which courses will best suit you, please feel free to contact us, or give us a call on 0845 650 6500. We'll be happy to help discuss the challenges you face and recommend suitable training.
