For new managers, leading a team is both exciting and daunting. You’ve made a significant step upwards in your career. You’ve mastered business relevant skills and maybe your team still struggle with them. But now, the team is looking to you as if you have all the answers to their many and varied problems.

Learning how to think, speak and act like a manager is a skill to be practiced. The good news; you don’t need to have “the right personality”. Introvert or extrovert; technical or people centric; embracer of change or preference for the familiar… No matter who are you, or your background, you too can learn the basics of effective management, in ways that work for you. And as the basics become more natural to you over time, you become free to develop your own leadership style.

Objective

Participants experience and gain knowledge of four classic management practices, which they can then use immediately.

1. The one-on-one meeting
2. How to give feedback, both positive and negative
3. How to coach for effective performance
4. How to delegate responsibly

Participants learn why consistency on the basics as a manager is so important. See how they build trust and accountability, so that team members listen to and effectively follow a manager’s lead.

Develop the confidence need to have emotionally challenging conversations with team members.

Outline

Day 1

• Introduction to management - Part1
• One-on-ones: The most fundamental meeting of them all. Build that relationship.
• Feedback: The core of behavioral change - without drama or hesitation!
• What have we learned?

Day 2

• Introduction to management - Part2
• Coaching: Help team members improve skills/behaviour
• Delegation: Give your work to juniors, without making a mess. How delegation drives higher performance and career development.
• What have we learned?

Who should attend

• Leaders at first level management or entirely new to management.
• Managers who have had the role for some time but feel a need to improve effectiveness. Perhaps found that leading via their personality doesn’t always work and they require some more formal practices.
• Leaders without formal management roles, who nevertheless need to influence significant colleagues across their organization, or who are viewed as leaders, informally, in their working groups.

Methodology

Facilitator lead presentations, hands-on practice. Learning includes simulated practice scenarios with other attendees in groups/pairs. All practice includes demonstrations, reviews and retrospectives so that the rest of the class gives feedback and attendees can learn from each other.

Testimonial

"I now understand why I should give feedback immediately, not wait for it to sort itself out"

"I had no idea regular one on ones were important. I thought they were a waste of time!!!"

"Ravi is always available to me as a manager no matter my requirements" (previous direct report)

"I have developed myself via his continuous improvements plan, and have achieved a promotion as a result" (previous direct report)

Ravi Agarwal's Profile

Business agility transformations in financial services; coach, facilitator and mentor for human centric leadership skills. Critical thinking, emotional intelligence, decision making, empathy, psychological safety

Ravi Agarwal, British born, raised and educated, has over 25 years’ experience in financial services and software engineering leadership roles around the world.
He believes the most powerful learnings happen when we touch the depth of our own humanity. When we do this authentically, it feels like magic. His facilitation style reflects this conviction. By engaging empathetically and individually with learners, whether one-on-one or in class settings, he allows people to uncover their depth, thereby bringing them into these precious learning zones for themselves.

Though intimate with information technology over several decades, he believes access to information can never allow you to flower to your greatest potential. So he focuses on the specifically human, character-centric skills. Emotional intelligence, critical thinking, paying attention, decision making in ambiguous contexts, empathy, psychological safety, mentoring & coaching are his life blood.

Not only does he create original content for such learning, he implicitly demonstrates the learning in real time via his facilitation techniques and who he is, so that attendees can absorb their learning from many dimensions. This is by far the best way to teach character skills.

So please join him. Learn how to blossom your humanity and your leadership journey in life, in the only way that really matters: your own.

1. Paying Attention and Critical Thinking with Emotional Intelligence: Taylor Swift – Lyrics as Poetry (for individuals & teams) (half day with writing homework)

2. Hands-on Introduction to Agile Product Development (for teams) (full day)

3. First Time Manager - the basics. One on ones; feedback, coaching & delegation (for individuals) (two full days)

4. Psychological Safety & Leader Vulnerability – a 21st century super skill (for individuals & teams) (half or full day)

5. Manage your Personal Finances & Spending - A Layman’s Guide (half day) (individuals)

Ravi, a natural polymath, was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, England. He is extremely grateful to have studied Mathematics, French & English Literature under the guidance of some extraordinarily gifted teachers. Though many years apart, he is proud to call both Isaac Newton (English polymath, world pioneering mathematician) & Lee Hsien Loong (former Singapore Prime Minister) his college alumni.