(Nederlandse versie niet beschikbaar)
What to do about managers that are not high enough on the score board to get into the management development programmes? Don’t they need to develop their leadership skills? Don’t they WANT to develop their skills? It is time to serve them too!
Time for reflection is not only for the happy few at the top.
Right down the managerial spine of your organisation, there are leagues of leaders that deserve to get more attention from your L&D department! Team leaders in production, administration, finance, and particularly in HR itself are often a very underdeveloped population. How is it in your organisation? Are there courses and programmes accessible to all your staff with direct reports? What about project leaders? Do you cater for all those temporary leaders in your organisation?
In our experience at leadershipdialogue.eu there is large untapped potential in the ‘lower’ management levels. We have worked with regional managers, sales team managers etc. that never had the benefit of any form of leadership development. If they were lucky, they had functional HR courses like “How to lay off people in 10 days” and “Where are the controls in the work time registration system”. But nothing that was any use to them in improving their direct working relationship with their team members.
What a waste, we thought and developed the first online guide for leadership dialogues with the people that matter.
Our method improves understanding among manager and team members what leads to better functioning and performance.
It is easy and pragmatic, cost effective and customizable to your specific organisational context. We facilitate direct conversations, but just not the way they are held on a daily basis. We focus the attention on the functional relationship with a personal perspective.
Dialogue might still be under appreciated in business surroundings as a viable tool to a better workforce, but it is increasingly recognized for its potential.
Dialogue in a business environment acts to fundamentally shift an organization’s culture towards collaboration by focusing on conversations, the “real work” in organizations. [Cecile Querubin, 2011, ISSS]
You need not go as far as David Bohm or Martin Buber would advocate, but the beauty of dialogue as a planned intervention is its broad applicability. All people I have met in positions of manager or team leader have at least some basic people skills. They don’t need a whole leadership development programme to get to the next level. A little nudge in the right direction is enough to get started.
Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory, its meaning and its methods continue to unfold. No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning [ David Bohm]
Good luck with empowering your countless leaders! Give them that little nudge in the right direction.