We began the leadership training day by introducing ourselves to Alistair, the trainer, and saying what we wanted to gain out of the event.
I was hoping to develop new skills to help improve my leadership, particularly around how to deal with conflict. This seemed to be a common theme in the group, as well as wanting to know where we could improve our skills to get the best out of our own teams.
SMART goals
We started by talking about key results, which made us consider what goals we wanted to achieve throughout our lives.
We learned about using the SMART technique when setting our goals. This is the idea is that goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time orientated.
I’d not heard of this method before and found it a really interesting idea. It also made me think in more detail about what goals I wanted to go after, and in what length of time. I found it very thought provoking and the session opened my eyes to some goals I might have pushed aside in the past.
Management vs leadership
We then moved on to discussing the difference between management and leadership.
We split into two groups to discuss what we classed as leadership and what we classed as management.
This was quite interesting to discuss, as we often think they are both the same – but there are differences.
An example is management is more problem solving, dealing with staffing and controlling resources, whereas leadership is more about motivating and inspiring people.
The key takeaway was that you will need a combination of both to help you to be successful within your role.
What sort of leader are you?
We then looked at the leadership pipeline. This was very interesting to see the different levels and what skills and time are required for each level. We all start at the bottom and we work up towards the top by showing willing and building upon our growing experience and knowledge.
Alistair also explained the different leadership styles and the pathway to maturity.
We each filled in a questionnaire to see what sort of leader we are.
The four leadership styles we looked at were directing, coaching, supporting and delegating. We discussed different ‘supportive’ and ‘directive’ behaviours, where you need both to help you to manage a good team.
We also looked at Belbin’s team roles and did another questionnaire to see which ones we matched with. I was a combination of ‘shaper’ and ‘completer/ finisher’, which means I’m naturally focused on getting tasks and projects finished.
We compared our results and it showed that it’s important to have a balance of different personality types within a team.
Finally we practised our communication skills with a group exercise where we each had part of a sentence and we had to work the answer out to a puzzle – it sounds easy but it’s quite difficult. We got there in the end, with a little help!
Doing this training has made me look at my future goals more closely and how I can improve my leadership skill to be the best leader I can be.