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The Challenge: Developing Employees' Performance at the Speed of Business

Managers at every level sometimes feel trapped in the middle: it's their necks and careers that are on the line to meet objectives, yet they can't do all the work themselves. Instead, they must rely upon others who very likely have less experience or skill. Newcomers to management often don't know how to elicit or cultivate their employees' best efforts. Even experienced and successful managers — once they begin managing other managers — find that helping someone else develop employees is a lot harder than simply coaching employees themselves.

In the past, managers at every level — often copying those who managed them — have tended to meet these challenges by applying traditional carrot-and-stick techniques designed either to entice employees to try harder or punish those who don't perform.

But today's managers confront a broad array of unprecedented challenges — ever-larger spans of control... employees in remote locations... rapid turnover... profound and continuous changes in every aspect of the job... and an entire generation of employees who are less impressed by management authority than in the past and more interested pursuing their own objectives than the company's — that have rendered these traditional techniques at best insufficient.

Without training, guidance and support, many managers simply fail, with devastating results for their company. These managers — who generally were promoted because they were top-performers in their previous job — often leave in discouragement. And, their top-performing employees, frustrated with the absence of effective guidance and support, may seek opportunities elsewhere, too, depriving the company of their valuable knowledge and experience as well.

Experienced-Tested Programs for Managers

Managing At Your Peak™

Think Training's core management program, Managing At Your Peak™ can help your managers retain good employees, develop their performance, and help them build successful careers within your organization, even in today's challenging environment.

We have observed and worked with top-performing managers in a representative cross section of industries and distilled the essential skills that make them successful. In addition, we have collected extensive survey data that shows what employees say distinguishes the best managers from the rest. Based on all this information, we've designed a program that can help your managers make changes in their approach that are precisely targeted to help them get better results.

In Managing At Your Peak™ your managers will learn how to:

review the many roles they play as managers and prioritize them in ways that maximize employee development in the least possible time;
observe and analyze an employee's performance in order to define the precise changes in performance that would have the greatest impact on results;
plan and implement brief coaching conversations that will encourage employees to accept ownership of a performance issue and spur needed changes in performance;
thoroughly explore employees' perspective and thinking in order to keep them engaged in the performance development process;
implement a powerful 4-phase model for coaching discussions that dramatically increases a manager's developmental impact; and,
develop and practice new strategies for working back on-the-job with their most challenging employee.

Participants in Managing At Your Peak™ receive and analyze comprehensive and confidential feedback - from direct reports, peers and others - about every aspect of their management performance. The program helps each manager use this information to develop and implement his or her own personal plans for improvement.

Managers who master the skills taught in Managing At Your Peak™ and follow through on their personal development plans emerge from the program fully prepared to establish themselves as trusted allies of their employees. They become credible and effective sources of information, guidance and ideas that employees want to seek out. As a result, they're able simultaneously to engage employees in a joint, continuous search for ways to achieve the organization's strategic objectives and to increase each employee's skills, career potential and value to your company.

Leadership With Distinction™

As managers rise through the ranks to mid-level and executive positions, the challenges they face grow by quantum leaps in difficulty — and in importance to your company. Leadership With Distinction™ is designed expressly for managers of managers. The program assists participants to evaluate their leadership style, set out a clear, compelling vision for their company or unit, and develop plans for helping the managers who report to them to develop performance development skills with their employees.

Group/Team Strategic Planning

Clients frequently engage our consultant-instructors to facilitate team planning or problem-solving sessions focused on a wide array of specific team or company issues such as finding and keeping good employees, change management, improving team communications and management and interviewing and selection.

One-on-One Coaching

Whether or not your managers have attended Managing At Your Peak™, our consultant-instructors — all of whom have personally held management positions in Fortune 500 companies — can combine our state-of-the-art diagnostic instruments, self-assessment tools and structured exercises with one-on-one sessions in order to offer your managers intensive, individual coaching assistance.

One-on-one coaching sessions offer a number of advantages. For example, they enable you to:

tailor coaching to the specific needs of each person based on input from their managers, survey feedback from peers and direct reports, and self-assessment data;
offer coaching/training support to managers in their offices (especially useful when the number of managers is too small to justify classroom training, or when you don't want to take managers off-site); and,
offer intensive individual assistance to a manager who needs help thinking through solutions to specific problems.

A Training Sequence That Helps Carry Your Managers through Every Phase of Their Careers

Experience has shown that companies achieve the greatest and most enduring improvements in management performance when managers at every level in the organization get the same, mutually reinforcing messages. Managing At Your Peak™, One-On-One Coaching, Leadership With Distinction™ and Strategic Planning Sessions each stand alone as self-contained programs that produce consistent, proven results. But when they're combined and each is delivered to managers at the appropriate levels in your organization, the synergy between them multiplies their impact several-fold.

Each program or service offers your managers the support and guidance they need at different stages of their careers. Alone or in combination, our programs help your managers (1) elicit the best possible performance from their direct reports, and (2) develop employees so that the value they offer keeps pace with the expanding strategic challenges your company faces.