Recognising that both the management team themselves and their staff were facing an uncertain future we created a combined management training and leadership coaching programme.
We created a programme which would provide a rapid remedy for some of the issues they were facing such as managing performance and difficult conversations, plus NLP skills on self-awareness, personal effectiveness and communication to help engage staff and lead them through change.
As managers all had different levels of experience, and were at different points on the change curve, we held 1-to-1 coaching sessions to really help embed the learning and help the team work through their own personal challenges.
…It has made me view the way I communicate as a vital tool in making a message hit home, rather than relying purely on the content. I have even found myself using techniques outside of work. It has given me some practical tools and methods to use, which is key to making the course useful; I have attended management courses in the past where they spout some theory at you without any hint as to how it’s relevant to me or how to use it. It is important that I am able to apply my learning.
Marmalade works with the whole system, so the group sessions were followed up with a coaching session with the Director of the business area. This was an opportunity to provide themes which have presented themselves & ideas of how the development can be kept alive.
Gill Kemp Director of Operational Support explains...
Training and coaching courses for people managers who work in specialist support areas quite often are not tailored to our needs. In fact in many organisations there are no programs to develop leadership and management skills for specialist support areas as they are seen as the subject matter experts in their fields and as long as they are producing that support, it’s often missed that they too are leaders and people managers.
What was fantastic about Marmalade was the fact that it’s coach has spent many years in Contact Centre’s and understands specialist roles and was therefore able to make the program relevant to us. She gets the challenges as she has experienced them herself. She understands the different types of person & dynamic in a specialist department and so quite quickly was able to make the program fit their needs. This program has turned a light bulb on for CCP managers in a very short space of time as the ethos of the program was to make it relevant and discuss real situations faced by CCP managers and so it was not simply theory that was soon forgotten, it was real practical tips and coaching for specific challenges for specific individuals that they have been practicing since the start.
Each manager has come away with a coaching plan and I have a clear view of how I can continue to support this and the development of managers within my department.