Posts Tagged ‘management training’

Communication Skills Training

Leadership – 5 Vital Lessons from Actors…
Posted on 15th August 2014 in creativity, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Development, Management Training, Theatre & Drama

Leadership is tough. Actors by nature, training and practice have to be incredible communicators in rehearsal, on stage and on set. Empathy, perceptiveness and emotional agility are vital skills for any performer – it would be impossible to fathom a Shakespearean monologue otherwise.

Whilst actors could certainly learn a lot from the discipline, organisation and decision making abilities of those in the corporate world, business leaders could also gain valuable insight from the agility of performers.

1. Make Choices & Take Risks

The odds are so stacked against any one actor making a success that by their choice of profession alone, they are extreme risk takers. Also the most magnetic performances require daring, sometimes dangerous choices to be made in terms of character and action. Risk nothing and you will only deliver a mediocre, cliched performance which is easily forgotten. Anyone remember Blockbuster Video..? “The talent is in the choices you make” – Robert De Niro.

2. Improvise

Few can improvise and roll with the punches as well as stage actors. The ability to take on new information quickly (new characters, relationships, scenes, scripts) and roll with the punches has enormous relevance for robotic, process obsessed managers. “Accept and build” is the improviser’s mantra. Accept everything, deny nothing. Since change is inevitable, managers need to understand that everything changes and roll with that fluidly instead of clinging on to old ways of doing things.

3. Understand Behaviour & Empathise

No matter what amazing innovation technology will bring us tomorrow, a true understanding of people’s behaviour, nuances and emotions will always mark out real leaders from middle managers. In fact this should be no hardship or task but borne of a natural curiosity. The skill of feeling a character’s joy and pain are part of the actor’s job description. The leader, if she is to understand an organisation and inspire them must first of all understand them and what moves them.

 4. Build Relationships

Actors regularly have to create close, trusting relationships with their colleagues very quickly – imagine barely knowing somebody yet charged with portraying a loving relationship of say twenty years within a couple of hours of knowing each other. With just four weeks rehearsal before curtain up, there simply isn’t time to take your time. Jump to it, throw yourself in. This of course, takes courage – the courage to surrender ego and trust others.

5. Perform

The presentation, pitch, speech, difficult conversation etc are all moments of theatre and nothing quite expedites a leadership journey like performing with verve in those situations. Foster the storyteller within you and actively seek out every opportunity to showcase these skills.

Sartaj Garewal is the founder of Dynamic Presenting – a creative, leadership development consultancy, adapting theatre training to create leadership programs for business.

Dynamic Presenting – Enabling Powerful Communication

Leadership Development Clients

Emotional Agility… Great Leaders Nurture This…
Posted on 11th August 2014 in Communication Skills Training, Critical Conversations, Emotional Intelligence, Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Management Training

Emotional agility is a tremendous asset in understanding and influencing others. Great leaders should have the ability to manage their thoughts and feelings. We all have a river of endless thought and emotion flowing through us – there is simply no moment ever, where we find ourselves not having a thought or experiencing an emotion. Managing this flow or nurturing emotional agility is a key attribute of successful leaders.

This never ending inner monologue is composed of all the fundamental emotions, their various deriviatives and a huge menu of contrary thoughts. It took millions of years to create this sophisticated computer system and all these signals are there to support the will to survive – to anticipate issues in advance, adjust in a nano beat our action to suit changing circumstance and ultimately to avoid danger.

Can We Control Our Thoughts & Feelings?

Yet it is impossible to truly control these thoughts and emotions regardless of what many psychologists, kung fu masters or even method actors would possibly have us believe. If we could control our emotions, well we would have nailed it – we would know happiness or euphoria all day, every day. Depression, anxiety and stress would be things of the past and giant pharma conglomerates would have nothing to sell that anyone would want or need.

We don’t fundamentally change who we are in the workplace – some may alter their external behaviour more than others but this repackaging aside, we largely remain ourselves with the same thoughts, emotions, values, actions, reactions, preferences… and so on. In fact with tough deadlines, ambition, competition, limited resources etc all very evident, the workplace is for many a far more pressurised environment where one’s behaviours, based on thought and emotion, become very obvious.

Self-Awareness & Acknowledging Emotions

Picture a manager in an office who routinely becomes angry and screams and belittles his team when a piece of seemingly inadequate work is submitted. Repeated anger when faced with certain trigger points has embedded this behaviour to the point of reflex. This manager could become far more effective, for himself and others, if he could acknowledge the thoughts and emotions that occur, recognise patterns of embedded behaviour, make a conscious decision to accept those thoughts and emotions and then make a conscious decision to behave differently. A clear case of a manager who utterly lacks emotional agility.

Self awareness needs time and space to develop and our manager desperately needs to make that time and space. Only from quiet can come introspection and awareness of the self – the reason there are so many closed eyes exercises in yoga is to take focus deep within oneself. And to some extent he needs to realise that he is stuck in a pattern of behaviour himself. 360 degree feedbacks are well and good but our manager needs to have that realisation for himself if he is ever to willingly make changes.

Pausing, Re-Labelling, Reframing…

Then he needs to be willing to take a giant pause the next time a trigger point takes him to his routine expression of immediate anger. Pause literally for a minute or two and focus on the thoughts and feelings that he is experiencing. It is vital to acknowledge that these thoughts and feelings are taking place. This acknowledging is the basis of mindfulness or meditation and the start point to consciously develop emotional agility.

Equally vital is that he re-labels the thought “my stupid team have screwed up again..” into “I’m having the thought that my stupid team have screwed up again..” Simple but very necessary in creating a little distance between the thought and emotion on one side and the reaction on the other. This re-labelling will allow him to see that these thoughts and emotions are transient. He then needs to accept that they occurred and that he experienced them without any sense of judgement of himself or the team.

Nurture Emotional Agility…

Have the thought, acknowledge that you had the thought, accept the thought and then let the thought leave as freely as it arrived. In doing so our manager would now be able to make a choice in how he behaves, reacts and expresses himself, a choice which hitherto was not available. That is the stuff of emotional agility and of real leadership.

Sartaj Garewal is the founder of Dynamic Presenting – a creative, leadership development consultancy, adapting theatre training to create leadership programs for business.

Dynamic Presenting – Enabling Powerful Communication

Elevator pitch effectively

Elevator Pitch… How to Pitch Your Idea Effectively…
Posted on 4th August 2014 in Change Management, Communication Skills Training, Executive Coaching, Investor Pitching, Leadership Development, Presentation Skills Training

The elevator pitch strikes many of us as fairly hackneyed and cliched these days. Perhaps we still find it too salesy and pushy as a speculative approach to a potential investor or client who we’ve just bumped into and best left to Americans who generally don’t have the same fear. They, when compared to us Brits at least, can happily steam ahead with their elevator pitch whenever they want. Or so it seems.

There are various approaches to making a favourable impression within just a couple of minutes and that after all is the best you can hope for in a short space of time. So perhaps that should direct your thinking with respect to an elevator pitch.

3 Approaches to the Elevator Pitch

Some choose to give a mini, condensed presentation complete with introduction, middle and ending all within two minutes. A lot for the listener to take on board, can feel stilted and really what are the chances of them remembering all the information that you tried so keenly to cram in.

Others go straight to the heart of the issue knowing that time is pressing in the perfect elevator pitch. This has the advantage of stripping away that which is largely unnecessary given the context but unless very careful in the initial approach, you could come across as overly direct and robust.

Possibly a more effective approach is to establish a two way conversation. After all, dialogue succeeds where monologue fails. This approach favours beginning a natural conversation where you introduce yourself and give just the headline of your idea, project, whatever and then ask an open question and use whatever time there is, regardless of how little, to listen. Remember that it doesn’t need to be over the top flashy or a dramatic performance. Read your audience in the moment – how are they feeling right now? Tired or energised? Adapt your energy to match them and you’ll have a much better chance of being remembered for the right reasons.

Dialogue Succeeds where Monologue Fails…

Do this all in an unhurried manner. In other words aim to have the most effective beginning to a fuller conversation. Far easier for you to do and much better for the recipient. This way, if your idea or pitch was truly of interest, you’ll leave them wanting to know more – which is exactly what you want.

Sartaj Garewal is the founder of Dynamic Presenting – a creative, leadership development consultancy, adapting theatre training to create leadership programs for business.

Dynamic Presenting – Enabling Powerful Communication

leader or manager which are you

Manager or Leader… Which One Are You…?
Posted on 14th July 2014 in Change Management, Critical Conversations, Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Management Training

There has been a huge explosion in the number of people with manager somewhere in their job description in the post war period. Everyone’s a supposed manager these days. Arguably, many are under an illusion of importance. When vast swaths of middle management are removed from organisations, usually very little changes begging the question what did they ever do in the first place? But try removing those on the shop floor who actually make the widgets and see how immediately productivity is affected. Also, try to run a large company, football team or school choir without real leadership and notice how quickly the organisation loses its way and stops performing.

There are reams of studies given over to the differences between leadership and management. In brief the manager maintains where the leader develops, the manager administers where the leader innovates and the manager controls where the leader inspires.

Real Leadership

So, perhaps there are only a few positions of real leadership – probably you can only ever have so many cooks – therefore only a few chosen individuals out of the many who call themselves a manager, can ever hope to ascend to the position of a leader. So what are the traits that only those select few have beyond their peers?

The Difference Between a Leader and a Manager

Here’s an attempt at distinguishing the necessary traits between a leader and a manager:

Managers – reactive, controlling, prescriptive, maintaining the status quo, putting in the hours and graft, disciplining, running things, dealing with the nitty gritty, risk averse, authoritarian

Leaders – big picture, creative, inspirational, risk taking, strategic, unique, charismatic, proactive, breaks rules, gives credit.

Many people, possibly most, approach there managerial careers in a manner that means they won’t ever be considered as future leaders. Might be a good manager but leadership is made of rarer stuff it seems.

It almost seems that real leaders have more in common with artists than with hard headed corporate managers which neatly returns us to the notion that art and business have a lot to learn from each other yet.

Sartaj Garewal is the founder of Dynamic Presenting – a creative, leadership development consultancy, adapting theatre training to create leadership programs for business.

Dynamic Presenting – Enabling Powerful Communication

learn until you die

Learn Until You Die – There’s Always Something New to Learn
Posted on 14th October 2013 in Change Management, creativity, Emotional Intelligence, Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Management Training

Learn until you die – this was the mantra of a martial arts instructor I once trained under. There’s always something to learn. If there wasn’t you would be dead. A refusal to learn is a refusal to live. Setting limits for yourself stifles any chance of growth.

The least useful aphorism to take seriously is “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” It’s a lie…!!

Typically many of us as undergraduates in our late teens and early twenties were primarily motivated by partying and experimenting in all its guises. Interesting to note the difference with mature students who return to study a masters or phd years later – they genuinely want to learn, that’s their key motivation.

Learn & Adapt… or Die

So it seems that maybe the will to learn is actually linked to longevity and the struggle to survive. Adapt or die is a harsh lesson for individuals and businesses alike. Just ask HMV, Blockbuster, Woolworths etc. They either didn’t adapt whatsoever or did not adapt quickly or effectively enough.

The Best Learning is Unlearning

Bruce Lee’s take on the spiritual teachings associated with martial arts was that all his training was part of a bigger journey of unlearning. That each kick and punch was aimed squarely at his own ego, slowly chipping away over time to eventually reveal some semblance of absolute truth.

Similarly, the artist who stands still is the artist who goes backwards. Getting curious, making changes, trying new things and so moving forwards despite inevitable obstacles are the way of survival and potentially the way of success. Which kind of explains the relentless success of Madonna – an average dancer and mediocre singer who has been nothing short of prolific. She has endured through a genius knowing of when and how to reinvent herself.

Now just imagine if Madonna with her wily business outlook could have been the CEO of HMV, Blockbuster, Woolworths etc….

Sartaj Garewal is the founder of Dynamic Presenting – a creative, leadership development consultancy, adapting theatre training to create leadership programs for business.

Dynamic Presenting – Enabling Powerful Communication

Bespoke Leadership Development

Leadership – It’s Something We Can All Do
Posted on 18th February 2013 in Communication Skills Training, Leadership Development

Leadership development is a fascinating growth area of study and research. Every day there are a million blog posts, tweets and updates on Facebook and LinkedIn around the broad notion of leadership and developing necessary skills to be deemed good at it. There are more “Top 10 Tips to become a CEO” than anyone who is actually working to become a CEO would have the time to read.

We at Dynamic Presenting have been guilty of getting in the mix and piling it all on the heap as well. Some articles and posts out there are very informative, engaging, sometimes amusing. Others are just repetition of well known nuggets of wisdom.

Do Leadership

When it comes down to it though, leaders simply have to DO leadership like an actor has to turn up on stage regardless of how rehearsals went and deliver what they have to. They have to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in, in whatever way they deem best. Just like learning to drive, there’s no point turning it into an academic exercise insisting that theory is all important. Get behind the steering wheel and get going. Each time you stall, you will learn more about your own resilience, determination and creativity than through any studied means.

Dynamic Presenting’s Bespoke Leadership Development

That’s why when we deliver bespoke training courses for our clients, we focus on their specific needs in the moment and are more than happy to change up our day’s agenda if that will yield greater benefits. We also place the accent very firmly on DOING many practical exercises…repeatedly.

See how Dynamic Presenting’s bespoke communication and presentation skills training could benefit you.

Sartaj Garewal is the founder of Dynamic Presenting – a creative, leadership development consultancy, adapting theatre training to create leadership programs for business.

Dynamic Presenting – Enabling Powerful Communication