WATER THE GARDEN
Leadership Development & Performance Management Program
Tailored & Modular, for Your Team, or…
Send Individuals to Our Running Programs
It’s just plain demoralizing when you send a leader to a program to develop their leadership capacity, and nothing changes.
We train leaders to build skills, and provide them with dead-simple systems… dead-simple, so people use them.
You know the benefits of systems in your business. To name a few…
- Consistency and predictability
- Quality control
- Continuous improvement
- Creative potential
All companies need – and most don’t have – a system of leadership and management for driving performance and creativity with heart and compassion.
When you can confidently say, ““This is how we manage people around here,” you get:
- Emerging managers and executive leaders – with the confidence to inspire trust
- Consistent employee experience – so morale and retention soar
- Strong performance across teams – so profits rise
What makes our work so different, so sticky, is that our proprietary frameworks are deliberately aligned to the workings of the human brain both in the way we train, and in the practices you learn), so we capture everyone’s attention (we know how to engage training participants – all of them), and the leaders we train can captivate the minds of those they lead.
Performance and behavior problems on the job are often an almost involuntary response to fear. As Simon Sinnek illustrates in his bestselling book, Leaders Eat Last, when folks on your team are fearful, their brain chemistry will only permit them to make “choices” of self protection.
That’s why managers we’ve trained elevate human dignity on the job, so your people gladly act in the company’s interest and enjoy work, so they never want to leave.
How’s that sound?
Ready to make real change? Take Initiative Today
You might be ready to develop your leaders with Teamification if…
Imagine that the next ideal job candidate to walk through your doors asks in the interview, “So, how do you lead people around here?”
How confident are you that leaders across your organization would have a ready answer that would be consistent across every person that the candidate asks?
Can your leaders say, “Here’s the system we follow?”
Call on us to support your leadership development if…
- You want to drive performance with compassion and with heart
- You’re planning/anticipating change, and dreading the process
- You’ve become frustrated that performance and retention are not consistent from one department to the next
- You’re promoting new leaders from within
- You’re hiring leaders from outside your company
- You’re growing fast and feeling growing pains
- You want more visibility into all areas of your company
- Your best people leave, while the troubling ones stay
Results you may see from your custom leadership development and performance management program…
People are the engine of your company’s performance. When you tune-up your people management… When leaders drive performance systematically, with compassion and heart…
You’ll see immediate acceleration…
- People you need in order to succeed stay, and stay satisfied.
- Succession planning almost takes care of itself, so you’re ready for the next phase of business before it arrives.
- Change management gives way to change readiness so momentum builds through change instead of stalling at each change-point.
- Leaders see problems coming before they arise, so they (and you) have far fewer fires to put out.
- Your team steadily grows capacity without growing headcount, so you can grow without growing (and bank the profits).
- Grow headcount without the growing pains, getting new employees to peak performance faster, while also retaining more new hires because they’re fulfilled.
- Better hiring decisions for reduced waste, greater momentum, and higher morale.
“I [have] a great team culture… and of course you helped me with that. You gave us a great platform to challenge my senior leaders to lead differently.”
– Stephen Boyle, VP US Partners Group, Microsoft
Leadership Development & Performance Management Program FAQ
This program is something we’ll tailor with you and our team of experts to meet your needs.
Modules have included…
- Effective One-On-Ones
- Micromanaging vs. Close Managing
- Meetings That Get Shit Done
- Inspiring Accountability
- Performance Reviews (not annual)
- Coaching Your Team
- Time/Priority Management
- Effective Delegation
- Effective Feedback
- Managing Up
- Dealing With Defensiveness
- Effective Delegation
- Escalating Feedback
- Succession Planning
- Using Conflict Productively
- Humane Hiring and Firing
- Managing Work From Home
- Managing managers
If you’re not ready to go whole-hog on a leadership development program for every leader in your company, our newest program is an 8 week Manager’s Upskilling Sprint.
- 8 Weeks
- 1 remote meeting per week, live
- 2 hours per week
- 12 managers per learning cohort
- 6 topics
- 4 tools
- 1 system
Enroll 2, 3, a handful of managers, and we’ll send them back ready to drive performance with compassion and heart.
We have a diverse team of leadership coaches who can support leaders at every level of your organization.
If you’re looking to develop a rising star, we have coaches who can help.
If you’ve got a valuable leader who’s exhibiting some troubling behavior, we have coaches who’ve successfully helped mid-career leaders change deeply ingrained and destructive habits in a short amount of time.
If you’d like to see a new executive make that critical shift to executive thinking, we’ve got proven leadership coaches who have been there.
We can do that two ways…
Either, we can conduct a series of learning labs for your team of leaders – on site or remotely – specifically tailored to your needs and priorities. We’d build that on a framework system of tools that work together to get great results through great relationships.
- A framework for understanding accountability well enough to inspire it
- A model for providing feedback that ensures continuous improvement
- A framework for conducting one-on-ones that build strong relationships, retaining talent, and providing visibility into the work that’s happening
- A process for delegating work that scales your leader’s capacity to produce and develops their people
Or, you can enroll 2, 3, a handful of managers in our next 8 week Manager’s Upskilling Sprint – a remote program of managers from companies around the country, meeting remotely once per week for a couple of hours.
A 20 year veteran manager in companies you’ve heard of called this program, “Best in class,” after he started implementing the tools he learned.
Um… Yes. We do remote. We do in person. And we can do a mix of both.
What’s important is, this is an interactive, co-created adventure. And it’s fun. Because fun, adventure, and active participation ensure learning in a way that boredom, yeah-yeah, and passively receiving information never can.
Remember our brand promise… No ineffective, boring, powerpoint lecturing yak-yak.
That’s not our way.
Glad you asked…
- Are their values and philosophy of leadership aligned with yours?
- Are their strategies, tactics and tools backed by the emerging science of effective leadership?
- Are their strategies, tactics and tools dead simple, so they’ll be used? Or are the so complex or clunky that the thick manual they’re given will collect dust on the shelf?
- Will your participants have fun (and learn) or be bored to tears (and glaze over)?
- Is the program interactive and responsive to the participants, or is this learning on rails – rote memorization?
- How do the trainers/facilitators respond to questions, objections, resistance?
- Are you charged per participant, or are you charged per group?
- How do they ensure long-term retention and implementation – stickiness?
If you’ve got a decent internet connection, we can work with you wherever you are.
We love working with you and your team in person. We’ve been working with teams in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest, and down the west coast since 2014.
And we’re happy to fire up the old video-conference and work with your team that way. Since the great plague of 2020, we’ve been working with groups all over the world – in person, remotely, hybrid of in-person and video call. And people have told us they didn’t know such richly interactive work was possible online.
What’s important to us is that you get results. And results, we know, come from engaging leaders in what matters to them, giving them an opportunity to kick the tires of the tools they’re getting, and hearing them out when they tell us our tools are garbage.
If we don’t hear out our most passionate detractors, they won’t hear us out, and we’d never have the ability to generate the list of willing converts we’ve had in some of our programs.
Participants are loving work again, helping their team love work as well, and having a blast kicking ass. (Can I say “ass” on this channel?)
You’ve already started. Kudos!
The act of stepping out into this messy world of assessing leadership development providers is an investment of your valuable time into the future of your company and the beautiful souls who work there.
Sure. That’s not what you were asking. And it bears mentioning because so many leaders think to themselves, “I don’t have time for this,” and leadership development is neglected. People languish. And the company remains a shadow of what it could be.
How soon can we start – like really start? You may hate the answer… It depends.
The quickest turnaround time in our company’s eight year history from the CEO’s call to our stepping into their offices to run the first learning lab in a program built for them was 60 hours.
That’s a program we built with them as we went. They were in a hurry. Are you?
Want to try to break their 60 hour record?
Time for your favorite answer. It depends.
Assuming you mean, “how long does it take from the beginning until the end of the leadership development program,” it still depends.
The quickest cadence we’d recommend for a program is 8 weeks. At one session per week, that gives people an opportunity to take a new tool on board, consider it, practice a bit, and come back with questions for the following week. Then we recommend you take another 4 months after that to roll out the tools one-by-one so you don’t give your team whiplash.
That 8 week program would be bare-bones – a sprint.
We spent about a year with leaders at TextExpander. They got more tools and a deeper dive than we could have given them in 8 weeks. And we met much less frequently. And we were able to help them through the entire duration of their implementation roll-out.
If you mean, “how long will it take before I see results,” that’s a much different answer.
Typically, teams see more effective communication immediately after the first session. And when the executive team is committed to taking on the TEAMIFICATION system as SOP, the initial results don’t fade. They grow, spread, and amplify over time.
Where many programs lead to a quick spike in improved performance followed by a slow decline, our clients tell us they get an immediate jump followed by a slow incline.
That’s how cultivating a high-performance culture goes.