Management 2.0: Becoming the Kind of Leader You Would Follow

A two day intensive workshop created by Chris Sims of the Technical Management Institute and Wayne Turmel, host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show.

You have excelled as an individual contributor, and now you are contemplating management. To become a good manager - the kind of manager you'd want to have yourself - you'll have to develop skills that move beyond being "good at your job" to helping others excel at theirs.

The workshop is grounded in The Cranky Middle Manager's Four Disciplines of the Successful Manager:

Business Acumen:
Do you know how a business operates and how every department in the company contributes to it? What's happening in your industry?

Leadership:
Can you influence people constructively? Can you embody your mission and values in how you work with your customers, your team and those above you on the food chain? Are you an ethical leader while still doing the right things for your career and mental health?

Project and Process Management:
Understanding how to get things done, seeing the connections and finding ways to improve them are critical to your progress as an employee and sanity.

Communication Skills:
Nothing is more critical to your career than your ability to communicate. We only do it four ways: we read, we write, we speak and we listen. That's it, no short cuts, no other way around it. How well do we do these things dictates how we're viewed by everyone, from our employees to our bosses.

Participants will learn and practice specific skills vital to the success of the technical manager, including:

Delegation and Assigning Tasks
You will learn how to delegate assignments to get buy-in and maximum results. One of the most important things is deciding what tasks to do and which to let go of. How do you define/assign them to your team to get max buy-in and ultimately peak performance.

One on Ones
Give your direct reports your time and attention, and they will go to the wall for you. We will discuss the elements of effective one-on-ones, including what should be on the agenda, how to schedule them, and where to have them, then put these ideas into practice via role-playing exercises.

Performance Reviews
End-of-year performance reviews can become an empty ritual, or a source of needless angst. Learn how to design and implement an ongoing review process that will provide your employees with useful, actionable feedback throughout the year.

SWOT Analysis
You'll learn a structured technique for identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for any given project. SWOT is an excellent tool for evaluating business opportunities such as starting a new line of business, entering a new market, pursuing a new development project, or allocating resources.

Delivering Effective Feedback
Giving feedback to direct reports is one of the most important parts of a manager's job, yet many managers feel uncomfortable talking to individuals about their performance, be it positive or negative. You'll learn a simple system for giving effective and efficient feedback.

Active Listening
Managers who listen well are trusted more, experience less conflict, and are listened to in return. Active listening techniques can increase your own clarity of understanding and improve the quality of your team's overall communication.

Develop an action plan for your own success

Becoming a great manager is an on-going process. You will leave this course with personalized action plan for taking your management skills to the next level.