Leadership Skills in the Workplace

Maintaining Gains Made

LEADERSHIP BRIEFS

A follow-up program to any comprehensive, skill-based leadership development training.

When completing leadership training in the workplace, a training program that I have facilitated, I am often asked, “How do we maintain the gains we have made? How do we avoid falling back into our old, bad habits?”

Leadership Briefs are my answer to that challenge. The short lessons and discussions will help keep leadership ideas fresh and enable your organization to maintain good leadership behavior and continue to build good leadership skills.

Leadership Briefs are short, focused lessons, aimed at keeping the learnings of good leadership training fresh. These briefs will stimulate the dialogue between leaders in your organization. In no way can or will these briefs substitute for good and comprehensive leadership training.

How to use Leadership Briefs:

After your department or team has completed comprehensive leadership training, Leadership Briefs can be used as a follow-up to help keep your supervisors, team leaders, and managers moving in the right direction.

When used on a regular basis, Leadership Briefs will help sustain gains made and continue to enhance leadership competencies by keeping important topics and ideas top of mind for your leaders. They know these things, but everyone benefits by having reminders from time to time until their newer, better leadership behaviors have become habits and part of your organization’s culture. Even seasoned leaders benefit by periodically being challenged in these activities and group exercises.

Each brief takes 30-45 minutes to complete, but if you only have 20 minutes, do it anyway. A brief can be broken into two parts, if needed.

Suggested use is for the end of a regular staff meeting, weekly or monthly, depending on your needs. You could also have a short stand-alone meeting to complete your Leadership Brief.

Regularity is important; don’t let other things crowd these lessons out.

The briefs can be used in any order you choose.

Each brief is discussion based, requires no participant materials, and need little to no preparation on the part of the discussion facilitator. The facilitator should read the brief ahead of the meeting, though, in order to lead it more credibly.

A different facilitator can be assigned each time, or one person could take responsibility for facilitating every brief you use.

Read the introductory paragraphs (usually called Lesson) to your group and open the discussion to participants with the questions or the activities suggested. Modify and customize in any way that is beneficial to your particular circumstances.

You are encouraged to write your own briefs, too, based on your organization’s needs. A true leadership brief will be based on human relations, communication, and strategic goals – not on operations or functions. While operational or functional discussions are important, they should be conducted at another time. What kind of focused discussion or activity would benefit your leaders and leave all participants with a lesson or an important reminder about leadership?

Topics available so far in this series include:

Overcoming Adversity

Creativity

Listen Carefully

Relaxation

Vision

What Makes a Good Leader?

Your Role as Teacher and Coach

Time for Reflection

The Power of Your Words

Future Briefs will feature related topics, as well as case studies and biographical sketches of exemplary leaders for your discussion.

Continue checking back on this site regularly, as new briefs are added often and are free for your use.