Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Entrepreneurship and innovation is about creating and capturing new value. For companies to be successful, it is important to have entrepreneurial and innovative leaders at its core. Opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies and new markets create can be addressed with an entrepreneurial and innovate mindset and to be able to identify, evaluate, and innovate around opportunities can enable and empower an entrepreneurial and innovative company to disrupt an entire industry.

Leaders need to be able to identify, capture, and deliver on great ideas and to successfully drive innovation throughout the organization to inspire their teams and colleagues to innovate together.

Our course will address applicable entrepreneurial and innovation tools and frameworks to help leaders identify new business opportunities, build the right business models and help develop an entrepreneurial and innovative mindset to be able to help make the right strategy decisions to remain ahead of competitors.

Behavior Coaching for Executives

Many leaders achieve many great things, however they can have behaviours that simply are not good form, and without that behavioral trait, they could achieve a lot lot more. It is important to understand your behaviour so that you can clearly see the behaviors that need to change, and more importantly, why they need to change.

But learning alone is not sufficient and in fact will lead to no improvement if the leader does not change their thoughts, actions and feelings; collectively their behaviour. Successful leaders have great self-awareness and acknowledge their own personality flaws and weaknesses and are open to change, in particular, change in their behaviour.

Behavioral coaching should been seen as a performance and personal improvement strategy as it will help you identify and break bad behaviour. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By understanding your behaviour, you can truly develop as a person and as a leader.

Our course on behavioral coaching uses a combination of processes, models and methodologies including a 360 degree evaluation – it will increase your self-knowledge and awareness, identify how you respond to conflict, identify what motivates you, what causes you stress, and how you solve problems – equipping you with enhanced skills to solve those problems more effectively and potentially reduce the problems in the first place.

Effective Decision Making

One of the primary roles of a good leader is to make quality decisions. Good decision or bad decisions, you will not really know until the outcome is assessed – but quality decisions you should always aim for making. Making quality decisions is not a simple, isolated process, but depends on the information and time available, as well as a leader’s susceptibility for stress, predispositions and unconscious biases. A decision maker should appreciate how outside influences like stress, being tired or otherwise distracted – effects them and to take this into account when making decisions.

People also should know if they are making decisions just based on gut feeling – and should be aware if that is actually the best strategy for them at that present time. Decision-making is also influenced by leadership style. Democratic or autocratic styles will deliver different decision making processes and potentially entirely different decisions. A good leader needs to be aware of this and take this into account when making decisions.

It is inevitable that we will make poor decisions. Reviewing our decisions allows us to mitigate the effects of the poor decision as quickly as possible, and to reduce the number of future poor decisions by learning from our mistakes. Also escalation of commitment in driving decisions can also lead to poor outcomes, you have to know when to stick with something and when to quit.

Our course looks at effective decision making in many ways and helps you understand as a leader your strengths and weaknesses in decision making and how best to mitigate any weaknesses you may have in order to make better quality decisions.

Innovation Management

Innovation – coming up with new ways of doing things. Bringing innovation into your business can give you the competitive advantage to grow and adapt your business in the marketplace and can help you save time and money. However to make innovation effective you need to be able to extract value from it. Without capturing and managing the benefits of an idea – it just remains that, an idea.

You need to understand how to create innovation – tools and techniques to help develop it in the first place, and also how to effectively manage, and have a culture that actually inspires it, in your workplace. Common tools including brainstorming, prototyping, product lifecycle management, competitor analysis, patent harvesting and market trend analysis can be incredibly helpful and utilized in creating innovation.

Innovation can mean changing a business model and adapting to changes in your environment to deliver better products or services. Successful innovation needs to be an in-built part of your business strategy, where you create a culture of innovation and lead the way in innovative thinking and creative problem solving.

Having the idea in the first place is great – but the business leader needs to be aware of what to do with the idea – this is as important as the idea in the first place. You need effective and nimble strategies on how to extract value from the idea – to create effective innovation to translate ideas into something that creates value.

Our course looks at effective innovative management toolsets and frameworks in addition to innovation methods and helps you as a business leader develop and implement effective strategies to generate ideas and to extract the most out of those ideas in your workplace.

Explaining your Marketing Strategy to Executives

Marketing is critical to the growth of your business but key to selling your marketing strategy is effectively telling your marketing strategy.
So many effective marketing strategies encounter resistance mainly driven by poor understanding of how marketing works.

It’s a fact that despite working with each other some leaders and indeed stakeholders and board members just don’t get marketing or its relevance to them because it is not told and presented in a way that matters to them. As a leader you need to explain your marketing strategy and analytics to other executives in a way that makes your impact clearly known and invites cooperation between departments.

You have to put into context what your marketing strategy will do for the company and also explain what’s in it for other executives you may need to get buy in from and ultimately help you fight for your marketing budget. In addition using analytics can be very effective to your strategy by collecting marketing metrics and assessing how much your strategy has contributed. You need to present the marketing analytics that matter most to the group you’re talking with. Analysis in this form allows you to present figures during executive discussions to prove that your marketing strategy works.

Our course will help you as a business leader develop better ways to sell your marketing strategy to other leaders and stakeholders in your organisation using relevant metrics with regard to the company’s overall strategic goals.

Customer Retention

While attracting fresh customers and opening up new markets are essential to a business, it’s especially important to hold onto the clients that you already have as it can cost from five to ten times as much to land a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

The business leader needs to understand and develop strategies for using digital technology to reduce churn rate and encourage customers to stay. It’s important that the executive appreciates how existing clients view their organization, and their dealings with it and is able to apply proactive measures, implemented ever more so with digital technologies.

But what should the executive be looking for and what should they be aware of for their organisation?

Our course will help the business leader explore these concepts and highlight important areas for the executive that include how click analytics and website traffic together with behavioral analysis together with customer conversations, commentary, and behaviours on social media can all be used to help the executive keep and win customers more effectively.

High Impact Leadership Capabilities

Understanding the values, the ways of thinking, and the practices that need to be developed to be a high impact leader are important tools for executive success. But what are they?

An executive needs to be several things at once and must be able to stand up to leadership challenges on a day to day basis. The successful executive must be able to be an effective communicator, be able to engage in productive, efficient interpersonal exchanges, be strategic, be able to negotiate effectively, resolve conflict, win stakeholder engagement, influence, motivate and inspire and should be capable of unlocking the potential in themselves and others.

Our course will help you as a business leader target specific improvement areas to amplify your performance and overall business results.

Game Theory for Business Executives

Using game theory to improve strategic decision making is a powerful tool for the business executive and senior manager. Within the context of business strategy, game theory enhances decision making in situations of competition and collaboration.

As a business manager being able to understand better what collaborators and competitors are potentially thinking or planning, and assigning a degree of probability for decision making, can yield significant results to company performance.

Our course will look at game theory from the outset and apply it to realistic business decisions that can be made in an organisation. It will help you as a business leader think about using game theory as an additional tool in your decision making process and help you realise a reduction of risk and uncertainty when applied effectively.

Decision Making Strategies for Leaders

Decision making strategies are the ways we use information to make a decision. In order to make decisions to move your business forward, leaders must ensure that business goals are achievable whilst taking into account the uncertainty of future business developments. In a complex business environment, a sound strategy is the result of applying a strategic mindset and systematic approach to decision making.

The systematic approach in a data filled world should invariably use an analytical approach to making decisions to help manage and limit risks, sharpen your decision-making using sound reasoning, critical thinking and rigorous analysis through actionable frameworks. What strategies you should use when you have all the information, when you have limited information with some experience, when you are the expert in the area or whether you simply have no idea what so ever, decision making strategies can help you make a better decision.

As a leader you must also make sure you are not simply using data to justify a decision that you have already made where cherry-picking metrics can make any outcome seem positive.

Our course will focus on utilizing decision making strategies and analytical skills and tools in a business context to support business planning and strategic decision making, allowing you to unravel complex decision situations to formulate a sound business strategy. In addition we look at how and when to assign degrees of risk and probability in the decision making process and where you go to get relevant data and information to help in the decision making process.

High Performance People Skills for Leaders

Having people skills are crucial to your personal success and also to your business success. In this day and age of online and constant email exchange these skills are becoming far less polished than what they should be. Having self-knowledge and being introspective to help understand your strengths, your weaknesses, and your unique leadership skills; having insight into others; and having interpersonal problem-solving skills, as well as emotional intelligence, are very much a must for any business leader.

Our course will highlight and help develop the high performance leaderships skills needed. It will help the business leader to have a positive impact on their organisation’s culture, better manage and empower those they work with, and ultimately inspire the best performance from their team and build effective better business relationships.

Leading Change for Executives

Successful implementation of change can create an extreme competitive advantage. It can secure a starts-up’s success and lead to added value for established companies. Having an eversion to change can be damaging and being comfortable to change – with an actual executive bias toward action – can effectively lead to the creation of change, sustainability and value.

Executives need to understand that there exists a need for change in every organization, not irrational change, but strategic targeted change for value creation.

By being in tune with the market – close to the customer – to identify market driven needs, the executive leader is able to be innovate, and change, as needed. The leader should be able to reduce ambiguity and risk and understand the landscape to effectively lead change. They must be able to get alignment and buy-in and must produce a plan that is actionable through focused tactical implementation.

Our course will help the senior leader explore change within their organisation and become more aware of when a change is needed and also strategies and procedures for launching an effective change initiative.

Leading Teams for Emerging Leaders

As a manger moving into senior management a lot more is expected from you. Being able to transition to a role where you’re responsible for teams, strategies and growth requires a considerable change in focus, thinking and energy. You will need greater self-awareness and social awareness, be able to motivate and manage diversity and conflict, and to develop a sense of vision and to think and operate more strategically.

The emerging leader must also be a role model, be resilient and aware that your team will now be looking to you for leadership. That’s a shift in thinking and a shift in practice – you need to develop into that role to be effective.

Our course will help develop individuals within organisations who have been identified as an emerging leader or who aspire to take up leadership roles in the future. We help you to develop the confidence, knowledge and skill to be an effective leader.

Negotiating and Influencing Skills

Negotiation and influencing is an art and a strategic process. Together they are fast becoming two of the most needed management skills. Collectively they involve building trust and developing relationships, as well as shaping behaviors that result in mutually satisfying outcomes for all.

Having poor skills and potentially damaging predispositions in this area can result in poor business performance. It’s not about winning the argument at all costs. It’s about negotiating and influencing, producing win-win resolutions for all parties.

As a business leader you should be able to engage in problem-solving conversations, build trust, strengthen relationships and manage emotions and conflict.

Taking the perspective of the person your negotiating with, making effective use of anchor points, being able to move things forward by bringing people around to your way of thinking and using effective non-verbal communication strategies, which project confidence and promote cooperation, will collectively, help make you a better negotiator and influencer.

Our course will help you identify your own negotiation and influencing style and help you understand its potential strengths and weaknesses. You will gain an awareness of what negotiation and influencing is and develop skills, knowledge and understanding necessary to be an effective negotiator and influencer.

Executive Public Speaking Skills

Fine-tuned public speaking skills are essential to deliver articulate addresses to your audiences, be it employees, your board of directors, investors or peers in your industry. Not having this skill can make a dent in your effectiveness as a business leader and damage your career enhancement and perception of you and your personal brand.

Our course will engage on skills and prowess needed to be developed in making effective public speaking. You will have several opportunities to develop and deliver talks and be critiqued and encouraged. At the end of this course you should be more confident and be able to deploy skills and techniques to allow you to speak like an effective executive.

Big Data for Executives

Big Data is changing every part of organizations, but many leaders do not know of the power it can unlock in creating value. For companies to effectively use big data and gain its benefits, the analytics enabled transformation required is rooted in a cultural change of the company and a committal to analytics in the first place.

Big Data is being used in many areas, from health care to supermarkets, ecommerce to building infrastructures. The rapid development of big data mining tools, together with the availability of multiple popular visualization tools, makes big data analytics much more convenient and affordable – turning it into a crucial component for many businesses.

Mining big data sets can identify unrealized opportunities, reduce churn, and improve product features. Retailers are able to optimize their stock based on predictions generated from social media data, web search trends and weather forecasts. Customers leave product feedback, there are discussions and suggestions on various forums and social media – analyzing this data can help identify opportunities for improvement, underserved niches and various trends, and can help avoid competitors’ mistakes – helping you to provide exactly the features and services the target audiences want. These are just some of the benefits of big data – there are many more.

Our course will help you understand what data is out there and how to think about introducing strategies using big data for value creation and growth.

Macroeconomics

With increasing roles of managerial responsibility, it is important to be able to interpret and use macroeconomic data for your business.

Macroeconomic data typically includes things such as inflation, price levels, rate of growth, national income, gross domestic product (GDP) and changes in unemployment. Businesses use macroeconomic analysis in several ways. For example, to determine whether expanding production is a good thing for the business or has wage growth been reduced resulting in consumers not having sufficient disposable income to buy a newly introduced product.

Executives and managers need to understand the larger economic context, in particular what data matters, how to make it meaningful, and how to use it to make informed business decisions.

Our course will give you an overall understanding including several key factors such as GDP, monetary policy, trade surpluses, Government spending and interest rates, to help you as a business executive gain and understand the main concepts and theories around the discipline of macroeconomics and how they can be used in better business decision making.

Build a Brand Called You

Building a personal brand to develop stronger personal and professional skills is critical. Your own brand is as important for your development as the company’s brand that you serve. Your personal brand needs to be easily articulated and clearly communicated verbally and through behaviours and actions and be a genuine and accurate depiction of who you are. Don’t ignore it. You need to be the CEO marketer of you.

Our course will help you understand why your brand is important for your development as a leader. You are the only one in charge of your brand and you need to know how best to develop it and how best to use it for your growth.

Effective Presentation Skills

Having effective presentation skills is a basic requirement for any senior manager or leader. At this level, expectations are high in any organisation and leaders are required to make consistent high quality presentations. Time and time again, leaders and senior management want to, or are rather asked to, improve their presentation skills.

Leaders must be able to present ideas with conviction, clarity and style through multiple channels and address audience questions with professionalism and confidence. The ability to present well can be the key to unlocking your own career success and your organisation’s success.

Presenting to senior executives can be one of the toughest crowds you’ll face as a presenter. They can be impatient and have to make decisions, often with little time to weigh options on what you have just said. As a presenter you have to learn to get to what they care about right away so they can make their decisions more efficiently. Having presented to many executives before, if you ramble on in front of them the chances are they won’t listen to you for very long. You need to provide well-crafted and insightful presentations that get to the point.

Our executive presentation skills course will allow the leader to produce compelling presentations with clarity and insightful, straight to the point polished content in an easy-to-follow and engaging flow. Whether it be for an upcoming speech, board presentation or investor pitch, we will help you develop the skills you need to deliver engaging presentations on a consistent basis. In addition you will learn how to rehearse effectively and reduce presentation anxiety and stress with proven exercises and techniques.

Building Empowered Relationships

Empowered relationships are comprised of elements of beliefs, motivations, and actions and are overall designed to increase the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people.

In a business setting, empowerment is about giving your employees skills, resources, authority, opportunity and motivation. At the same time, it is also about holding them responsible and accountable for outcomes of their actions.

Ultimately it will contribute to their competence and satisfaction and will develop well-functioning business teams. Yet mangers and senior business leaders micro manage employees and do not know or understand how to empower them and this can cause damage to the employee and their productivity.

In good networks, relationships are balanced. People help each other equally and genuinely care about the well-being and success of each other. That can also be achieved in the workplace where the employee is genuinely concerned for the wellbeing, success and performance of the company and not simply there to cash a pay check. An empowered relationship is created by empowered individuals.

Our course will help you understand how to build empowered relationships that are well-functioning, trusting, connected, and rewarding to your business, yourself and also to your employees.

Effective Time Management

Leaders have numerous demands in their functional roles and their time is limited. Time needs to be effectively managed for a business leader to be effective. It’s not about putting things off until a later date, which in fact can lead to indecision, it’s about effectively managing your workload with the time available and keeping the big picture of what you want to achieve in sight and not getting caught up in short term demands.

Several prone areas that can be targeted for time wasting include implementing first instead of analyzing-thinking-smarter first, procrastinating, having ineffective meetings, making unrealistic time estimates and micro-managing by failing to delegate and let others perform and grow with accountability.

As a leader, several hours a day are spent in meetings. It’s essential that time is used effectively. All meetings should have a purpose, time limit, and include only essential people. A step back before the meeting and asking what is it do I want to achieve as a result of this meeting, and then asking did I achieve this result, simply allows for a more targeted and efficient meeting mindset from the outset, yet many simply do not follow these steps. As a leader you should also understand what work requires focused thinking and work that doesn’t should be separated. Remember that no two tasks ever hold the same importance. In addition, enormous tasks are easier to manage when seen as increments.

Effective time management is crucial to accomplishing organization tasks as well as to avoiding wasting valuable organizational assets. You can waste a tremendous amount of time by trying to multitask which can actually spur ineffectiveness or focusing too much on unimportant detail.

Our course will help you master time management and help you work smarter and more effective in your approach to work. It will aim to help you accomplish more and increase your productivity in the time you have a business leader.

Project Management Fundamentals for Executives

Effective project management is critical to today’s business and organizational success and any executive must be able and capable of successfully engaging in any project.

Executives and senior managers need to understand the importance and the key principles of project management. Project managers are often employed, however being able to establish and communicate clear expectations to avoid project failures is the responsibility of the executive staff. Each project must also be able to align the benefits of the project to the organizational strategy, where these benefits must be realized.

Being able to conduct more efficient project meetings using mutually understood project management terminology and methodologies is vitally important. In addition, proper communication with board members, and ensuring that important stakeholders such as investors are kept informed and their engagement is managed, is important for the success of the project and the perceived leadership of the executive. Making sure an adequate risk management plan is in place and activities surrounding quality and change are also important concepts to keep top of mind.

Our course will you help understand the fundamentals of project management and allow you to better engage with project managers and ensure that the correct communication and strategic decisions are discussed among the stakeholders across the organization.

Executive Stretch – Leadership in the Welsh Mountains

Being in challenging and extreme conditions can bring out leadership qualities or lack thereof in you as a person. Being open to introspection and how you acted or behaved in those conditions and how your team responded can help you grow and become a more effective leader. To help teach our executive stretch course we use the Snowdonia Welsh mountains and their inclement weather conditions as our classroom.

Our course will develop your management qualities and will test your determination, strength of character, resolve and your ability to work well under pressure and as part of a team in challenging and demanding scenarios working outside your comfort zone. This is a unique and introspective opportunity to enhance personal leadership, effective decision making, teamwork and communication skills and will give you a real insight into how you tick when tired, hungry, wet and bothered – and also how you will likely perform under a tight business deadline or what you would be like after a 12 hour business flight and have to make an immediate business meeting and presentation.