What We Do

What we do Longshaw Consulting Group

Management and leadership workshops and programmes

Management and leadership workshops and programmes

If it’s to do with people management we can do it. We design and facilitate workshops on the full range of skills, knowledge, behaviours and mind-sets to be an effective Manager.

We design and deliver workshops of varying lengths: bite sized sessions of 105 minutes, half day, full day as well as management boot camp programmes of several sessions spanning 6 months.

Our workshops equip managers to effectively wear the ‘two hats’ of their role. These ‘two hats’ represent the simultaneous need to manage themselves and manage others to achieve success.

The first hat is for them; to help them define and become the Manager they want to be and to clarify their style, brand and identity as a leader. They develop self-awareness about their communication and influencing preferences, leadership styles, skills, strengths, motivators and relationships.

We find that once Managers have clarity about who they are and what they have to offer they can optimise their strengths to increase their performance and impact. They can manage their career path and take steps to develop and grow their career and manage their profile and networks to achieve personal success.

The second hat is for those they manage. Supporting individuals effectively, through setting targets, objectives, expectations, effective delegation and coaching people to achieve exceptional performance. Understanding and improving team dynamics, equipping them to grow a high performing team.

Every workshop has a participant workbook, which includes space for self-reflection, notes and action plans.

Our workshops emphasise practical application. This mean we always ensure there is plenty of time for skills practise, review and action planning so that the skills, knowledge and behaviours learnt can be applied in the workplace right away.

The table below shows the workshops that typically we run for clients to facilitate both aspects of successful and effective management. All have been run in the last 12 months or so for a variety of public, private sector and charity sectors.

SELF MANAGEMENT
Equipping managers with the tools, skills knowledge and behaviours to increase their self-awareness and define who they are as a Leader. Building clarity around their leadership and communications styles and helping them maximise their strengths and manage their own careers
PEOPLE MANAGEMENT
Equipping Managers with the tools, skills, knowledge and behaviours to help them and their teams thrive. Effective target setting, delegation, coaching and managing peoples’ performance, developing people and getting the most from teams.
  • Resilience and stress management
  • Effective Networking
  • Managing my time
  • Understanding and harnessing my strengths (using strengths finder)
  • Strategies to become more motivated (using motivational maps)
  • Understanding and harnessing my potential
  • Developing my personal brand
  • Choosing a positive and empowering mind-set
  • Developing my career for future success
  • Agility and innovation for the future
  • Developing resilience in others
  • Managing difficult conversations
  • Managing myself and others through change and transition
  • Giving positive feedback
  • Coaching for performance
  • Effective Influencing
  • Managing my own and others careers
  • Getting the best from your teams
  • Setting expectations and effective delegation
  • Understanding your leadership style
  • Setting inspiring objectives

Management Boot camps

These are usually for those new to management and aspiring managers. This covers the foundation aspects of being a People Manager and is typically 3 modules over a 6 month period with coaching and action learning in between

Team development and facilitation

Team development and facilitation

We have 25 years experience of designing and facilitating hundreds of events across a wide range of organisations.

Clients report better teamwork, improved team communications, better relationships with stakeholders and customers as well as improved innovation, collaboration and efficiency.

We facilitate Board level / top teams to understand their vision, purpose, values and to help them move forward and plan their next steps. We follow our own structured approach developed over many years, which enables us to do this successfully and effectively.

We use Insights Discovery and Motivational Maps as our preferred tools for our team development and we are proud to have been accredited facilitators of these for many years.

The Insights Discovery model, which is based on the work of the eminent psychologist Carl Jung, helps team members understand their individual personalities, communication styles, strengths and preferred ways of working. These attributes are represented by ‘colour energies’.

Motivational Maps was created by James Sale, bringing the work of Maslow, The Enneagram and Edgar Schein’s career Anchors together. It helps team members understand both what motivates them and how motivated they are currently.

These tools help us to facilitate the team to understand themselves, each other and how to adapt and flex to enhance team effectiveness, and to work more effectively with customers and other key stakeholders.

The team receives a unique ‘Insights Team Wheel’, which places all the team members in their position on the wheel relative to one another by dominant colour energy. This is a really helpful visual prompt for the team and forms the basis for the opportunities to maximise and the changes they may need to make to achieve the team’s highest potential.

Each team member receives a personal 21 page profile based on the online questionnaire completed before the session.

The ‘Team Motivational Map’ is a data-rich one-pager enabling the manager and the team to see motivators and motivation levels across the team. Understanding shared and less common motivators within the team is a great tool for building team-spirit and understanding as well as for informing who might take the lead or be utilised more on specific projects and initiatives.

A Team Map report is also provided showing the team’s potential areas of compatibility and potential tension, readiness for change and more.

The individual Motivational Map reports, which include recommendations for increasing and maintaining motivation, are invaluable self-awareness tools for team members. Often one or two small changes can make a big difference to motivation levels.

We have found the individual reports can provide a really useful means of enabling staff to open up important conversations with their manager that they have either been avoiding or had not realised until now that they needed to have.

Insights-discovery

four-quadrants

 

Motivational_maps

three-things

Executive Coaching

Executive Coaching

We work 1:1 to enable individuals to reach their next level of performance and be the best leaders they can be. Madeline and Guy are qualified and highly experienced coaches, who are member of the Association of Coaching.

We have worked 1:1 with all levels of Managers and Leaders from Board Directors to first time Managers, aspiring Managers and individuals on Talent and Graduate programmes.

We have coached over 250 Managers, who have reported significant results and benefits ranging from increased self awareness, confidence, clarity, motivation, improved working relationships, new mindsets, increased team working, adaptable leadership, increased team productivity and performance, increased personal job satisfaction and job success, career advancement and promotion (etc!)

We also have a group of trusted and experienced accredited associate coaches whom we call upon for larger programmes when additional coaches are needed.

Our typical executive coaching programmes span a 8 – 12 month period and consist of 2 hour face-to-face sessions every 4 weeks or so.

We also run coaching clinics, seeing up to six managers or employees per day for a fixed day rate, making this a very cost effective way of allowing the benefits of professional coaching to reach deeper into your organisation.

Resilience, Wellbeing and Performance

Resilience, Wellbeing and Performance

Our tagline ‘Managing People Well’ acknowledges the link between wellbeing and high performance. Whilst resilience is only one facet of excellent people management, we have found that enabling people to more proactively manage this makes a significant contribution.

For over ten years we have been designing and running workshops specifically aimed at proactive stress management, resilience through change and wellbeing for performance.

For example, with Police Forces, our resilience workshops have successfully reduced sickness absence by preventing the recurrence of absence due to stress, anxiety or depression.

For a large public sector body we developed a bespoke resilience model and a 2 x half-day workshops approach, delivering significant increases in attendees ‘Ability to manage my own stress’ on a ten point scale.

The needs expressed by our clients for these type of workshops range from tackling higher than average stress levels and reducing sickness absence to maintaining performance under pressure and mastering how to manage personal energy and mindsets.

We work across the whole spectrum from ‘helping out stressed staff’ to ‘helping high performers stay at the top of their game’.

Talent and Career Development

Talent development

This area of our work is about stretching people outside their comfort zones and shifting their beliefs, behaviours and mind-sets to create the best version of themselves, overcome challenges, grow and transform.

To help people understand their motivators, strengths, personality and preferences for the way they work, we use a variety of psychometric tools.

An organisation restructure or department closure is normally the catalyst for our career development programmes

The need to build a talent pipeline and to raise capability and confidence for the future is often behind our Talent, Women’s and Men’s programmes.

Our programmes have significantly helped people manage themselves and their careers across the private, public, not for profit and charity sectors.

To help embed the learning between workshops, we facilitate action-learning groups either face to face or on line and produce content and short video to post on your intranet.

Managing personal change and transitions

Managing personal change and transitions

Change is an inevitable aspect of life. Social, economic and political and in particular technological changes are happening at an accelerating pace, and workplaces have to adapt and become agile to stay competitive and/or meet customer expectations.

We design and deliver a range of workshops to enable Managers and Leaders understand the 2 hats that they must wear on a daily basis.

One hat is for themselves to help them understand, digest and manage themselves through change.

The second is for their people – supporting, challenging and enabling their people to navigate the phases of change and seize the opportunity for growth whilst often grappling with changing goals, priorities, systems and processes.

Guy is also qualified workplace mediator and uses these skills to help resolve difficult relationships and avoid costly litigation wherever possible.