Your Leadership Edge Mastering Management Skills for Today’s Workforce
Unlock your leadership potential by following this stepby-step program. Not only will you become more aware of the crucial core leadership qualities you need to succeed, but you will acquire a strong foundation of leadership skills that will result in a highly engaged and productive workforce.
Story Behind the Book I started doing call center onboarding training back in early 2000 and quickly discovered that my colleagues who enthusiastically joined the company became disengaged within a few months; this caused their performance to decline rapidly and leave the company. In fact, 1/3 of the department employees left within one year of joining the company. Noticing this disturbing trend, I started emphasizing to management the importance of high level of engagement to the department efficiency and to the overall company’s bottom-line. I quickly started training department managers on how to become more approachable and encourage higher employee engagement. Our turnover rates started dropping dramatically, employees started making more improvement suggestions and surveys showed us moving to 3rd place in the industry for customer experience (from 10th place in the previous year, which is dead last in the industry). This lead me to the belief that a positive well-trained leader can create an optimal work environment and drive company growth exponentially, while an ill-equipped leader will simply drive good employees away and potentially amplify costs of ongoing recruitment and training. This set me on a path to focus my training efforts on helping manager’s and business leaders to develop and practice essential competencies needed to be a good leader. I started doing workshops, online training and writing about it in blogs posts and books on the topic and started realizing that certain key elements were absolutely essential to developing highly engaged
www.ravindertulsiani.com
workforce. I formalized my years of corporate training experience into an employee engagement training model called “E.D.G.E.” Your Leadership Edge will introduce you to this model to help you assess and develop the key leadership competencies you need to drive efficiency and effectiveness in your organization.
About the Book 'Your Leadership EDGE' training program will help you to develop the core competencies needed to become an exceptional leader to enable you to engage and develop your employees so that you can drive massive growth to your organization. The book is not about making you aware of leadership competencies; awareness is only the first step to mastering anything. This is exactly what most books and programs on leadership do; and that’s why they fail. In fact, we have had no noticeable improvement in employee attitude over the past decade. A survey in 2000 and 2012 suggests that there has been no major shift in employee engagement attitude, 70% of all employees continue to be disengaged from their employer interest. In fact, 30% of employees are actively disengaged, that is, they intentionally work against the company’s overall core objectives. How much more productive would your company be if you could reduce the number of disengaged employees? What would that do to the overall company morale? The source of the problem is not employees. Numerous exit interview studies have found that employees don’t leave companies, they leave their managers. Yet, most companies focus on carrot and stick approach to effect employee behavior and engagement levels. Logically, if 70% of employees are disengaged in the workforce and most report leaving as a result of their experience with their managers - isn’t it time that we look at what the manager’s could do differently to improve employee disengagement situation? So, is it the manager’s fault? No. Most managers’ became managers because they were good employees and were rewarded with a promotion. But, once promoted, very few organizations train their manager’s to manage properly. These managers rely on their past experience as employees themselves to manage their subordinates without any leadership training. So, is the answer leadership training? Yes - in part. I firmly believe that training is rarely the silver bullet; however, a solid foundation is a prerequisite to leadership mastery. ‘Your Leadership EDGE’ will give you the foundation necessary to be an effective leader. Using the step-by-step program outlined in each of the chapters in this book you will not only become more aware of the core leadership competencies; you will acquire the necessary leadership skills foundation that will enable you to develop and support a highly engaged and productive workforce.
www.ravindertulsiani.com
About the Author Ravinder has over 13 years experience in training and development and is the Founder of Training EDGE, a consulting firm based out of Toronto, Canada. Training EDGE offers its clients several training programs, including a two-day leadership in house training program and online leadership training program. Author of numerous quality, business and self-help resources including but not limited to, Effective Leadership (2013), Manager’s Guide to Workplace Health and Safety (2012), Time Management in the Workplace (2009), Master Negotiation Techniques (2007) and How to be a Public Speaking Superstar (2006). Tulsiani’s expertise has become so well respected his knowledge has been seen on several major media outlets including: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN and Forbes.
Table of Contents Overview: A skill development program for Supervisors/Managers seeking to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. Each chapter focuses on core competencies required by today’s leaders. Chapter 1: How this book will help you... To master the necessary skills and enable you to deliver results. Overview of core competencies. Help readers to identify their own competency gaps and create an action plan to improve in needed areas. Chapter 2: Using your time and resources strategically. Establish performance priorities, set goals and write results-focused plans to maximize effective use of time, unit and organizational resources by concentrating on performance priorities and gaining buy-in. Chapter 3: Gather and share information effectively. Effective Communication is the key to building and maintaining relationships, processes and systems. This chapter helps readers understand their own style of communication and listening. They will also learn different personality types to aid them in better relating to others. Chapter 4: How to transform employees into owners of the organization’s success. Empowerment and collaboration. This chapter will cover essential elements of team development and team building processes, the many roles team members play, factors which contribute to
www.ravindertulsiani.com
winning teams, group decision-making, putting team building theory into practice, and detrimental effects of internal competition on achieving organizational goals. Chapter 5: Enhance job ownership and performance. Develop better understanding of how employee needs, supervision, job characteristics, work environment, and external constraints influence workplace behaviors and their leadership preference. Understanding different leadership styles and how to determine appropriate leadership intervention. Chapter 6: Coaching and managing employee performance. Learn how to effectively communicate performance expectations, provide feedback and training and determine the source of performance problems. Detailed information on how to deal with difficult employees. Chapter 7: Managing and resolving conflict. How to identify conflict(s). Avoid destructive communication, identify causes. Assess personal strengths and developmental needs in determining the best approach to managing conflict. Chapter 8: Problem solving and decision making. Techniques for solving problems efficiently and creatively, and how to gain employee “buy-in.� Chapter 9: Change Management. Implement change, deal with resistance to change, develop effective communication strategy to plan and implement change. Chapter 10: Develop process-improving strategies. How to effectively diagnose and continuously improve critical business processes. Chapter 11: Wrap up How to ensure that the concepts you learn can be implemented.
www.ravindertulsiani.com