Involve Them! How Leaders Develop & Train People To Learn New Skills

Obtaining the emotional, psychological and intellectual buy-in of your people -- especially those who rarely have an opportunity to contribute in those critical ways -- to your planning process should be leadership's key priority.

As Aarti Iyer's truly instructional post advises, leaders must design, shepherd and guide:

"the planning process so that staff feel that they have adequate input into the process, that they are heard, and their values and visions are incorporated into the final plan and its implementation" [see the Human Resources Circle discussion group in Yahoo - HR Circle at yahoogroups.com- Digest-142]

With the right process, strategic planning can actually spawn itself into some of these vital opportunities to exercise your leadership:

=> Engage employees, volunteers and mission partners as your co-creators, co-conspirators or co-leaders in shaping, implementing or supervising the plan

=> Encourage and train your associates to develop their innate creativity, communication styles, critical and systems thinking, value engineering, leadership behaviors and attitudes, teamwork and collaboration, mapping and modeling skills and more

=> Enter into agreements with your stakeholders to hold you accountable for turning the plan into tangible reality and elicit their commitment and assurance that they too will assume responsibility for certain sections of the plan

=> Establish a schedule for communicating with your people using coaching, mentoring, consultative sessions, progress conferences, focus groups, team reports, performance reviews, reward and recognition ceremonies, etc.

=> Empower your people to have authority for or take the lead in further defining or refining the strategy, sculpting your vision and mission, and aligning organizational and personal values by:

- taking process ownership or leadership roles;

- becoming quality champions or entrepreneurial detectives;

- creating meeting or event agenda items;

- participating in goal- or priority-setting;

- conducting formal consulting or coaching sessions with others

Does your planning process enables you to encourage and engage your people in all those ways?

How could you solicit, channel, align and incorporate the personal values and visions of your group so that organizational goals and priorities are enhanced and extended?

Once the plan is created, what are you doing to make it the roadmap you use to lead, supervise, steer and control its implementation to edifying, empowering and successful conclusions?

From now till January 11, 2005, you can get a Planning Workshop Facilitator's Manual [40 pages], Workgroup Handout materials [35 pages] and 75-minute Webinar for Leaders and Workshop Facilitators for 50% less!

Learn how this very affordable, yet uniquely effective planning leadership tool

=> Enriches your planning process,

=> Empowers your people;

=> Energizes your leadership performance

Click HERE to get your FREE Webinar and begin your leadership adventure!