Leaders Helping Others to Achieve Greatness!

In the final session of our supervisory series, discussion centered on helping employees to achieve greatness. This means focusing on the most important resource a supervisor has – people. Knowing that the job of the boss is to get the job done through others, it’s important that we figure out how to help those “others” to be great.

In previous sessions we discussed many ways to help our employees to do well. One of the primary goals of any supervisor should be to help their employees exceed their own expectations for themselves. In other words, help me to do better than I ever thought possible. Give me the freedom to use my strengths, to develop new ways of doing the work, and to be great!

The content portion focused on coaching, counseling, providing constructive feedback, and handling change. We did a demonstration on different coaching methods that effectively showed the effect of different styles. We did role play and practiced having those difficult conversations with employees who are not performing well. We talked about change and how to make it positive for ourselves and our employees. We effectively predicted change that will be happening in the organization within the next year – and each person was challenged to develop personal strategies for handling changes in their work and personal life, based on the predictions.

Today marked the end of the six-week series and was celebrated with cupcakes and certificates to the graduates. Of course the next step is the hardest – following through with lessons learned and putting in to practice all the amazing insights and ideas that came from the sessions.

I learned a few lessons from these sessions as well, and thought I would share with you:

  1. People who immediately implement concepts learned, have good stories to tell a week later.
  2. It’s really a good thing to have conversations about what motivates us personally.
  3. DiSC is a great tool for improving relationships and communication.
  4. Nonverbal communication has a big impact.
  5. It’s cost effective to buy candy in bulk from a warehouse store!
  6. When training on rainy days, sessions should be moved to windowless rooms.
  7. Lots of lessons can be learned using tennis balls.
  8. Valued rewards can be made from play dough.
  9. Some people resist working as a team even when their very survival depends on others!
  10. Cracker Barrel’s Peg Game is a great tool for teaching different methods of coaching!

A final thank you to my Bonita Springs participants. I enjoyed being with you and thank you for your participation and expressed appreciation. I sincerely hope you will be excited and inspired going forward with the important work you do.

Lorna Kibbey

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