How can you support your managers to become agile?
30/3/2018
Valerie Rocoplan
Valerie Rocoplan

How can you support your managers to become agile?

"Disruption": among our clients, this word is on everyone's lips, and rightly so: all industries and their business models are in the throes of change!

Whether in retail, transport, hotels/restaurants or banking, customers are consuming in a radically different way, and new disruptive players such as startups are "attacking" these sectors by offering highly efficient and very agile solutions.
Not to mention the other factors that are accelerating this disruption: the arrival of Artificial Intelligence, data management, the arrival of Fintechs, crypto-currencies, etc...

This requires all the players to undergo a profound change in their organisation and their management methods, which requires a real awareness of the paradigm shift that is currently taking place.

Indeed, we may be witnessing a kind of new 'illiteracy' within populations of very experienced employees or leaders, who do not see, understand, or take the time to learn to manage in this new environment.

In parallel with a system that is transforming business models, organisations, technologies and customer offerings, the crucial question for ALL COMPANIES is:

HOW TO MANAGE AND COOPERATE IN A WAY THAT IS PERFECTLY ADAPTED TO THIS NEW ENVIRONMENT?

Managing in this new environment means :

  • Learning to learn continuously
  • Managing in parity to make employees co-responsible
  • Generate the desire and commitment to dare, take risks, move towards new ways of doing things
  • Stimulating innovation
  • Focusing totally on the customer
  • Seek well-being and commitment at work.

This means that managers have to accept big changes and challenges in order to change the paradigm:

  • From knowing manager to learning manager
  • From controlling to facilitating manager
  • From the manager who masters to the manager who dares
  • From authoritarian manager to parity manager
  • From "serious" manager to enthusiastic and meaningful manager
  • From the manager who gives lessons to the "mentor" manager who gives a lot of feedback and helps employees develop
  • From 'three-year plan' manager to 'agile' manager
  • From the "win-at-all-costs" manager to the "collaborative" manager, who creates a cohesive team and makes teams work together.

Many companies are currently reviewing their management model and starting to work with consultants, coaches and trainers, some of them in a frenzy bordering on the surreal.
We sometimes hear, for example, "Can you transform our managers with a half-day workshop?

As if a few hours in coaching mode could wipe out years of managerial habits in a single stroke!

Entire populations of leaders, senior managers and managers must embrace an uncomfortable but exciting new era:

THE ERA OF LIFELONG LEARNING.

Indeed, it is only by offering themselves time to discover, learn, share, visit and exchange with multiple players that they will be able to adapt permanently to the changes that are shaping their market and their offers differently.

HOW TO TURN YOUR MANAGERS INTO AGILE MANAGERS?

By offering them a programme of discovery and continuous learning.

This programme should be coherent and oriented around a few key competences and values, the basis of this managerial transformation.

1 - Define precisely the new values and skills expected of managers

Using different tools, Talentis helps you to co-construct your new skills repository, by translating a few key skills into observable behaviours.

FROM THE NEW PRINCIPLES AND VALUES the ideal is to align these new skills and postures with the strategic challenges of the company.

This repository should be limited to 8 to 9 competences and about 50 observable behaviours that reflect an alignment with new key values.

The objective is to measure the skills and managerial postures of today in order to map the strengths and difficulties of managers.

The competency framework of the agile manager, the leader of the future desired by the company, is worked on with a small project group in charge of the transformation within the company.
Thus the questionnaire is based on the values, qualities and precise culture of the group.

2 - Measuring the gap between the current situation and the desired situation

Managers carry out a self-assessment or a 360° survey (a questionnaire administered to employees on their manager's competencies) in order to measure their strengths and areas for improvement.

From the outset, 360° has been very effective in raising awareness of management changes.

It allows both a precise mapping of managerial skills and a real pedagogy on the new skills expected (10 people answer on average for each manager, which makes 100 people think for 10 managers and 1000 people for 100 managers!)

3 - Sharing results with managers

CREATING A SENSE OF URGENCY -
To create a real sense of urgency and initiate a process of change, we propose to organise a very authentic sharing session with the managers concerned by the changes.

BE AWARE OF THE IMPERATIVE CHANGE -
During this session, we seek to bring about real awareness of the business issues, the management issues, and the employees' issues.

INSPIRE -
For example, have leaders who have already successfully completed their transformation, start-ups who explain their solutions, young talents who explain how they manage in an agile way, etc.

It is then important to get the teams to co-create around the company's new values and the associated skills. Put managers in cooperative intelligence in order to make them co-create, discuss, exchange and share.

COACHING -
With the support of coaches, managers receive feedback on their individual postures and cooperation patterns.
These "challenging" and benevolent feedbacks are the basis for transformation action plans. They can be carried out individually or in teams.

Feedback

4 - Building a management support plan: an engaging and learning experience

To be aligned with the subject of the Agile Manager, or Entrepreneurial Leader, or Data Leader, whatever the new manager defined by the organisation, the experience of managers in their transformation process must itself be

AGILE - INNOVATIVE - INSPIRING

Talentis builds a LEARNING FOR DEVELOPMENT cycle with you around different complementary moments, over a period of several months, in order to ensure lasting changes. (No! We can't transform your managers in a few hours!)

EXAMPLES OF THE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE COURSE

  • Leadership expedition: get inspired by visits, testimonies, meet new ways of working and cooperating, get out of your comfort zone...
  • Workshops or experiential workshops combining practical cases (business / business) with new managerial postures that managers must adopt: the art of feedback, the intelligent meeting, employee commitment and motivation, the entrepreneurial spirit in everyday life, learning to learn, etc.
  • Collective intelligence sessions to touch or learn the fundamentals of practices: Design Thinking, modern authority...
  • Short webinars (one hour maximum) on very specific topics to explore a specific subject, to stimulate a new subject, to encourage interest in new concepts and disciplines.
  • Practice exchange groups that meet quarterly to share honestly about their new lives as managers.
  • Double/reverse mentoring to get senior and junior staff to exchange ideas about new ways of working in this new context. These reverse mentoring sessions can be strongly focused on 'innovation' or 'customer' or 'cooperation' depending on the company's choice.
  • Pure training (and yes, going back to school is sometimes useful!): for example coding, building a roadmap, using social networks for business...
  • Individual coaching for managers who wish to do so, to support the collective transformation and to support each person in the personal reflection of the changes to be implemented.
  • Support for the management team in the implementation aspects of these new forms of management for themselves, communication and alignment around the language, measuring progress regularly with them.

Not all of these modalities are used in the same programme, but for effective and real change, we encourage a variety of modalities and long-term support.

Reflecting the effectiveness of coaching based on the power of experimentation, feedback, change planning, implementation and measurement of change, these programmes are built by Talentis in a pure group coaching pedagogy.

TALENTIS DOES NOT ONLY COACH MANAGERS BUT ALSO ADVISES ON THE METHODS TO BE IMPLEMENTED TO ANCHOR LEARNING

A change in management culture takes between 3 and 5 years, provided that the following conditions are met:

  • A sense of urgency aligned around business, customer and employee issues
  • A strong commitment from the management and all the company's entities, true sponsors of the change programme
  • A team of leaders and senior managers who lead by example by quickly applying these new forms of management
  • A solid, long-termsystem, with regular measurement of changes and effects on daily life (business, customers, employees)
  • Care in individual and collective support, driven by the values of benevolence and constructive challenge (no "scapegoating")

The transformation of the managerial culture towards an agile manager, an entrepreneurial leader who shapes his or her management style to the rhythm of economic, technological and sociological changes, requires :

A courageous approach to work on oneself, one's ways of being, sharing, cooperating, saying things.

Far from being a simple training issue, it is a collective dynamic of change, towards values of :

CURIOSITY
AUDACE
PARITY
CO-RESPONSIBILITY
TRUST

TRANSFORM YOUR MANAGERS INTO AGILE MANAGERS:

Leadership seminars :

Make your seminars and conventions real employee experiences. Inject more fun and conviviality into your events and offer your talents more workshops and inspiring keynote speakers!

Read more >>

Individual coaching :

Allow your managers and leaders to take a step back from their managerial practices and work on their areas of improvement in person with the help of a Talentis Executive Coach.

Read more >>

Online coaching :

With Click & Coach, the online business coaching platform, coaching becomes more accessible and flexible. Managers and executives of your organisation can choose their own coaching topics and coaches for tailor-made sessions.

Read more >>

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