Courses & Programmes

Improve your leadership in a day (or an afternoon)

Whether an employee has been on a lengthy leadership development course, or is totally new to leadership, this is a short course working with up-to-date findings on leadership. It will be tailored to your industry or organisational function, providing a recap or initial entry into the leadership domain. It’s suitable for mixed levels and abilities, and will be adapted to fit your setting.

How to tell great stories

Stories are a great technique for sharing new ideas, getting important concepts across and improving presentation skills. This half-day workshop increases participants’ skill and confidence in constructing and telling stories, and looks at how to use stories to improve written and spoken communications.

Reduce bias, encourage diversity

We know that diverse companies are more successful but what can we do to make our firms more diverse? This half-day workshop is aimed at those involved in the hiring process, helping them to see the natural biases that we all have when we’re recruiting and what can be done to manage them. It’ll provide participants with a range of tools and techniques that they can use to debias their recruitment and to help your firm debias its recruitment process.

Time management and planning

Rather than dwelling in the usual ideas and theories, this workshop uses really up-to-date findings about how we perceive and use our time to help delegates come up with ways to manage their time that will really work for them. It looks at how to break habits and how to form them, as well as technological solutions that have been designed to reduce stress and cognitive overlaod. Delegates leave this half-day workshop with a clear plan of action and lots of new techniques and tools they can try out.

Leading in the Professional Services Firm

Law, accounting and the wider professional services are very challenging environments in which to lead. From winning respect to garnering support and driving strategy, the partnership landscape and the lawyer personality feed into a sense that, sometimes, leadership is impossible. This day-long workshop shows that it’s not, using key theories and models of professional services leadership to explore the challenges, but most importantly to help leaders to originate solutions that will work in their particular context.

Have great ideas (and use them)

Giving employees the skills to come up with ideas and then furnishing them with the confidence to use them can be invaluable for firms looking to retain the best people and move forward in their industry. This half-day workshop helps people to develop their creative thinking skills as well as understand how to test ideas, help them gain traction, and how to tell an average idea from a great one. It combines nicely with the storytelling workshop as a day of developing creative skills.

Leading Change

This full-day workshop is aimed at middle and senior managers who have been charged with leading a change initiative. It will use key change management tools and theories to explore the challenges and develop solutions that fit the circumstances. Managers will leave with a clear sense of what to do and how to do it.

Getting Started on Strategy

This whole-day workshop is aimed at junior and middle managers who are getting involved with strategic decision making for the first time. It will help them to look at what companies mean when they talk about strategy, as well as exploring some of the key tools and techniques that managers can use today to understand and develop strategies. It’s a little like an MBA Strategy module rolled into a day for those who need to make progress in this area quickly.

Effective Stakeholder relationships

Almost every job requires employees to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders who don’t all want the same things. This workshop analyses the stakeholders and their relationships in order to help delegates come up with optimal ways to work with them and manage them. The workshop also touches on conflict management and resolution as a key tool for those who have to balance the needs of very different stakeholders in a way that keeps everyone as happy as possible.

Managing Upwards

This is a really popular half-day workshop aimed at junior managers and those with no management responsibility.  It helps participants to recognise when it’s relevant to ‘manage your manager’ and how it can be of benefit to the organisation and how to go about doing so. It’s a great session for helping staff to feel empowered but also for calming down any tensions by giving them a voice that they know how to use in a positive way.

Great Delegation

This half-day workshop helps delegates to understand where they sit on the delegation-control spectrum, as well as helping them to identify what can be delegated versus what cannot. It also explores how to support and motivate teams through delegation, and in particular how to manage from afar. Participants will find themselves feeling more confident about what to delegate, how and to who, as well as assessing whether delegation is working and how to take action if not.

Having difficult career conversations

This half-day workshop tends to work best in large firms, where employees find it hard to navigate the hierarchy and put themselves forward for promotions, pay rises, or flexible working arrangements. It helps them to explore whether there is a business case for their request, and if so, how to organise their approach to asking for what they want. It can lead to much calmer appraisals and negotiations and help firms to promote those who are deserving.