Kardelen ran its first open course on March 23-24, covering our popular combination of subjects for senior teams of Structured Thinking & Goal Setting. Thank you to our participants from Expertees, Intuitive, Sports Leaders and Validus for making it such an enjoyable 2 days.
Our next open course on Structured Thinking is on September 14-15 at Bisham Abbey, Marlow.
Kardelen has launched its Action Learning training. These are 2 1/2 hour sessions with a small group, working on a current case or project, and applying critical thinking skills to make the analysis more useful, the process more efficient, and the presentation more succinct. The sessions act as refreshers for previous training participants or as tasters for people who have never been on our courses. We can run up to 3 Action Learning sessions in a day, with up to 3 different groups.
We rely on our teams to help us solve problems, make good decisions, present to customers and build our businesses, but the output we get from our teams can be frustratingly inconsistent.
Common issues include:
Structured Thinking & Presenting teaches people to approach questions openly and logically, to challenge and uncover a better solution, and to present conclusions succinctly.
To help your team to think and present in a structured way, helping you to make easier, better decisions, see Kardelen’s Structured Thinking & Presenting
Have you ever thought you had a fantastic solution but struggled to get client buy-in? Have you ever had a difficult client who is hampering the process? Ever had to deal with managing a mistake from your team or with a highly emotionally charged unhappy client?
Relationships with your clients, both internal and external, bring a raft of challenges. But without your clients’ engagement and buy in, your work won’t be valuable and your clients won’t return.
Kardelen’s new module, Improving Client Results, helps our training participants bridge the gap to turn a great product and process into excellent results and an engaging experience for their clients. We cover the core mindset that leads to excellent client results, simple steps to make common client meetings more valuable, how assertiveness generates respect and leads to a better solution, how to work with clients who have roles in your project delivery, and we practise a simple process to handle client issues well in a series of typical challenging client situations.
For more information click here
Kardelen launched its latest new course, Managing Project Teams, with an excellent session last week with 14 project leads from Two Circles.
The course is designed for both new and experienced project managers. It introduces a small number of skills that project managers can use to help their teams generate excellent results in often uncertain environments. The bulk of the day is spent practising those skills in role plays and group exercises.
We start the day with an exercise highlighting participants’ experiences project wobbles or failures, and what might have caused them. We then focus the role plays and exercises to practise pre-empting and remedying those typical issues, to help the get the team back on the front foot and performing well. Participants are then ready for those issues when they happen in anger outside the classroom.
Judging by the atmosphere and learning last week with Two Circles, this course is going to be a fun way for project managers to practise some critical skills; and it should result in some smoother and more satisfying projects for all involved.
Kardelen has launched its MBA, training a group of 10 Senior Consultants, 3 Associate Directors and 2 Directors at Sports Industry Agency of the Year, Two Circles. The MBA comprises 7 individual courses, and the group will take one course every 2 months.
We spread the course into separate sessions to give participants time to bed in each course’s skillset before introducing the next one. This approach has some other practical advantages: we don’t take a whole senior team away from client work for days at a time; and the participants can come to each session refreshed and hungry for an energetic day of learning and practice.
Because an entire peer group and senior team are taking the course, we have also been able to work with Two Circles to integrate the skills and practices from each course into its operating playbook.
We offer this course for all clients, and will publicise details soon.
Kardelen has developed 2 of its courses for distance learning: Managing Teams for High Performance and Managing Individuals for High Performance.
We have worked closely on developing the distance learning with Premier Training International, the UK’s leading training company in health and fitness, and with Active IQ, the UK’s largest health and fitness awarding body. The courses will form the core of the health and fitness sector’s new level 3 qualifications in management and leadership, and will be complemented by more of our courses in October and November.
Kardelen and Premier will launch their suite of management and leadership distance learning courses in the health and fitness sector in the next few months. Kardelen will offer a growing range of courses as distance learning in all sectors.
We set up Kardelen Training for 3 simple reasons:
We want to spend our time doing something that gets results; and the facts are relentless about how training the right skills in leadership, management and self development increases both performance and satisfaction. Training in intelligent goal setting creates reliable single and double digit performance improvements. People trained in sound leadership skills strongly outperform their control group peers. Leadership teams trained to develop inspiring but well-rounded missions financially outperform those without.
We see results like these ourselves from the first day we train, as our participants begin to apply and master the skills we teach. Participants’ companies start to see the benefits of those skills the day they get back to work.
From the outset of Kardelen, we plan only to train skills that we know improve performance. We believe the burden of proof is on us as a training provider to find out what genuinely gets real world results, so we do the background work to know that with confidence. We review studies on what does and does not improve performance, we run our own surveys, and we see the results of our own training.
This is why we train effective goal setting, which is one of the most compelling areas of performance improvement, but we don’t train SMART goals or stretch goals, which miss critical steps. It is why we train how to set inspiring visions and coherent missions, which have excellent records of success when done well, but we don’t train strategic tools, which have a typically negative effect on the performances of companies that apply them. We will continue to grow the subjects we train, but we will only train what works.
We also only want to train with a method that works. We believe that teaching insightful concepts is important, but we believe that most of the challenge and benefit from training comes from applying those concepts skilfully in real life. This is why we describe our work as skills training. We introduce a small number of new skills, and spend the bulk of our time practising those skills in progressively difficult circumstances relevant to our participants.
We know our training is better if it’s enjoyable. Our participants are more engaged, open to learning, and keen to test out new skills if they’re having fun, so we make it fun.
We don’t plan to train every important management and leadership skill. We only want train subjects where we think we have something distinctively good to add. There are plenty of experienced people doing excellent training in technical subjects, like finance, systems and operational improvements. We have nothing new or distinctive to offer in these subjects, so we leave them to the people who are already doing an excellent job.
The main reason we set up Kardelen, though, is that we love to work with smart people who want to improve and who want their teams to flourish. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work with these people, as they get stuck in, practising and mastering essential skills, and integrating those skills their daily way of operating.