Smarter Data People

• makes your team easier to manage
• gives them skills to keep their stakeholders happier
• makes sure they spend their time solving the best, highest-value problems.

Smarter Data People approaches these challenges with a mix of skills-based interventions, structural changes and cultural changes: it’s often as much HOW a training, off-site or coaching session is presented as it is the content which makes it work.

Every project addresses your challenges specifically.

Smarter Data People includes:

• reviewing the structural and incentive issues underpinning communications and culture
• upgrading the systems that track what we do, how we prioritize it, and when we say yes (or not) to work
• coaching for your executives, high-potentials and key-opinion-leaders coaching
• training on key topics
• quarterly team offsites

You’ll find more information on each of these below.

Structural, team and incentive review

Structural issues such as workflow, process design, team composition and organisational design can actually drive communication problems. Draw on our extensive experience in productivity and organisational design so you can get to the heart of the problem.

Review the systems that underpin communications and culture. Upgrade the systems that track what we do, how we prioritise it, and when we say yes (or not) to work.

Coaching for executives, high potentials and key opinion leaders

You need coaching to ensure that your vision is as clear as it can be, and to eliminate emotional and physical obstacles in the path to achieving it. Coaching customises the message to each participant.

As much as your leadership sets the tone, unless your high-potentials and key opinion leaders share your vision and have the skills to make it happen, it can get stuck.

Engage them on how politics work and its effect on their job. Engage them on understanding their stakeholders better. Engage them in how they enlist their teams in solving problems. It’s absolutely essential to your team’s success.

Training and coaching

There is an indicative menu of training topics. Training and coaching makes sure that your teams have the information, attitudes and skills they need to succeed.

Each team gets a customised version.

Influencing others

• making No sound like Yes
• taking a good brief
• asking excellent questions
• pleasing your boss
• rapport 101: getting on with people you hate
• helping your team please you
• rolling out the vision
• dealing with bad customer and stakeholder behaviours.

Presenting and training with confidence

• Presenting and training with confidence
• to boards, ExCos and bosses.
• when you don’t have all the information
• when the audience is difficult
• when your information is complex.

Application labs and twinned leader assignments

Designed specifically for smart teams of extremely clever people, application labs combine training, real-work assignments and coaching. Each application lab results in a real leader action (twinned assignment) that supports the improvement in the real world of meetings, assignments and presentations.

Team building

Building:

• a team who talks to each other and has each others’ backs
• a client base who works in partnernship with you
• interdependence between your teams and your stakeholders

Working with your brain and its chemistry

Using your brain in a smart way to

• manage time
• manage energy and emotion
• set goals
• navigate stressful times
• prioritise what’s important and get it done.

Managing your team

• pointing out what works: so you get more of it
• dealing with poor performance in your team
• career planning and skills extension

Quarterly team offsites

This is your chance to get your team focused on your vision.

Too many leaders tell me their team says they don’t know where they are going – even when it’s been said many times. Offsites allow you to change the medium and build two-way communication that you can’t get in the day-to-day environment.

Having a guide and facilitator provides someone to protect your ideas, advocate for you, and allow you to relax instead of trying to control the room.