Every business needs well-prepared supervisors who are ready to provide the appropriate guidance, structure, and encouragement to their staff.

Challenge Consulting’s full-day Empowering Front Line Managers workshop is an outstanding opportunity to realise your true management potential. This comprehensive and hands-on learning event has been developed for all supervisors, managers and team leaders. You will empower yourself to build and maintain productive working relationships with and among your team members, manage your workflow efficiently, and communicate confidently with your staff.

Learning outcomes

• Understand the role of the supervisor in staff retention
• Effective team communication
• Managing generational differences in the workplace
• Managing and resolving conflict
• Managing interpersonal relationships
• Managing your time
• Effective delegation techniques
• Problem solving and decision making
• The effective use of goals
• Understanding your responsibility to identify and manage common performance constraints in the workplace
• Providing constructive feedback
• A health checklist for your team

This workshop is designed for anyone responsible for selection and hiring of staff, including, human resources staff, team leaders, supervisors and new managers who would like to learn or enhance their hiring techniques. In a competitive employment market the interview is a make or break opportunity for selecting good candidates to work for your organisation.

This interactive and practical workshop provides you with all the questioning and probing techniques to give you the confidence that you are hiring the best candidates to fit into your culture. Leave the theory behind and learn the latest, proven and practical skills to become a good interviewer and successful hirer.

Learning outcomes

• What is the reality of the current employment market?
• Character and capabilities vs job knowledge and skills.
• Understand the importance of preparation prior to the interview.
• Learn how to keep out of court by being aware of anti-discrimination laws as they relate to recruitment practices.
• Learn the different types of questioning techniques and be able to use competency based or behavioural questioning to ensure the right organisational fit.
• Get beyond the “veneer responses” in the interview.
• Understand and follow the seven steps of a structured interview to maintain and control the flow of information.
• Recognise the importance of being able to sell the benefits of working for your organisation, to encourage the right candidate to accept your offer.
• The Do’s and Don’ts of reference checking.

“A quality that organisations with high performing employees seem to share is managers who are compassionate, caring, and nurturing while still having the ability to hold employees responsible for high levels of performance. These managers aren’t afraid of developing relationships with employees. Those relationships sustain employee satisfaction even when difficult issues have to be addressed.”

This half-day workshop is designed for team leaders, supervisors and new managers who would like to learn or enhance the skills required to manage performance effectively. It provides a comprehensive introduction to the elements of an integrated performance management programme, as well as practical tools to turn the theory to reality.

Learning outcomes

• Performance management and its objectives.
• The process of quantifying, measuring, correcting and reporting on performance.
• That retaining the right people is every manager’s responsibility.
• The management tools that make up an effective performance management system and how to use them.
• The skills and techniques required to effectively manage performance, and some practical models to apply.
• How to manage performance by setting meaningful and manageable goals.
• How to prepare and conduct performance reviews that really work.
• How to manage difficult people and situations during the performance review – emotional, timid, angry, threatened, unresponsive, etc.
• The seven steps to an effective performance management interview.
• The importance of making development plans an integral part of the process.

Help your line managers develop their understanding and skills to help build engagement and readiness for change.

“There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment – and you start to decline.”

Andy Grove, Intel

Many of today’s managers have never experienced the challenges of major change. This workshop gives you practical guidelines to help you gain insight and understanding into this very sensitive business imperative, as it will play out in your own environment.

The workshop is designed to help Human Resources Staff and Line Managers to work through the critical steps when anticipating or managing organisational change to ensure the best possible outcome for all stakeholders:

• Developing the vision and strategy to take the organisation forward
• Managing the communication to ongoing stakeholders – initial and ongoing, internal and external
• Ensuring employee engagement with the new vision and strategy

Learning outcomes

The workshop is highly interactive. Participants will engage in facilitated discussions and group exercises to address the following areas:

• Consultation and involvement during the change process – with whom, about what, how much should employees be involved?
• Compiling the Organisational Change Checklist.
• The positive use of the principle of Audience Advocacy, i.e. understanding that to achieve a call to action the audience must be brought into equal focus with the Executive Team’s objectives.
• How to determine your staff’s wants, fears and needs.
• Compiling and delivering a compelling message, which will address your staff’s wants, fears and needs.
• How to manage difficult responses – emotion, anger, distress, disinterest and disengagement.
• What to expect post change announcements.
• Understanding the critical responsibilities of the management team in the early stages of change.
• The real costs of mismanagement of organisational change.

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have — and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.”
James Belasco and Ralph Stayer