By Rachel Mallows MBE
The Mallows Company
ARE you a bee or a butterfly? That’s one of the first things that you might be asked on a Mallows Company course!
You might wonder what that has to do with Leadership and Management skills development but traditional management training relates to understanding the world by putting people in to imaginary boxes.
We have models to explain things and research to underpin our most treasured reasoning and ways of working. These are all immensely useful but when we are growing leadership skills one of the first things to do is to develop confidence so that the leader and manager can draw on his or her own inner compass to know what to do and how to do it. Confidence is the key.
One way of developing confidence is to understand how we operate; can we reflect and analyse our actions, can we change our thinking and, therefore, our behaviour in order to grow as a leader?
We do a little quiz to work out if you are a bee or a butterfly as an introduction to find out if you can do the detail or you prefer the bigger picture. And in this analogy there is no right or wrong – we are who we are – but we can learn the skills to change our thinking and to grow as a leader if we know a little more about who we are and build the disciplines to recognise difference in others in order to build better teams, delegate successfully and to make transitions.
The autumn courses include Manager To Leader, Effective Appraisals and Delegating Successfully, and Coaching For Success and full details including booking arrangements are available on the website.
In addition, we have just released details of two free half day workshops aimed at Third Sector leaders.
With Associate Jane Deamer, these latter two courses are aimed at the building blocks of leadership development for senior managers and directors in the voluntary and not for profit sector. The two topics are Overcoming Third Sector Leadership Challenges on 11 September and Third Sector Future Proof Strategy on 14 September.
We are really keen to demonstrate that the ecology of leadership – resilience and focus alongside humility and integrity – applies in business and in the third sector. Our experience working with a wide range of customers led us to run these courses which are proving to be very popular, based on the interest we have had already.
As a bee keeper, it will come as no surprise that I am a bee, which means that I like order, make lists and believe in good planning and preparation; hopefully it doesn’t mean that I could be accused of ‘droning on’!
Find out more at www.themallowscompany.com or by ringing 01933 664437 or emailing
