The Leadership and Management Development Program (LMDP)
The LMDP provides a comprehensive approach for creating organizational alignment from senior leaders to first-line supervisors by clarifying leadership expectations and promoting trust and communication across all levels of management. The Program includes an offsite and a series of seminars that build on the offsite’s themes. We’ve delivered the Program to hundreds of public- and private-sector managers over the past four years.
* Background Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
The Expectations Offsite
The Expectations Offsite ideally kicks off the Program with a series of facilitated discussions covering senior leadership’s expectations of its management team in four key dimensions, each with four customizable expectations. We’ll work with seniors prior to the offsite to craft expectations that best serve their needs. The four dimensions the offsite covers are:
The People Dimension
Our first dimension deals with how supervisors can build trust and connect with their direct reports while helping ensure an engaged and effective workforce.
The Programs Dimension
Our second dimension covers how supervisors should run their programs and deliver on mission and includes expectations related to domain mastery, resource management, customer service, and acting with integrity.
The Partnerships Dimension
Our third dimension looks at how supervisors cooperate and collaborate with peers and get things done across organizational boundaries by being corporate, respecting others, and promoting diversity and inclusion.
The Personal Growth Dimension
Our final dimension addresses the need for supervisors to continuously develop their leadership and management skills, improve their self-awareness, embrace opportunities to excel, and maintain wellness and balance.
Additional Offsite Sessions to Reinforce Expectations Discussions
For each expectation we provide a short introduction, drawing on relevant literature and our own leadership experiences, and then facilitate a discussion about what that expectation means in that team’s context. We provide the seniors with the questions in advance that we’ll be asking them and the team.
We offer a variety of additional offsite sessions and activities that reinforce the expectations discussions, including:
Icebreaker Session
We usually begin the first day exploring how and why attendees became managers and how each of them defines success. We then offer an aspirational definition of success that tees up the rest of the offsite content.
The View From the Front Office
This gives the senior manager or managers a chance to lay out the environment in which they operate. The goal is to share the challenges, demands, frustrations, and opportunities the unit faces, which provides key context for the expectations discussion.
People vs. Programs Exercise
This session asks team members to think about the tradeoffs of focusing on developing their people vs. delivering on programs and generates a discussion on the appropriate balance between leadership and management.
Blockers Exercise
This exercise explores possible roadblocks team members face in trying to meet the given expectations. It seeks to uncover possible systemic problems that might require the seniors’ attention, exposes everyone to the challenges that their peers face, and shares best practices for overcoming them.
Fireside Chat
Usually held after dinner on the first day of residential events, this session is a chance for the seniors to tell their personal stories in a way that demonstrates transparency while sharing key formative events and lessons from their careers. This session always receives high marks, as attendees appreciate how candid and personal the discussion is.
Finding Solutions
We can design and facilitate a session to tackle any tasks or problems our clients want, from addressing negative upward feedback to launching a strategic planning effort.
The Expectations Offsite ideally runs for a day and a half and includes social and bonding time the evening of the first day. We can also do a compressed, one-day version that covers the four dimensions above but leaves out several of the additional sessions.
The LMDP Seminars
The LMDP Seminars build on the Expectations Offsite’s discussions and dig deeper into subjects that will help supervisors develop their leadership and management skills while learning how to promote communication and trust. Each highly interactive session runs roughly two hours and includes a comprehensive manual that captures everything we cover in class. The material is geared specifically to our client and uses stories from our careers to illustrate key points. The seminars include:
Effective Communication for Managers
Our kickoff seminar explores common communication challenges and how to overcome them to become a more purposeful communicator.
Successfully Managing Up and Down
Our second seminar looks at how to build more effective, trusting relationships with your bosses and your people using strategies to clarify expectations, create transparency, and smooth communication.
Effective Decisionmaking for Managers
This session explores how to balance your bosses’ expectations that you have a bias for action with your people’s desire for you to have an inclusive leadership style. It also covers key questions to ask to avoid common pitfalls before making an important decision.
Emotional Intelligence for Managers
Our fourth seminar explains the power behind emotional intelligence and how supervisors can employ it to create a more engaged, positive, corporate, and productive workforce.
Executive Presence for Managers
This seminar builds on our previous sessions and focuses on the role presence plays in communicating competence to others and in creating trust. It provides specific strategies for crafting a more confident and effective presence to meet the expectations of bosses, direct reports, peers, and customers.
The Personal Leadership Philosophy Workshop
Our final session explains why having a leadership philosophy is important, what makes a good one, and how to communicate it. The workshop includes a template for creating a personal leadership philosophy as the capstone project of the LMDP.
We can combine select seminars to create full-day training experiences that meet specific client needs. For example, we have integrated material from the effective communication, emotional intelligence, and executive presence sessions into a Communication Workshop that explores multiple dimensions of what it means to be a truly effective communicator.
Leadership for All Seminars
We also have versions of our LMDP seminars for non-managers. Our clients often pair LMDP training for their managers with accompanying training for the rest of their workforce. This combination extends organizational alignment from the leadership team through the rest of the workforce. You can find out more about our Leadership for All Seminars below.
