4 C Leadership

The role of leaders is to mobilise others to get extraordinary things done in organisations. Inspiring others to believe in what they do, deriving value and satisfaction from it and being committed to the organisation and its objectives, is critical in the process. This, in essence, is what employee engagement is about.

The benefits of employee engagement have been verified by research from e.g. The Hay Group, Gallup and the Corporate Leadership Council. This research has proved that organisations with engaged employees out-perform organisations with comparatively low engagement by an average of 47% across all key business metrics. In all studies on drivers of engagement, one thing is clear: no-one impacts the state of engagement more than an employee’s immediate leader.

Leaders need to create a climate where employees to want be and want give their best to the organisation. The following 4 C’s are critical to their ability to do this:

1. Credibility:
People trust leaders when their words and deeds match. Leaders therefore need to ‘walk the talk’ and role model what they expect from their people – they need to show credibility, which is the foundation for being able to engage employees.

2. Connection:
Leadership is about relationships. The ability to build and maintain meaningful relationships is therefore crucial as an entry point to engaging employees. Connecting, however, goes beyond this to include connecting individual team members to each other, building a team and connecting them to the organisation by showing the link between what they do and what the organisation needs. The quality of all of these directly affects engagement levels.

3. Contribution:
Motivating and encouraging employees to contribute fully is important. Equally important is creating a climate where contributions are recognised and valued, which strengthens others and builds pride.

4. Communication:
Creating dialogue about what matters so that employees experience that they are being valued as ‘informed partners’ instead of being merely ‘the hands that are needed to do the work'. As it is often assumed that the above competencies are in place in leaders, leadership development programmes frequently do not address them, or if they do, tend to briefly gloss over them. However, 10 years of training thousands of managers/leaders has shown Free To Grow that critical gaps often exist in the 4 C’s.

4 C Leadership has been designed to develop the capacity in leaders to exercise leadership at its best. The programme actively develops the skills they need to demonstrate the 4C’s and inspires them to set the tone and lead by example. Leaders then become the change they want to see in the organisation. In the process, they not only increase their own performance, but also that of the people they lead.

Duration:

Four days

Group size:

Maximum of 16 delegates per workshop.