Hector makes workshops fun and practical: participants take an active role and leave with techniques and methods they can apply immediately.

Workshops are individually tailored to client needs and usually last half a day or one day.

Vision-inspired Leadership

Leaders at all levels build followership by inspiring their teams or organisations with a compelling and clearly communicated vision. The workshop explores the construction of a range of different types of visions, and provides practical instruction in how to embed visions and avoid common pitfalls.

Vision-based Leadership

Topics

The role of a shared vision

Customer, Competitor and Transformation visions

Communicating your vision

Aligning your team around a vision

Leading by example

Embedding a vision

Outcomes

Discover the different types of vision and how to construct them

Practise three ways to share a vision

Learn how to make a vision gain traction within an organisation

(Full day) Build and practise sharing a real vision for your own team 

Storytelling

The power of storytelling to enhance communications and engage teams is now widely recognised. The workshop teaches the building blocks of a good story and how to create and share goal-oriented personal and corporate stories.

Topics

Why stories work

The universal story

The building blocks of a story

The importance of causation and choice

Personal stories

Corporate stories

How to tell your story

Outcomes

Discover the many ways stories can be used

Learn how to create four different genres of story

Practise goal-oriented storytelling

Develop a personal story

(Full day) Develop a corporate or team story to meet a business objective

Storytelling

Collaborative Innovation

Contrary to popular belief, innovation is a hard slog that depends on stamina and teamwork more than brilliant ideas. The workshop details how innovation team members can work together to achieve a shared goal, balancing planning, financial discipline and creativity.

Collaborative Innovation

Topics

Incremental and transformational innovation

Defining the challenge

The innovation team

Ideation and creative thinking

Testing, measurement and feedback

Reaching the finish line

Outcomes

Understand the importance of setting the right challenge parameters

Know how to build the right team

Appreciate the need for honest assessment of progress and cost

Practise ideation and creative thinking

Understand the full innovation process and likely pitfalls

(Full day) Generate and develop ideas for a current innovation challenge

Change Communications

The success or failure of a major change programme will hinge on the quality of its communications. The workshop equips leaders with the communication strategies and techniques to guide their teams through a world of accelerating change and proliferating information.

Topics

Change and its obstacles

Stakeholders, influencers and audiences

Communications strategy

What to say and what not to say

Communications channels

Roles, Milestones and Metrics

Outcomes

Recognise the vital role of timely, clear communications in a change programme

Understand the differing message and channel needs of different audiences

Learn how to design a communications strategy

Practise crafting key messages to achieve particular outcomes

(Full day) Create a draft communications strategy for a change programme

Change Communications

Adaptive Strategy

In an increasingly fluid and unpredictable world of accelerating change, traditional strategies are becoming ineffective. The workshop prepares leaders for a more agile and responsive approach to strategic planning and competitive advantage.

Adaptive Strategy

Topics

Competitive advantage in the VUCA world

Adaptive capabilities

Spotting opportunities

Rapid experimentation

Distributed decision-making

Engaging employees for permanent change

Outcomes

Recognise the failings of traditional strategy in a fast-changing environment

Discover the capabilities needed to stay agile and responsive

Learn to balance the need for agility and the need for a sustained vision

(Full day) Draft an adaptive strategy

 

Truth in Business

It is more important than ever for business communications to be honest and fair.  Companies believed to be dishonest in their marketing or PR lose the trust of consumers, investors and regulators.  Internally, colleagues who distort the truth weaken team collaboration, while those who don’t recognize how truth can be manipulated leave their companies vulnerable to misinformation.  

A clearer understanding of truth in all its various forms is of vital interest to business leaders concerned for the effective operation and good reputation of their organisations, as well as to anyone working in marketing, PR, government affairs, investor relations or internal communications.  In a fast-moving world where comment, rumour and criticism spread like wildfire, we all need to become more sophisticated consumers and producers of information.  As the author of Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape our Reality, Hector Macdonald is an expert on how truth is used and abused in professional communications. 

Topics

Omission and obfuscation

Cherrypicking

Context

Subjective judgements

Definitions and names

Predictions and promises

 

Outcomes

Recognise that good communication requires simplification, which opens the door to multiple versions of the truth

Learn to spot the techniques that misleaders deploy and the pitfalls that unwitting communicators face

Develop skills in context framing, number presentation and storytelling

Discuss the ethics of communicating various forms of the truth

(Full day) Evaluate the truthfulness of current business communications and craft an alternative set of true messages

Truth in Business