Modules

Leadership

Management is becoming increasingly challenging and leadership has to be fulfilled against the backdrop of a business environment that has become more and more complex. This has radically changed the nature of the demands placed on leaders. An unpalatable reality with complex challenges is that they can never be completely solved. Just one small change in a seemingly trivial area can suddenly have a huge impact in a different area affecting the business – positively or negatively.

  • More demanding employees
  • The complexity of information that has to be managed
  • Stricter (legal) requirements
  • Highly demanding technology
  • Accelerating innovation cycles
  • More fluctuation
  • Raised productivity
  • More work than thinking time
  • Different personal approaches to time management

The risk of leaders failing to achieve their goals intensifies with added complexity. An important goal to have when providing managers with the right training is to engender an understanding for the logic behind complex interdependencies.

This situation is exacerbated by the fact that employees expect their involvement in processes to be more closely based on their qualifications, yet the more qualified employees are often only willing to offer their availability when they really want to. This makes managing qualified colleagues a highly specialised and complex task that takes a strong ability on behalf of managers to adapt to any given situation – qualified workers tell their managers how they expect to be managed.

To deal with this, CAAT provides you with training that has proven its effectiveness over time and has a strong academic foundation. This allows you to acquire the required skills to remain adaptable and cope with complexity, to understand it, to build on it pragmatically and maintain high standards.

Illustration on leadership by Hubert Greiner: 12
Artist’s website

Team leadership

As a rule, leading a team entails leading qualified co-workers. A key ingredient of this is an implicit obligation: looking at the overall task to be solved, leadership will be assumed by the person who adds the highest level of complexity to the task. Leading a team in the narrower sense includes managing the scope within which the team should achieve its maximum effectiveness. It’s just as important to include planning and organisational aspects as it is to work out which external people will need to be involved, plus exactly how the team should work together and be managed.

It is known from business practice that rotating the leadership of a team is extremely unlikely to work, simply for time reasons and because teams are based on a huge myth: we all have a tendency to use teams to derive personal advantage and benefit from the overall team, which is more powerful than a group of individuals. What brings a team together and creates a bond is mutual trust, the knowledge provided by people with different qualifications, and pursuing common goals and aiming for common outcomes. When trust disintegrates, desired outcomes crumble, or both of these things happen, every team falls apart.

  • Dealing with the person who defined the team task
  • Defining objectives
  • Monitoring and controls
  • Coherent team leadership
  • Deciding who to include in the team
  • Pooling of skills
  • Understanding one’s own strengths and weaknesses
  • Trust and dealing with errors
  • Group cohesion and conflict management
  • Decision-making, commitment, reporting
  • Safeguarding objectives and outcomes in the long term

Many managers these days are ill-prepared for the role of team leadership; in some cases they are even completely unprepared. As a result, there is strong demand for more information on team leadership, not only on the frontline of business but also in science and academia.

Accordingly, CAAT provides you with training that is tried and tested, and has a strong scientific foundation, allowing you to acquire the right information and qualifications and build on this.

Communication

People don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say.

Even though we all learn to communicate from the moment we first open our mouths, and even though we keep communicating throughout our lives, we develop certain habits – idiosyncratic behavioural patterns with their own special ‘blind corners’. In everyday situations, especially when the going gets tough, these shortcomings can result in extremely problematical misunderstandings and these can have a severely detrimental impact on the efficiency of communication.

Communication is an important instrument in the repertoire of everyday management. That being the case, people who want to work with one another also have to talk to one another – expressing themselves understandably, clearly and unambiguously. At the same time, it’s important that both conversation partners are fully understood in terms of their sensibilities and individuality. That’s the only way to recognise possible difficulties early on – be they related to personal style or the actual issue at hand.

The quality of communication plays a decisive role in the success of a company. This quality depends entirely on the extent to which communication with all parties can be shown to be binding, reliable and sustainable.

CAAT offers you the means to determine precisely how you communicate, to shape communication processes more consciously, to recognise and avoid communication inadequacies quickly, and to make significant improvements not only in your personal style of communication but also in how you actually communicate with others.

Motivation

Motivated people are an indispensible factor within every company in order to keep things moving forward and secure competitive advantage. Keeping people motivated entails understanding what drives individuals and fostering people’s ability to make decisions. People have to be encouraged and helped to recognise when they could assume full responsibility so that they actually assume this responsibility, with a focus on company success.

Managers invest a great deal of thought into different ways to motivate their colleagues and how to show others to motivate themselves. The aim is to keep self-motivation at a high level.

A decisive factor with personal motivation is to grant employees the appropriate responsibility, in keeping with their independence, and to provide them with enough freedom to get on with their job. Another important part of every game plan is to show genuine interest in an employee’s suggested approach and to encourage people to ‘go their own way’ – even if this may not always be the most expedient or best way. Working along these lines keeps people motivated and on the ball, resulting in a sense of responsibility and trust.

Drawing on scientific methods, CAAT offers you novel and tried-and-tested toolkits to fine-tune your personal analytical methods. Working alongside you, we develop individual, coherent motivational strategies to inject you and your colleagues with plenty of momentum to keep things moving forward. Improving your approach towards motivation helps your colleagues invest their entire energy in achieving company goals. Your improved approach towards motivation has an influence on everything around you and as a result, this also has an impact on improving the success of the company.

Selling

Clever selling is always about entering into a win-win situation with customers.

More and more competitors are investing more and more energy in successfully achieving target revenues. As the pressure to turn in a winning performance intensifies, the only way forward is to secure competitive advantage for the company by planning and presenting systematic sales policies.

To steer and manage sales successfully, as well as the effectiveness of incentive systems, it is essential to systematically develop the selling skills of the people who work in sales.

Achieving good sales results in the short, medium and long term is increasingly down to soft factors. Central to this is the ability to quickly build a personal rapport with target customers that will last over time. A strong command of interpersonal skills and recognising the effect this can have on closing a deal are also essential to succeed in sales and to reach targets and achieve the desired results.

Most people working in sales need regular encouragement and the right incentives to deliver sales results as agreed. In the future, successful salespeople will not just need the right blend of customer orientation skills but also the ability to focus on reaching consensus. Central to this is an ability to make things happen. With all skill sets and sub-skills, the key priority lies in (measureable) behaviour and activities that are central to effective sales staff performance (and no longer people’s personality and character).

Accordingly, CAAT provides you with established training methods that have a strong scientific foundation. This empowers you to monitor the selling and consulting skills of employees, to build on these and to maintain high standards. We offer an internationally unique selling model that provides the participants on our courses with the tools they need to capture areas of activity individually and to improve and raise skill levels measurably in the long term. One of our particular specialities lies in the negotiation of high-value deals.