The course is conducted as a group, so that you can always see and feel how skills are actually applied.  Contact days are ’supportively challenging’.  You will learn great things about yourself and provide a much stronger and more practical foundation for your management skills.

The course comprises 11 key units that weave relevant theory and practice together.  In addition to the units outlined here, focus is placed on working in different management settings, and with your particular challenges.

Compared to other Diploma of Management courses which cover an average of eight days, this course covers twenty days over a ten month period.  After the first course formation today, there is a five day residential block.  In the subsequent two day blocks, we focus on the relevant learning learning unit.  To complement this, students bring issues from their work, and/or prepare for upcoming challenges.

Units

So much of what goes on in organisations and groups has an emotional content. Do you ever feel puzzled by the way you respond to particular situations - why you may flare up or remain silent?  Much of this is the interplay between our conscious and unconscious selves.  Becoming aware of this dynamic  can dramatically improve our capacity to manage ourselves, and in turn others and maximise the potential for collaborative endeavour.

1.  Organisational Dynamics and You!

This unit includes:

• understanding the organisational dynamics and our role in these
• being conscious of our personal motivations
• the unspoken components of organisational culture
• Role Theory - roles people play in teams and how we can prevent getting stuck in these.

The more we understand our personal motivation, the better managers we will be. Therefore self-reflection will be threaded throughout the course.

2.  Leadership

This unit includes:

• understanding The Unconscious at work
• our leadership styles and their impact
• working on our self-limiting messages
• building emotional resilience
• increasing confidence in risk taking

All organisations have a culture of stated and unstated patterns of behaviour.  This unit utilises strategies that strengthens workplace culture.

3.  Cultural Transformation in Organisations

This unit includes:

• understanding how organisational cultures are formed
• mapping our own particular organisational culture
• tackling the key barriers to cultural transformation
• creating a vision for the culture we want
• how we can personally effect cultural change
• empowering others to influence organisational culture - practical tools

We can’t be our best as managers when there is significant differences between our values and those of our organisation. 

4.  Integrating your Values Within Your Organisation

This unit includes:

• management values and beliefs
• understanding our organisation’s values and beliefs
• how can we change our practices to better match our values?
• our capacity to effect change and influence values 

This area is often ignored in the study of organisational management. Yet marginalisation and the ‘them and us’ dynamic can present myriad challenges for managers.

5.  Organisational Rank, Power and Diversity

This unit includes:

• understanding a structural view of power and rank
• dominant/non-dominant groups and their effect
• understanding how our own rank affects our management
• collaborative managers as leaders and elders
• fostering diversity.

The success stories of the future are organisational cultures and practices that facilitate shared learning, innovation and the pursuit of excellence.  This requires supportive learning systems for staff.

6.  Creating a Learning Organisation

This unit includes:

• Super Vision for staff – our staff supervision model
• refreshing the specific skills we need to facilitate supervision
• refreshing the specific skills we need to facilitate supervision
• Performance Appraisal Circles
• Peer Learning Circles - our peer supervision model
• practical strategies for for risk taking and innovation
• ‘mistake’ making, evaluative reflection and learning from our practice
• the art of giving Hearable Feedback.  

This unit focuses on facilitating excellence in collaborative decision making and enabling information systems.

8.  Collaborative Decision Making

This unit includes:

• collaborative decision making - why it is so powerful in its ability to bring about lasting change, and yet is so challenging to implement effectively
• mapping the different types of decisions to be made and establishing where within the organisation they are best made
• holding efficient, collaborative and rewarding meetings
• processes for clarifying boundaries between decision making, consultation and information sharing
• welcoming and working creatively with difference. 

Strategic planning needs to be collaboratively developed, simple to understand and useful to guide people’s daily practices.  This is often not the case!

9.  Planning - From ‘Big Picture’ to Detail

This unit covers:

• connecting the every day to the big picture
• vision, principle, aims and objectives – clearly understood
• understanding the strategic plan within the overall context of the organisation
• organisational mapping
• management skills to ‘rekindle the fire in people’s belly’
• ensuring the strategic plan is whole heartedly owned by all
• evaluation  - how to make it work hard for your organisation.

Most of us have some fears and various avoidance behaviour around conflict.  As managers we need to be confident we can welcome such differences.

10.  Conflict and Challenging Dynamics

This unit includes:

• understanding our own responses to conflict and strong feelings
• working with ‘hot spots’
• managing challenging behaviour
• converting conflict into creativity
• facilitating/mediating between others in conflict
• re-grouping after significant upheaval  

There are key practical methods to ensure that our workplace performance lives up to objectives.  Happily, many of these methods are built into other components of good collaborative management practice.

11.  Quality Assurance

This unit includes:

• service delivery check ups
• effective internal and external monitoring methods
• how to find out what clients really think
• from feedback to implementation of service changes.

It is so easy to get ’snowed under’ as managers and find there is just not enough time to look after yourselves. We need to get past the rhetoric of self care and ensure we are in good shape to give our best as managers.

12. Self Care and Professional Development

This unit includes:

• mapping our key work areas and their expectations
• some practical tools for prioritising and tracking our objectives
• sorting the important from the urgent
• ‘managing up’
• taking care of ourselves as managers - what do we need to ensure we can sustain our best contribution.