Archive
Please find below details of past Business Forums.
Past Forums 2011
Thursday 17th November Influencing for effectiveness and long term sustainable change Novotel Tower Bridge, London
Wednesday 21st September
Enabling High Performance - How meeting 'core needs' has a powerful impact on individual and organisational success
Novotel Tower Bridge, London
Wednesday 6th July
Igniting Change - Using the Power of the 'Rumour Mill'
MaST Offices, Maidenhead
Wednesday 18th May
Do your leaders give values the respect they deserve?
Novotel Tower Bridge, London
Tuesday 22nd March
Making the Transition to Leadership - Breaking the Chains that Can Hold You Back
The Park Royal, Warrington
Wednesday 16th February
Making the Transition to Leadership - Breaking the Chains that Can Hold You Back
Novotel Tower Bridge, London
Thursday 17th November
Influencing for effectiveness and long term sustainable change
Novotel Tower Bridge, London
Organisations are dynamic systems, and ensuring vital messages are heard, and acted on within teams, departments and throughout the organisation can be a daily challenge. Whether face to face or using digital media, how do your managers get things done around your business? Do people really hear, and act on what they say? Or do they simply listen, ignore or over-react to the messages..?
Unlocking the true potential of your business will depend on the skill of your managers to influence the hearts and minds of their people – so that they can change / develop / react quickly to market conditions, and get ahead of the competition.
This Forum will help you evolve the way your Leaders, Managers and Communications experts use their influence for the benefit of your organisation. Through shared observation and working with experienced actors from MaST Theatre, we will explore ways to identify and make best use of familiar influencing patterns. It is not only about getting things done, it is also about building trust and respect within a team/department / organisation that will make them truly effective and change sustainable.
Join us to share best practice, gain awareness of habits and cultural elements that hold you and your organisation back, and have the opportunity to reflect on what new behaviours will increase your levels of influence both personally and corporately.
Together we will explore new ways of influencing so that your teams and organisations thrive.
Wednesday 21st September
Enabling High Performance - How meeting 'core needs' has a powerful impact on individual and organisational success
Novotel Tower Bridge, London
Leaders who depend solely on their organisation’s Performance Management structure and processes, are finding that it is not enough to deliver high performance.
Most managers have a desire to motivate and engage their people to generate a sense of fulfillment and desire to do more. So in a time when resources are limited, what can they do?
Moving a manager’s focus towards having insightful dialogue with their staff is key. The ‘Human Givens Scale’ is the latest tool that combines psychological research with a pragmatic approach to help focus that dialogue, and enable the release of greater potential.
During the Forum you will discover how this simple yet powerful approach, will enable you and your managers and leaders to:
- Understand this latest theory on our ‘Human Givens’, hearing and sharing thoughts with other leaders in HR and Leadership.
- Identify the previously hidden reasons why individuals may have been unable to increase their performance.
- Explore pragmatic ways to generate a sense of fulfillment and have authentic dialogue that impacts performance.
Wednesday 6th July
Igniting Change - Using the Power of ther Rumour Mill
MaST Offices, Maidenhead
Have you ever thought of using the “rumour mill and gossip channels” as a tool for creating change?
If you don’t tell people what is going on, rumour will fill the gap… so how can you capitalize on these informal conversations and use them to positive effect? Recent research on Viral Change shows that using the rumour mill can be a more effective tool than traditional top down methods.
The forum will raise questions such as:
- Which key behaviours would you like people to improve that could be influenced through casual conversation?
- What tactics do you need to change in order to make sure that the rumour mill works in line with your strategy?
- Who are your organisation’s key influencers? Remember these are people at all levels and roles, from receptionist to Board Member.
- How do you choose the right language and right channels to give your message maximum impact on the rumour mill?
- How do you reinforce positive rumours rather than negative gossip?
Wednesday 18th May
Are your leaders giving values the respect they deserve?
Novotel Tower Bridge, London
Many of the world’s most profitable organisations owe their success to their values being an integral part of their DNA.
Yet how can we expect staff to take values seriously unless they see and hear them being demonstrated by their managers and leaders in daily interactions and decisions?
Join us to share your challenges and:
- Debate the importance of getting values heard, and leaders giving them respect
- Discuss how to encourage leaders to role model personal and organisational values
- Understand the connection between personal values and organisational values
- Understand how managers and leaders can choose values that will best serve themselves, their teams and the organisation.
- See how values can contribute to personal development
During this forum you will also experience how interactive Theatre and cutting edge digital media can both bring values to life in the workplace, and communicate a clear message throughout the organisation.
Wednesday 16th February and March 22nd March
Making the Transition to Leadership - Breaking the Chains that Can Hold You Back
For companies to succeed in the future, it is vital that their managers make the transition to become real leaders of the business….
Are your key managers:
Creating a culture that enables delivery of the organisational strategy?
- Engaging their people, and helping them find meaning in their work?
- Articulating a clear vision and purpose for the future?
- Maintaining high quality relationships during difficult conversations?
- Courageous, resilient and compassionate when the going gets tough?
If not . . . join us and other senior business leaders to explore:
- Innovative approaches that can help managers to 'break the chains' that are holding back their leadership potential
- The realities of the transition to leadership –understanding why it is so difficult, and what it really takes
Past Forums 2010
Igniting Change - Using the Power of the 'Rumour Mill'
Managing Performance in Difficult Times - Seizing the Opportunity
Expanding Influencing Potential - From Conventional to Great
Transforming Organisations Through Leadership
Leadership Evolution: Innovating for the 21st Century
The Value of Values in Turbulent Times
Igniting Change - Using the Power of the 'Rumour Mill'
‘Infecting’ your Organisation with positive change, using naturally occurring communication processes to achieve your objectives.
It is faster and more pervasive, and shares the ownership of your change initiative. It helps your leaders by giving them a different and less traditional role in leading change. It focuses on a few vital principles and roles, thereby simplifying the process:
- Select a few key behaviours
- Use your organisation's key influencers
- Select the language that maximises clarity and has unequivocal meaning in your organisation
- Design structures and processes that support, reinforce, and reward these few key behaviours
Managing Performance in Difficult Times - Seizing the Opportunity
- What does great management of performance look and feel like?
- Is it just a bureaucratic system that is a paper exercise?
- Are we being honest with our people?
- Do we deliver difficult messages?
- How do we manage performance to drive our business out of recession?
Why does it matter?
It can be tempting to see performance management as an unnecessary formality when change is happening and workload is increasing, instead of seeing it as a tool to help engage employees and drive high performance.
Are managers using performance management meetings as a way to stregthen the psychological contract and validate the ongoing relationship...or are they just a tick box exercise?
Expanding Influencing Potential - From Conventional to Great
Have a voice and be heard
David Cooperrider believes that each of us has the need to:
- Have a voice and be heard
- Be viewed as essential to a group
- Be seen as unique and exceptional
We believe that these three universal human needs are at the heart of great influencing.
Why does it matter?
Whether you are a leader, HR Director, L&D Specialist or an employee, influencing is vital. So much is left unsaid, so many great ideas are lost, and we can become frustrated or cynical.
How can we create a culture where we all can have a voice and be heard?
From conventional to great
Conventional influencing can often be described as a battle of messages, ideas and opinions ping-ponging back and forth.
Great influencing is a different dance: it is the art of true dialogue, communicating for shared understanding and creating the context for a learning conversation.
We will offer you the opportunity to experience the core behaviours and mindsets that make this possible.
Transforming Organisations Through Leadership
What does transforming organisations mean?
MaST can help you to shift, gently nudge, or move you to your next stage of individual, team or organisational mastery and agility. This Forum will provide you with profound, innovative and insightful frameworks that will help you to build a fresh understanding of organisational transformation. You will gain a deeper understanding of how to help your organisation deliver its strategy, engage your people and adapt to emerging opportunities. We will invite you to think with each other and to share different perspectives.
Why through leadership?
We will explore the central role of leadership within any transformation work. We will bring to life our innovative leadership framework which integrates management and leadership and clarifies the role of leadership in value creation.
We will highlight key dimensions of leadership culture and the dynamic interaction between the drive to accelerate change and hold ourselves back at the same time. We will demonstrate how MaST can help you and your leaders increase personal and organisational impact.
We are very proud to be working closely with Frances Cooper, who some of you may have met last year. Frances has offered to share her experiences of transforming organisations through leadership and the value of working in partnership, both internally and externally, to achieve this.
Leadership Evolution: Innovating for the 21st Century
The way that we manage and lead many organisations is often based on a set of principles and unquestioned assumptions that are now over 90 years old. . .
Increasingly in this market, we are faced with a set of challenges that might require us to reconsider our set of assumptions in order to be successful.
This business forum will introduce you to Leadership Innovation as a means for getting the most out of your resources and gaining competitive advantage.
Whether you work in the private or public sector, this forum will provide you with the opportunity for discussion and debate that will help you assess what effective leadership will look like in your organisation in the future. There will also be practical ideas that you will be able to take away and apply both in short and long term planning.
Organisations that have experienced Leadership Innovation have succeeded in:
- Releasing talent, innovation and creativity within the whole organisation
- Allowing leaders to emerge rather than be appointed
- Creating an environment of trust not fear
- Allowing new ideas to surpass the status quo
- Providing new rewards systems that reflect quality of life, not just pay
How do your leaders need to change to achieve better results in 2010 and beyond?
The Value of Values in Turbulent Times
- Are the Values optional in your organisation when times are tough?
- What real difference could your organisation’s values make in 2010?
- Do your organisation’s values align with your leadership development? How could this help to transform your organisation’s performance?
- How well are your values communicated and demonstrated in alignment with your Performance Management system?
Are values fair-weather friends or are they life-savers in a storm?
What happens to those Organisational Values we carefully constructed in the good times, before the economic difficulties? Do they become optional? Do we just put them in moth balls at the bottom of our desk ‘until things get better again?
At MaST we believe that the true worth of Values should be seen in tough times as well as good.
Using MaST’s engaging and innovative Theatre and Film expertise as well as our diverse range of experience of individual and organisational transformation, we will create a stimulating and challenging environment in which you will be able to:
- Share best practice,
- Meet other professionals going through similar dilemmas to your own,
- Test your organisation’s values against various scenarios and,
- Learn how leadership development is intimately linked with organisational transformation and values alignment.
