ExtraOrdinary gains extraordinary success
The recently developed self leadership programme has been greeted with some extraordinary success. Through one of our learning partners we provided assistance at a conference for the contract catering company, Charlton House. Over 200 chefs and managers gathered at Beaumont House near Runnymede on a sunny Saturday, to celebrate their previous 12 months and to refocus for the future. Despite the challenging environment they have had a succesful year, but as Tim Jones, the Company Chairman reminded everyone, these are now different times needing different approaches. We were approached through the client manager, Leapfrog International, to act as MC throughout the conference and to run a two and a half hour personal development session for the 230 delegates. The result was quite fantastic with a unanimous positive response to the powerful messages delivered. The energy in the room was amazing and all delegates committed to three very clearly defined actions to take away from the conference.
This was the first time that ExtraOrdinary has been rolled out to an audience and as Keith Stanton, our Managing Partner said afterwards, it will certainly not be the last. “It is without doubt a programme for the times. If a company is looking to develop engagement, personal leadership, the taking of responsibility and innovation within their staff, then this programme must be considered.”
Employee Engagement: The Challenge of Today
Employee engagement is something we hear a lot of at the moment from Human Resources directors. Companies are continually looking for ways to engage their employees and to achieve higher scores in employee satisfaction surveys.
At Votive Leadership we believe that engagement is part of each of us learning how to Self-Lead. Self-leadership is something that we believe is a key element of a happy and successful work life and yet is a topic that is rarely taught. From our experience of working in many different organisations, in different sectors, we find many unhappy, disgruntled, disengaged, disenfranchised employees. These tend to be those who are not yet in leadership positions – the “followers” in an organisation; those who are carrying out immensely valuable pieces of work for their organisation.
During October and November 2007, we ran a series of self-leadership programmes for the operations/clerical function of a FTSE top 100 financial institution. Up to 15 people per time were invited to a 3-hour session and overall we worked with around 200 people. Comments that we heard at the start of each of these sessions are typical of those we hear in many organisations:
“We’re just a number these days”
“Management only care about costs”
“It never used to be like this”
“We’re understaffed”
