If, as a manager, you also suddenly have HR responsibilities on your plate, it can feel like jumping into the deep end without a swimming certificate. Because without experience, how are you going to manage employees, do onboarding and conduct development interviews? And then things like intervening when things aren't going well, coaching employees and managing absenteeism come into play. Good leadership is not something you just do on top of everything else. So what do you do? You hire VIE People to help you with leadership development.
At the company Hizkia, we set to work on these specific issues. Hizkia serves museums and private collectors worldwide in the field of logistics, art transport and collection management. They do not only have offices in the Netherlands, but throughout Europe.
Good leadership is not something you learn in one afternoon. Not only is it important to have knowledge of HR topics, you also need to learn more about yourself. Who are you as a manager? What skills do you have and what do you apply at what stage? That's why we scheduled five 3.5-hour workshops that focused on the various topics related to leadership development.
Learning practical skills
We started with sharing information and knowledge about leadership. These were question-based knowledge sessions in which we found it especially important to answer everything the executives wanted to know.
But of course, you learn to be a leader mainly by doing. Therefore, we practiced conversations with each other and with an actor. All kinds of situations, which you also encounter on the real work floor, passed by in the role plays. These were often the roles that show challenging behaviour. For example, very dominant or very quiet and timid.
While practising these practical skills, the peer effect in the group was especially valuable. The group found out that they were facing the same obstacles. Thanks to the shared knowledge and wisdom, there was a lot of room to practice and learn new skills.
As People Partners, we are always also present on our clients' shop floors. Also at Hizkia. This allowed us to see very precisely where the leadership development was and to tailor the content of the trainings. And even after the trainings we remained present, which allowed us to apply a kind of on-the-job coaching. The knowledge and experiences from the workshops were thus even better put into practice. For example, was a meeting with an employee scheduled? Then there was always the possibility that we could give some tips and tricks in preparation for the interview.
Leadership development begins with leading yourself
In two months' time, we helped the managers at Hizkia develop leadership skills. At first, the team did not have much experience and knowledge in the field of HR, but after a few weeks they had enough competences to be able to put what they had learned into practice with confidence. It was very valuable for them to see that colleagues also sometimes struggle with the role of manager. Yet it turned out that there was a lot of collective knowledge in house. By sharing this knowledge, some challenges were also tackled jointly.
In leadership training like the one we gave to Hezekiah, it is important to first learn more about yourself. What is your personality and what type of leader are you? After all, leading others starts with leading yourself. That also means that you will have to learn a lot about yourself. And that can sometimes also mean that you will become consciously competent, but also that you might already be able to do things that you were not aware of. And of course, those are very valuable lessons to learn.
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