Duration: 1.5 hours

Multiple studies confirm that most managerial mistakes occur on the lower level of management. This is no coincidence. To keep growing as a manager and proceed to a higher level of responsibility, you have to learn to delegate what you did at the previous level.

How can you delegate what you do better than anyone else on the team? What and how can you delegate without feeling ashamed of the result or regretting not doing it yourself?

The workshop addresses these questions and presents the delegation process and its common mistakes as straightforward schemes and tools:

‣ The Snowflake Man, or four biggest delegation mistakes

‣ Typical pains of non-delegating specialist aspiring to be a manager

‣ Task transfer triangle

‣ Seven delegation levels

‣ Seven-step delegation algorithm and common mistakes

‣ Five control types

‣ Delegation traps: how responsibility for a task bounces back to the manager

Duration: 3 hours

Many managers and HR specialists have come to realize that all employees would benefit from honing their soft skills — that is, skills unrelated to their technical expertise. Most employees, especially engineers, aren’t always enthusiastic about it 🙂 but there’s a logic to it. Today’s business reality implies frequent and intensive communication with local and foreign colleagues, the management, and clients, which results in a constellation of challenging communication issues and tasks anyone would struggle to handle. The experience is not always painless and optimal.

People don’t do what you expect the way you expect them to or when they are supposed to. They have their own understanding of tasks, show little regard for deadlines, act confused when everything has been made 100% clear, and so on.

At the workshop, you will see how the vague concept of “soft skills” can be formalized into clear systems and schemes that A. work and B. can be easily reproduced when you need to explain them to your colleagues. The workshop is based on the constructive confrontation scheme suggested by Andrew Grove, a co-founder of Intel, and considerably enhanced.

The workshop covers:

‣ Four reasons why people don’t do something

‣ Four constructive communication principles

‣ Timeliness: attacking the past and living in “hero mode”

‣ Four-phase algorithm for solving people problems

‣ Two-step approach to preparing arguments for discussion

‣ Discussion tactics: handling a deadlocked conversation

‣ Point of agreement on an issue as a transition towards a solution

‣ Solution registration options

‣ Solution sustainability testing methods

‣ Real-world use cases for the constructive confrontation algorithm

Real-world cases to be analyzed at the workshop:

1. Selling a feat.

2. Boosting a low-performer.

3. A client ignoring the new reporting system.

4. An employee coming late to morning briefings.

5. A tech leader verbally abusing a female employee.

6. What principles of constructiveness have been violated?” (smoking room situation)

7. “What principles of constructiveness have been violated?” (correspondence with a member of the adjacent team)

8. “What principles of constructiveness have been violated?” (an employee of yours writes to her peer)

9. “What principles of constructiveness have been violated?” (two managers in a meeting)

Duration: 1.5–2 hours

As Alistair Cockburn, one of the agile movement initiators, justly pointed out, people are “non-linear first-order components in software development.” They get passionate, then burn out. They show great enthusiasm and then change jobs.

However, even working with non-linear employees, managers have to deliver predictable, agreed-upon results to the customer. Importantly, one’s state of mind changes over time. Many managers hope that nothing bad will happen and that they’ll figure a way out if it does. But hope is a poor management plan.

Our workshop offers efficient, hands-on tools for monitoring your team members’ status and discussing their professional goals without coming off like: “Oh, our manager’s taken another course, just let him play with his new toys for a day or two…”

The workshop covers:

‣ People’s non-linear nature: Hoping it’ll work out vs. Taking things under control

‣ Assessing your own and your employee’s state: the Interest-Competency Matrix

‣ The $10,000 Motivational Factor Test

‣ When it’s time to do something about an employee’s state of mind

‣ Five questions for discussing work goals

‣ The specifics of introducing people tools: three scales people use to assess their superior’s actions

‣ One-on-one meetings: the tool’s three primary objectives

Duration: 1.5–2 hours

As Tom DeMarco, a leading project management expert, once remarked, major issues of software development are human, not technical. In other words, whenever there’s more than one engineer, they are bound to face interpersonal challenges.

Our workshop analyzes several team-building concepts that explain what happens to a team in every life-cycle phase and suggest simple guidelines to team leaders: how they can propel their teams to the highest possible performance as fast as possible.

The workshop covers:

‣ Social consequences of organizational changes in the team (introduction or dismissal of an employee, a newly-appointed manager, etc.)

‣ Team members’ questions, expectations, and concerns related to organizational shifts

‣ Nine universal tips to ease your transition into management

‣ Berne’s group model

‣ Tuckman’s team dynamics model

‣ Orlov—Pankratov model

‣ Litvak’s model

‣ Team leader’s actions at each stage of team development

Coach: Alex Orlov

Duration: 1.5–2 hours

For the last 12 years, I have been exploring management tools — the all-too-common two-by-two matrices that make any team leader’s or manager’s life easier. In many people’s experience, they can be really efficient 🙂

By contrast, being an engineer, I treated things like mindfulness, coaching, and related techniques with considerable skepticism. However, when I took a one-year sabbatical and spent it trying to reimagine my entire approach to work, my skepticism somewhat faded, especially after I saw how efficient those tools could be.

And so, in the three years that followed, I took several courses in classic coaching and the Gestalt approach, participated in multiple training groups, had over 250 hours of individual practice, and considerably revised our company’s management style.

The workshop covers:

I’d like to offer eight coaching tools any manager could use:

‣ Lack of judgment

‣ Phenomenology

‣ Coaching arc

‣ The need for words

‣ Karpman drama triangle + process

‣ Whose energy drives the process

‣ Wheel of balance

‣ Owning your experience

Duration: 1.5 hours

Analysis of cases proposed by workshop participants

The process can be organized as follows:

— Meet & greet
— Gathering expectations and cases. Setting priorities and clarifying the situations
— Workshop on one of three proposed topics
— Analyzing participants’ cases with the use/demonstration of management tools:

1. Four reasons why people don’t do something

2. Four constructiveness principles

3. Four-phase algorithm for solving people problems

4. Eighteen questions for management case analysis

5. Seven delegation levels in task setting and five control types

6. Interest-Competency Matrix

7. Five questions to discuss work goals

8. Trust-Transparency Matrix

9. Mindfulness-Competency Matrix

10. Power-Interest Matrix

11. Personality typologies: DISC, Ichak Adizes

12. Team dynamics models: Berne, Tuckman, Litvak, Orlov — Pankratov

12. Nine universal tips to ease your transition into management

13. Solution sustainability testing methods

— Experience processing and final remarks