Leadership Development
Mary Anna’s focus helps managers step up and become inspirational leaders. Working together she can you develop a leadership style that is congruent and gives your teams autonomy. This approach will free you up, you can stop playing the expert that has to do it all. You will enable your teams’ development so they can take responsibility and manage themselves, allowing you to focus on becoming a catalyst for change.
Mary Anna employs a set of powerful techniques to help you be at your best, helping you understand your impact and circumstances better. Coaching conversations focus on what you find important, she will help you understand how you can be most effective, challenge your limiting beliefs and realise your full potential.
Specialities:
Leadership development – helping managers adopt an authentic style that moves them from expert to catalyst.
Communicating with impact – supporting staff engagement, increasing influence and promoting organisational change.
Developing personal resilience – using a variety of techniques to manage stress and address life work balance issues.
Equine facilitated coaching – working with horses to help you realise a leadership style that is congruent and authentic.
Special programmes for communications specialists
Moving from a management role into a leadership one can prove challenging. For expert managers, becoming a visionary leader involves embodying a new set of skills and a level of trust to allow others to take over their old, familiar, functions.
When the manager has been a working in a communications role, these challenges can be compounded. Communications functions can be reactive in nature. With 24-hour media expecting prompt responses, keeping future focussed and strategic can be difficult. Communications managers are typically highly skilled – the nuance of messaging for an organisation can take a while to refine. Mistakes can be public and highly damaging. It’s no wonder many communications managers find delegating a challenge.
Mary Anna has a wealth of experience across sectors and fully understands the expectations on you as a comms leader. Coaching is a powerful development tool to help you embrace leadership effectively. I really enjoy working with low budget teams in the public or voluntary sector. I have some flexible ways of working that make quality coaching more affordable.
Steps into leadership programme
A six month programme for small groups to support communications professionals as they move into management and leadership roles. Each cohort, maximum eight people, will meet virtually each month for a 90 minute facilitated discussion.
The programme will start with a session to set the group up for success. The group will agree ways of working together, clarify expectations and plan outcomes. Over the six month programme the group will then be encouraged to grow its own team entity that will then support members far beyond the end of the official programme.
The sessions will be co-created by participants and the coach. If one member of the group has a particular need in one month, for example, the session may focus on that. Participants will be encouraged to bring their wisdom and experience to the group and through this action learning format the leaders will learn how to design their own solutions.
Expected outcomes:
- Improved confidence in ability to lead
- Tools and strategies for success – tailored to individual needs
- Growth in ability to self-coach
- Becoming part of a supportive network of colleagues from different organisations, sharing similar challenges and learning together.
Key themes:
A voice at the top table
• Ensuring communications considerations are taken seriously at director level
• Influencing upwards
• Getting communications included in project planning processes and risk assessments
Planning for the unplanned
• Emergencies and crises in any part of an organisation typically have a heavy impact on the communications team
• What should be in your marketing store cupboard?
• Communications in a crisis
• Riding on the wave of someone else’s news
Aligning the organisation
• Helping others write and speak on message
• How an understanding of nuance might make delegating easier
• Questioning and refining key messages
Showing your worth
• What KPIs are suitable for your work?
• How can you value achievements beyond traditional measures like column inches?
• If everyone believes they are a PR expert, why employ a professional?
Back to the future
• Changing focus from reactive work to a forward thinking, proactive one
• Systems that might ease this process
• Setting boundaries to prevent interruptions
• How to catalogue the institutional memory