Next-Level Leadership: Upgrading Skills for New Managers of Managers
Becoming a manager of managers is a key step in the evolution of a leader. This training offers the essential tools to meet this challenge. As a manager of managers, you play a central role in aligning organizational goals, coordinating teams, and building a culture.
Through practical learning focused on realities on the ground, this training will enable you to master the subtleties of managing managers, to strengthen their autonomy while supporting them effectively.
Topics covered
At ClavaConsulting, each training is unique. It consists of a combination of the following themes, depending on the client's needs.
Find your way around the different levels of management: from 1st level manager to manager of managers. Build your legitimacy. Navigating personal sacrifices. Become familiar with the posture. Identify your limiting beliefs about the position: reproduce the same leadership style, fear of not being up to the task... Move from a prescribed role to an author role.
Manage your managers. Define a vision. Determine the desired effect on managers: clarity and understanding. Communicate your vision. Break down the vision into a strategy, pass the baton for operational actions. Organize reports, ask the right questions.
Build a team of managers or settle for a group? Design a leadership space to exchange safely. Develop the maturity of your team of managers through coaching and mentoring. Using a Performance/Skills matrix as a diagnostic tool guiding development actions. Conducting conversations with underperforming or high-potential managers. Learning patience: from “Doing the work” to “Guiding the work” and “Guiding the management”.
Role model: without pressure, with its imperfections. Be aware of its “weight” and its speech everywhere, all the time. Leave space. Recognize the different styles of its managers. Adapt its management to each of them. Developing development plans for its managers. Identifying its successor.
Reasoning on several levels: vision, mission, strategy, tactics, objectives. Aligning the corporate strategy with the objectives of the teams: connecting the dots. Concrete examples of successful leadership chains in organizations. Analysis of a scenario of misaligned strategy and proposal of corrective actions.
Decision-making: the different types of decision, the decision-making scopes, the different roles in the decision. Advanced delegation and empowerment strategies.
Agree to play politics: manage your N+1 and N+2. Engage your peers. Know your managers' teams (N-2): what behavior to have? Get your messages across (same message, different channels, form and timeframes). Develop influence tactics. Put your own hierarchy at a distance: establish cooperative relationships with your boss.
Confront complexity. Manage conflicts, interfunctional tensions and the challenges that complexity induces. Position yourself as an arbitrator or mediator. Simplify? It's changing complexity! Hybrid teams don't help. Avoid the pitfalls of complexity.
Change your perspective on change. Support managers, on the front line in organizational changes... without short-circuiting them.
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Pedagogy
Active learning: group discussions, role plays and simulations to engage participants in problem solving.
Experiential learning: real-life case studies and scenario-based exercises to replicate practical challenges.
Collaborative learning: encouraging peer exchange and feedback for shared ideas.
Reflection: individual and group reflections to internalize learning outcomes.
Option: contribution of experts, internal witnesses.
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Targeted skills
Strategic alignment: ability to translate organizational goals into achievable priorities for teams.
Coaching: Guiding managers to develop their leadership and decision-making skills.
Advanced communication: influencing, negotiating upwards and between departments.
Conflict Resolution: Effectively manage interpersonal and interdepartmental conflicts.
Change Leadership: Driving change initiatives by and with management teams.
Decision Facilitation: Empowering managers to make informed and independent decisions.
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Possible formats
Given the audience, face-to-face training is highly recommended: it offers the possibility of more in-depth interaction and even networking opportunities.
The optimal duration is 3 days. It can be reduced to 2 days by selecting the themes to work on.
The format is modular:
- the training is divided into shorter modules spread over several weeks. This offers flexibility to busy managers while allowing time to apply the concepts learned between modules.
Further reading.
We do not manage with financial indicators, but with strategic orientations. Read .
The leader, man or woman, providential? Read .
Putting managers at the heart of the strategy to put them back at the heart of the action. Read .
From control to mastery: a managerial journey. Read