Our curriculum is designed to support technical "hard science" leaders with both time-tested and innovative "soft science" leadership skills, tools and methodologies.
The modularity of the Villard Group's curriculum allows our clients to use our on-site and online courses in creative ways. They can be combined to plug a gap with one course or to solve broad organizational needs with a mini curriculum. They can also be blended with online delivery supported by instructor coaching. Our courses combine three elements:
• talent and aptitude assessment
• skill building and coaching
• integration of client's current initiatives
The curriculum addresses our clients' needs in three areas:
• Leadership Development
• Team Development
• Customer Development
Leadership Development
Transitioning to Leadership (on-site or online)
In most organizations the transition from strong individual contributor to leadership is short. New managers and technical leaders are expected to adjust immediately. However, they often find their current skills are mismatched and actually work against them in their new or prospective roles. In Transitions or vTransitions these challenges are surfaced, aptitudes assessed, skills taught, feedback given and personal decisions made about important career choices. The impact is greatly enhanced by the active participation of a respected senior technical leader who speaks informally and candidly about critical leadership incidents and career issues from a personal perspective.
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Coaching and Empowerment (on-site)
In today's resource-scarce environment, technical leaders must get maximum effort from everyone. They must be able to get introspection, ownership and follow through from three groups: subordinates, peers and bosses. They must be able to give feedback to subordinates, influence peers and safely provide suggestions to bosses. Effective coaching almost always involves delivering bad news and negative feedback. Most technical managers hate doing performance management. Most have "one" approach they use with everyone. One approach doesn't work with everyone. Closely aligned with coaching is empowerment. But, it too, isn't for everyone. A practical approach to empowerment involves determining whom it's appropriate for, how to implement it and how to increase employee engagement with it.
Retaining Top Talent (on-site)
At any moment over a quarter of your talent pool is intending to leave your company. An equal number are considering it. Most technical managers "never see it coming" and are stunned and hurt when it happens. Just as the economy begins to come back and opportunities open up is not the time to lose your top performers, high potentials and mission-critical people. Retaining Top Talent is designed to help you head off unanticipated, unnecessary and costly attrition. It focuses on the underlying causes of top talent disengagement, its symptoms and the factors that push employees over the edge. It also helps you identify who might be at risk, how to talk them back from the "brink" and how to put best practices in place to provide a safety net. Retaining Top Talent is not an HR responsibility. It is a leadership priority and challenge for every manager in the technical community.
Team Development
Launching & Leading Virtual Teams (LLVT) (online)
Many technical and business leaders are trying to lead this century's virtual teams with last century's methods and bad habits. Most don't know what's possible. Virtual teams are now the norm. They allow organizations to engage their best talent without geographical restriction. It means working across boundaries, time zones, languages, systems and cultures. Virtual teams require a different kind of leadership and a different kind of toolkit. Leading a virtual team is infinitely more difficult than leading a co-located team. It's not intuitive or common sense. Your shortcomings as a leader get magnified when you try to lead a virtual team.
Advances in technology provide connectivity. What happens after everyone is connected is up to you … the leader. LLVT is not about having a chat. It's about real work sessions that produce deliverables and decisions that stick. LLVT is designed to take the guesswork out of leading virtual teams. It scripts your first three meetings so you get started right. It teaches 15 of the most powerful tools designed to get you the tangible outcomes you need. When you learn to lead virtual teams with our tools and methods, you can confidently and successfully lead any team, for any purpose, from anywhere in the world.
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Team Triage: T² (on-site)
Team Triage is for teams that are struggling. It is for project or product teams that are behind schedule and challenged by quality issues. It is for teams that have quit communicating and given up on collaboration and caring about the needs of other groups. It is for teams that have become self-protective, started finger-pointing and are almost solely focused on individual accountabilities. T² is for teams that have put corporate goals and, unintentionally, their own management at risk.
T² focuses on where a team is and where it needs to be. It works a tailored agenda of the "unfinished tasks" that are holding them up. It surfaces both the known and the unknown blocks that have stalled them. It realigns the leadership roles and accountabilities of your key players. It produces a 60-120 day plan to meet your deadlines. It is not magic, but it produces outcomes that our clients have called … miracles.
Top Team Tools: T³ (on-site)
On average, technical leaders spend between 40 and 60 percent of their time in meetings. They usually report between 25 and 60 percent as "ineffective," unless, of course, they "are leading" the session. We call it the 50/50 club … 50 percent in meetings … 50 percent effective. Top Team Tools is our contemporary team facilitation lab. It is designed for technical managers, project leaders and team leaders who belong to the 50-50 club and want to resign. It is ideal for technical leaders who need to break "bad habits" after years of "pushing solutions" and being the "content expert."
Although, there are lots of process tools available from the disciplines of project management, TQM and group process theory, no one, until now, had attempted to hand pick and integrate the most useful into a suite of practical "facilitation tools." T³ has done that. T³ is about "what to do with meetings": how to run fewer, run shorter, involve the "right" people, get better input, visit issues only once, make better decisions and build ownership and follow through. It is custom tailored for each client's current challenges with hands-on practice and instructor coaching. T³ is revolutionary.
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Customer Development
Provider of Choice (on-site)
Everyone wants to be the "preferred" vendor. Whether you have only internal customers who "must use" your services and often feel "stuck," or you have external customers who have many choices … everyone wants to be the Provider of Choice. But how does one become and stay the Provider of Choice? Over 90 percent of Engineers and SEs have never been exposed to the science of consulting skills. Yet it is this skill set that sells, designs and implements your products and services. It anchors both you and your customers' businesses. So how does one acquire these skills?
Consulting firms, who are often the competition, teach their people when they come on board. In corporations some learn "piece meal" by working with seasoned engineers or by emulating those deemed successful. To become the Provider of Choice, everyone who interfaces with customers needs to have skills appropriate for their role. But no role is more critical than that of the Engineer or SE. They have a unique level of credibility with customers. Customers listen to them differently. Customers trust them. You keep or lose business based on their customer-facing skills. Provider of Choice gives "your" people that edge.
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Selling Complex & Advanced Technical Solutions (SCATS) (on-site)
We've heard our clients say over the years, "Just let engineers do what engineers do best … good engineers don't sell … they design and test … someone else sells." But then, there are great engineers. Great engineers have learned how to sell. They are usually called chief engineers. Selling skills are often what make them the chief. And it usually has taken 20 plus years.
Whether you are a consulting engineer trying to sell a new product to external customers or an SE attempting to move a new idea with internal clients … selling today's leading edge technologies can be tough and slow. Most engineers are not prepared or trained for the task. They didn't get the skill set as part of their engineering curriculum. The few who have it are self-taught or learned through trial and error. Learning by mistake is expensive.
The most effective engineers are consultative. They are bilingual; they can speak both business and technology. They tailor their presentation to the level of the customer. They build their value proposition with real customer data. They set clear and realistic expectations on outcomes and support. They deliver on both. If you have great innovations and products in the pipeline, but need more chiefs … SCATS.
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Gurus (on-site or online)
For well over two decades we have heard our clients say, "If I just had more people like _____." Gurus was built to answer that cry from the wilderness. Gurus is a revolutionary leadership concept for developing your sales talent. Gurus demystifies how your best sales people, your eagles, have been successful. It culls their "tribal knowledge," the unconscious competencies that often the gurus themselves do not fully understand. It extracts and integrates the best regional and cross-regional sales practices of your top two percent.
It is particularly designed to tease out best practices for products that are complex that have long sales cycles or high cost of sale. Gurus produces and delivers "learning legacies" that can be used just in time, across town or across the globe. It focuses on what "works" in your business, with your products and services, with your people and your customers. We can't clone your gurus, but we can clone their best practices.
Learn more by watching our video >>