Being A Likeable Boss: Course Introduction

Developing good rapport with your employees can take you far!

A likeable boss is not necessarily someone you would invite to the team braai. That person, however, is liked by you and your team because they are respected. A boss can have nothing going for them personality wise, but if they treat their employees with respect, truthfulness and are willing to adhere to the same standards and ethics they require from employees, they can’t really go wrong. They might still not be invited to the braai though. With our course we aim to improve good qualities participants already have, like leadership and help them improve their interpersonal skills.

Being A Likeable Boss: Course Outline

It is important to every company for their managerial level employees to develop better managerial skills. This workshop is intended for managers and prospective or potential managers and can be completed separately or together with the workshops on Appreciative Inquiry and Assertiveness and self confidence.

We aim to give a fully rounded course in managerial skills in this workshop. Possibly the most important key to being a likeable boss is being a boss employees know they can trust, both with company issues or co-worker issues or even personal and emotional issues.

A boss who has no empathy isn’t a very likable boss. In this workshop we will teach students how to gain the trust of their employees and thereby their respect. But trust is a two-way street, trust like respect does not come automatically with the job, it must be earned. We will help participants to develop leadership qualities and teach them how to delegate instead of micro-manage. We also teach participants to identify skills in each member of the team so that the person best suited for a particular job, is doing that job.

Developing a team is such an important managerial skill that we spend two modules identifying the skills and strengths of each team member as well as identifying the roles that each member of the team plays.

TIP: Dr. Meredith R. Belbin describes in her 2012 book: Team Roles At Work, nine team roles that can make up a balanced and effective team.

Some of the other skills taught in this workshop are goal setting and how to get your team to buy into that goal. We also help managers identify their core values and their company’s core values and assist potential manager in setting up a mission statement for themselves and those they lead. We spend a module looking in depth at the pentad, which is used in journalism and how it can be changed to suit the business market.

Most questions and obstacles in business can be answered by the pentad method. The workshop also spends time on the emotional aspect of the boss and his or her team, identifying the modes of behaviour and roles team members play, we include a module on meditation because a clear mind is needed for a clear focus. At this point participants will know how to manage others effectively and productively so we round off our workshop by focusing on the boss.