Leadership fitness Flashcards
Leadership fitness
Facilitation (distinct from teaching) is a technique used by trainers to help learners acquire, retain, and apply
knowledge and skills. Participants are introduced to content and then ask questions while the trainer fosters the discussion,
takes steps to enhance the application experience for the learners, and gives suggestions.
Course facilitation requires competence. If you’ve attended an Influential U conference, you’ll know that we continue to master the
art. Not only will you see us demonstrate the skill and ability to facilitate courses, but you’ll also see us demonstrate Transactional
Competence while facilitating.
While superior facilitation skills may seem like inherent traits, they can be developed through practice.
For example, while training our Influential U Curriculum Faculty, we offer a rating scale of 1-5 (five being fittest) on each of the
fitness levels below. Over time, practice, and demonstration, those training new faculty offer a fitness rating. This rating helps the
trainee understand their current state, what to develop, and where to get coaching.
In many ways, your inclusion here might acknowledge your fitness to facilitate. That being said, here are five ways we encourage
the development of your fitness to facilitate Influential U courses.
1. Leading—nothing develops fitness like doing. Lead, lead, lead. You’ll mess up, modify, and course-correct.
2. Promoting—when you speak our principles to those who don’t yet understand them, you practice modifying your approaches
to differing listeners.
3. Conferences—our conferences are gymnasiums for practice. Watch us as facilitators, not mere instructors. Take notes.
4. Licensing Summit—the primary point of the summit is to develop your facilitation fitness. Live practice and coaching over
two days.
5. Self-assessment—use the fitness tracking below to rate your fitness as you lead.
How do you rate your fitness?
- The fitness to speak our course principles accurately. This includes speaking them as offered and not adding or blending in
principles from another discourse. - The fitness to attend to the needs of the listener (read the room/hear what is not being said).
- The fitness to validate and modify while delivering; to adjust for what is needed by learners.
- The fitness to show respect and gratitude for the person, the team, and the environment.
- The fitness to speak as Influential U; in our character, our voice, and how we act. Our Character is expressed as follows:
Exclusive earned advancement
Smart, authoritative, studied, factual
Committed straight talk, consequential, rigorous, deliberate
Game afoot, competitive, here to win, fun
Warm/likable, in this together, here to help - The fitness to demonstrate ownership for the course management, fulfillment, and measures.
- The fitness to move as an ambitious adult (for your aims, the aims of learners, and the aims of Influential U).
To reduce your bias, we highly recommend getting others to help assess this. It should be noted that we speak of qualified feedback
in our teachings on deliberate practice. In other words, your fitness should be scored by someone with the fitness to know better.
Facilitator ownership
When I first started facilitating courses, I felt an uncomfortable obligation to ensure that each learner left the course with new
knowledge and ability. In other words, I was on the hook for the course’s promised outcomes (both stated and assumed).
What if they didn’t get it? What if they got bored and checked out? What if I wasted their time and money?
Once I welcomed the accountability, any sense of discomfort was replaced by a true sense of partnership and fulfillment. As
a facilitator, it is my job to welcome the discomfort that comes with being accountable for course outcomes. This includes any
unknown that comes with a new cohort. There will be personalities that are difficult to deal with. There will be situations you
never considered.
There will also be learner outcomes you’ve never dreamed of happening. Some, you’ll remember forever.
CEO John Patterson
Facilitator outcomes
When you facilitate training that leads to remarkable outcomes, it doesn’t get any better.
Individuals who take part in this approach experience personal growth, improved financial stability, and increased
satisfaction.
Organizations that embrace Transactional Competence see accelerated progress, overcome dysfunction, and are quicker to
bring their products to market.
Teams that adopt this approach discover a renewed sense of purpose and enthusiasm as they recognize the value of their
roles in more significant transactions.
Ownership also includes knowing the scope of the course’s contract. Knowing when to assert that a learner request is outside the
scope of the agreement (private coaching requests, a weekly call, unwarranted emails, etc.) goes a long way in training them to
respect the transaction; yours and theirs.
So, how do you begin to own the success of your courses?
Simply said: put yourself on the hook for it.
Learner ownership
However, with Transactional Competence, it’s not a ‘do me’ environment. It’s reciprocal and co-constitutive. How?
Learner Ownership
The beauty of facilitating Transactional Competence is an up-front contract that we “hold up a mirror.” In other words, while
many learners come to general courses with a ‘do me’ attitude, we promise to address the behaviors which are costing an individual,
team, or enterprise its aims. Fundamentally, these are expressed by naive onlookers who are blithely unaware of their participation
in an entire world of reciprocal, co-constitutive transactions. They may not yet consider they’re an aspect of any transaction,
including this one.
We encourage you to begin all Influential U Courses with an up-front understanding that the course will offer behavioral mirroring.
Like any transaction, we must gain permission and acceptance to engage with our learners in mannerly conversations that offer a
mirror. In addition, you can’t assume that asking once is sufficient. Watch us at any conference, and you’ll see us request permission
frequently, especially when the coaching or feedback may be difficult for the learner to hear.
The mirror opportunities include:
Aims and aimlessness—this includes having and knowing aims that have been accurately considered and articulated.
Ambition—this state of mind is often weak or missing and must be elicited (draw forth something that is latent or potential
into existence).
Personality—the biological tendency to show up in transactions to offer values, views, and practices in accordance with one’s
personality.
Behaving Transactionally—moving in exchanges from a transactional approach (rather than self-actional, or inter-actional).
You MUST gain acceptance for this in every situation where you lead an Influential U Course. This is a continuous up-front contract
to offer a mirror.
Without it, you’ll be leading to entitlement.
Course Management overview
Course Management is managing:
1. Administrative aspects
2. Managing action for outcomes
3. Producing moods and attitudes
4. Reports and measures
Administrative aspects
Course administration begins early. You first produce the environment required for a course - starting with a definition of your
targetted learners. We’ll address this in our 16-Week Academy Training.
Next, aim at an object: the course, date, time, location, cost, and description of a course. Then, you’ll need the means to track
learner registration, attendance, testing, feedback, and more. Setting this up early begins to elicit novel thinking on strategies you
might deeply early—including welcome emails, orientations, and more.
During course facilitation, we recommend keeping a dashboard for at-a-glance tracking.
Managing action for outcomes
There are many outcomes you manage the action for during course facilitation.
1. Learners gain the stated outcomes of the course
2. Learners participate as obligated (where that is the case)
3. Learners hear/respond to opportunities for upsells and add ons
Numbers 1 and 2 above are about paying attention to what is happening “over there” with your learners. It also involves reminding
learners of their obligations and agreements.
As for number 3, we manage the action for outcomes in almost every course, conference, or summit. As we teach it, we want to
build recurrent transactions (vs. start and stop, start and stop). As such, each course fills the next course, and so on and so on.
The Courses in the Courses Catalog are not only designed to dangle the opportunities of the next course, but they also offer the
direct opportunity to register for future courses while leading.
This strategy saves countless hours doing the thing most Facilitators seek to avoid: filling courses. Mastering this goes a long way
toward expanding your growth.
Producing moods and outcomes
You have likely been on the other end of someone who elevates your mood. As social primates, we tend to mimic the moods of
others and, as such, can produce moods appropriate for transaction.
Producing a mood is most commonly rejected by rigid thinkers who are naïve to marketplace indifference. To transact powerfully,
you must produce moods to gain compliance.
We see people commonly reject practices that attempt to alter mood in the same way they tend to reject the use of levers of
influence. They relate these moves and practices as “cheap parlor tricks” or sales tactics. This is a mistake. They often haven’t
considered that producing moods appropriate for their transactions doesn’t always mean that they should produce highly positive
moods. On the contrary, moods of agitation, respect, and caution are highly effective and often required to interrupt the indifference of the marketplace. There are appropriate moods to produce that ensure the effectiveness of your transactions and increase their
speed and efficiency.
Appropriate moods are not always positive moods, and keep in mind that, in many cases, positive moods are inappropriate moods
for transacting. At the same time, highly positive moods are not to be avoided, for those who do not practice and respect enthusiasm
and moods of optimism, wonder, and good humor can just as easily repel others or, perhaps worse, produce indifference.
For more on this topic, explore the Personality Characteristics chart and the attributes Appropriate Moods or Mood in Breakdown.
Managing your mood and attending to the learner’s mood will offer leverage in leading successfully.
Reports and measures
Measure is the exchange in the transaction that follows Fulfill. It is the gathering of the tracked and relevant results of labor, work,
play, and action. In our curriculum, we gather and report session attendance, feedback, and comments. When we complete a
course, we gather and report the overall measures we established to monitor the success of this course.
Depending on your situation, these might include attendance, feedback, outcomes achieved, and future course registration. In fact,
at Influential U, our curriculum has established measures to meet for a program to be considered a business success.
