Relationship-Based Leadership (RBL) Development Program

The Relationship-Based Leadership (RBL) development program was designed based on this premise and to empower your leaders to:

Drive your values daily, &
Develop your employees towards your company’s vision and goals.

Your Challenges:

The 2 key challenges that most of our clients have shared with us in the past 15 years are as follows:

“Our leaders excel in their fields of expertise but not in developing people or building rapport with them.”
“We invested heavily in our core values and code of conduct, but our leaders are not applying them.”

In other words, companies invest in the development of their employees and core values or culture-related services but see no results in the day-to-day activities of their teams. Why?

Root Cause of the Challenge:

We believe leaders are too involved in their day-to-day tasks and activities that they can’t find time for the development of their people and the application of the organization’s core values and culture, despite the formal training they might have attended.

Our Approach:

Developing subordinates, applying core values to build organizational culture, and keeping the core values in mind at all times are not separate skills. Imagine this situation: You are learning to play the guitar, then you learn how to sing, while your manager asks you to keep a smile on while performing. Alternatively, you can practice doing all 3—playing the guitar, singing and smiling—at the same time right from the start. This is our unique approach to Relationship-Based Leadership.

As far as we are concerned, there is no other training program that simultaneously focuses on:

Familiarizing leaders with brain-based concepts of leadership and people development
Incorporating a company’s core values into the skills that leaders use daily, such as

Providing critical but constructive feedback to employees
Delegating with the delegate’s growth in mind
Coaching,
Storytelling, &
Team and individual decision-making
Empowering leaders to
Translate your company’s corporate strategy into their team’s activities and
To understand strategy as an approach to win, and not a plan to follow or a set of targets to meet.

In addition to being the only leadership development plan with such an approach, this development program delivers more than the sum of its parts. This program is based on 16 years of continuous research in neuroscience and leadership, training and coaching of over 1,000 leaders of multinational corporations and local companies on 3 continents, practicing leadership skills and techniques with various teams (remote & in-person), and building on feedback and criticisms of clients, students, colleagues and employees.

What You Get:

Experience shows that leaders undergo tangible changes in how they understand “learning” as they find out about the different ways the brain takes in information. While this change helps leaders and their employees to enjoy their work more, participants of this program will find it easier to apply your company’s core values daily, simply because the application of core values has been incorporated in feedback, delegation, coaching and decision making models that they will learn in this program. As such, the following results are expected:

Higher retention as a result of improved relationships between leaders and subordinates as well as a sense of self-actualization felt by employees who have learned new leadership skills
A more pleasant environment as leaders will learn to create “Fun as Work” instead of just “Fun at Work”
Easier decision-making on the part of leaders, and more independent decision-making on the part of employees as a result of the establishment of core values as a compass for decision-making
More encouraged subordinates and the establishment of the culture of storytelling as an effective leadership skill.

/All of the above will result in higher financial and lower employee turnover.

Our Development Model

Adults learn only if they know why they are about to learn something. Thus, our development model is mindset-focused. It’s called MiKS:

Reach Now

MiKS – Mindset, Knowledge, Skill

Mindset: Realization, Fun, Relevance (Benefit)

To put it briefly, only once we believe in the effectiveness of what we are about to learn, are we able to absorb knowledge productively and effectively. We refer to this as “Shaping the Mindset”. This happens when any combination of the following happens: 1) We come to a realization, 2) We enjoy the discussions that led to the shaping of that mindset, and 3) We see the relevance of the subject matter to the area we are hoping to apply it to, here our day-to-day activities.

Knowledge: Step-by-step, Buildup, Empowering

As for knowledge, it has to build up in a step-by-step fashion and give us the feeling of empowerment. This is how most people absorb new information best. Knowledge is best absorbed when we have the right mindset to learn.

Skill: Practice, Master, Confidence

Only once the knowledge has been imparted to the right mindset, will we be able and motivated to practice the skills and master them. This will positively impact our confidence.

Relationship-Based Leadership:

This is a neuroscience-based leadership model that we will use to empower your leaders to drive your core values and build your next generation of leaders who will have a deeper understanding of strategy and how it relates to their everyday activities. This model consists of 3 steps as shown in the model below: Input, Process, & Output.

Input refers to the 3 concepts that our 15 years of neuroscience research have taught us: Leadership cannot exist in a vacuum. Leadership skills are effective if a leader has a “meaningful relationship” with their employees. This meaningful relationship, neuroscience shows, is highly effective if 3 conditions are met:

The relationship is based on Mutual Trust
There are Opportunities for Growth in the team, irrespective of positions available
Team environment is as Predictable as possible because uncertainty is an obstacle to learning & and growth

For each of the above-mentioned factors, we will focus on a set of skills:

Mutual Trust: How to provide critical but constructive feedback. How to turn a meeting into a productive one, if someone is giving you feedback in a non-constructive way. How to shape a culture of feedback in a team.
Opportunities for Growth: Delegating with the growth of subordinates in mind & and coaching skills
Predictable Environment: Leadership conversations that are based on the latest findings of neuroscience & and strategic mindset.

The Outcome

Our experience shows that by focusing on these skills, leaders will be able to transform and help their subordinates change. While many of our clients have asked us to run courses on accountability and strategic planning for them, we have learned that focusing on the aforementioned concepts and skills will lead to a change of behaviour and mindset in ways that:

Constructive feedback and trust culture result in employees acting and make decisions based on the organization’s core values
Trust-based growth and autonomy (in delegation) result in more independent and accountable employees
Adopting strategic mindset results in more company-wide strategic alignment