| SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES |
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Context:
In 2005 Human Invest introduced the Situational Leadership® II license from the Ken Blanchard Companies on the Romanian market. The program, adapted to the Romanian business environment and based on relevant examples from our country, was very well received by both clients and managers wherever we implemented it. We began to receive numerous application requests from our client network and also from people to whom it had been recommended by those who had participated.
A lot of them were people who worked in companies that weren't prepared to introduce Situational Leadership® II at a team level. Others wanted to participate out of their own free will, independent of their companies. The problem was that we were unable to satisfy these demands because this training was only delivered to business clients.
Solution
At the end of 2006 we decided to make an experiment and we organized an open course on Situational Leadership® II. We started of with a pilot course, were we had 17 participants, from clients, who only had one or two people in which they wanted to invest, and independent participants. Besides the people who participated in this pilot course, several others had shown interest, and therefore we decided to launch an open course program for 2007.
Now, in 2008, we are in our second year and we're just establishing the program for 2009.
Development Stages
• 2007: our first year of open courses contained just one type of program and that was Situational Leadership® II. We had a good number of participants throughout the year, mostly from our client network. A series of companies were we had already implemented this solution at a team level chose to send their new employees to our open courses. Even if new comers were in small numbers, insufficient in order to organize an internal training, they could be prepared as soon as they joined the team, thus developing a common language and work system
• 2008, spring: as a result of the feedback we received from participants, we included a new solution in our portfolio, that primarily addressed middle managers - Communication and Influencing Skills for Managers©. We started to experience our first challenges with regards to maintaining a constant number of participants and as a result we recognized the need to promote these courses to managers
• 2008, fall: we have already established a schedule for the fall and we have also added another solution to our portfolio, Time Management- Priorities Matter™. This solution is focused on middle and front line managers but we also introduced a product aimed at top management - a leadership course held by our partners from the Tom Peters Company UK.
Lessons learned
Because we also wanted to make our solutions available to people who aren't involved in trainings within the team they are working with, we started off with great enthusiasm when it came to organizing open courses. The challenges came from within, with regard to the effort required to organize and manage these courses, but there were also external factors, such as the need to attract a higher number of participants and market the solutions.
We also recognized the advantages of having a person that needed to be responsible with coordinating this program, a job which was enthusiastically and energetically taken over by Mihaela Mocanu. She managed to ensure a constant number of participants and a high degree of satisfaction on behalf of the parties involved through the professional way in which she handles the process of communicating with them.
In order to have a balanced level of participation we started to direct clients, who didn't have enough people to organize an internal training group or had difficulties in scheduling a training for their employees due to an accelerated business pace, towards these solutions. As a result, besides the benefits of the training they also had the opportunity to be part of a mixed group, to share their experiences and the challenges they encountered with fellow managers from other companies. Alongside our traditional clients, we invested in promoting our program to people who are in management positions and want to participate as individuals, independent of their companies, or on the company's training budget.
Ioana Molnar,
Marketing Manager
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Human Invest is a Premier League company in the arena of training and
organizational development consultancy services, present on the Romanian market since 1998.
We are recognized for conceiving and implementing programs which offer managers an authentic experience towards improving their leadership
performances, and thus we support companies in becoming more and more engaged in delivering excellent services for their clients.
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