MAP - engagement skills for managers

Managers play the pivotal role in maintaining highly-engaged people by ensuring a productive workplace atmosphere. Developing such a climate requires managers to have the necessary engagement skills and attitudes.

Research shows that the relationship with the immediate manager is, for most people, the biggest factor in decisions to stay or leave, to invest discretionary effort or the minimum, ie. to engage or disengage. Ensuring that managers have the self-awareness and skills to build and maintain high engagement is essential - but all too often overlooked!

MAP (Motivation Alignment Performance) 

MAP is not just another training course; it is designed to engender sustainable behaviour change and is hence a development programme.  It focuses on recent discoveries from neuroscience and genetics as to how the mind works, changing the paradigm for managing people.

MAP comprises workshops, before-and-after feedback from direct reports and self-coach tools. The programme is essentially an experiential work-based journey, designed to convey knowledge, self-awareness and skills to sustain high engagement and performance levels. It is accredited by the University of Chester.

Launched in 2008, the Programme has continuously evolved as our work with clients refines it in the light of experience. There's nothing new about the terms motivation, alignment, performance is there? Yet the Programme's capacity to bring about sustainable behavioural change for managers is anything but simple or old hat. It combines the latest best-practice research with a pragmatic and understandable approach to skills development. MAP can assist any employer to meet the exceptional challenges they face in 2011.

Call us to discuss how you can run a pilot to assess its impact.

Programme design   

As performance improvement specialists, at The Training Foundation we know that engendering genuinely sustainable behavioural change always requires four things.

First, motivation - the 'what's in it for me' dimension. Before managers will invest the individual time and effort to develop the skills to fully engage with their people, they need to be convinced that doing so will be of personal benefit.

Second, learning - increased self-awareness, new knowledge and skills.

Third, practise, practise, practise! How often does the course manual from a training event simply get put on the shelf afterwards and gather dust? MAP is a development Programme. The workshops are simply the beginning - follow-on activities encourage managers to put into practice what they have learned. Seeing the immediate benefits inspires renewed commitment to the changed behaviours.

Finally, feedback. It's only when managers see the response to their changed behaviours - in terms of improved engagement and performance from their people - that the benefits of their efforts become clear and motivate continued commitment. The Programme's before-and-after 360º feedback means that the resultant improvements in employee engagement can be clearly identified.

MAP has been designed to meet all four of these essentials head on. It has the power to change behaviour - permanently. That's why it is bringing outstanding benefits to employers, managers and of course, employees. 

Programme content

Many inspiring people have contributed to MAP's content through their seminal published books and papers. In the sidebar are listed some of those that have most shaped our thinking. We can best describe these visionaries as 'people people', individuals who recognised the enormous power of the human spirit and who each made a valuable contribution as to how to best release that potential.

MAP also reflects amazing, ground-breaking findings from genetics and neuroscience in recent years into what really motivates human behaviour, and applies these to the employment context.