RONAN HARRINGTON
International Keynote Speaker and Coach
Creating Healthy, High Performance Culture
In my workshops and off-sites, I introduce leaders to the 10 leadership mindsets, behaviours and skills that are central to modelling and scaling a healthy, high performance culture.
It is a mix of brief content presentations to enrich our understanding of the key pillars, and small group exercises to deepen self awareness and practise new behaviours.
Its foundations lie in establishing a deeper level of psychological safety, one that encourages leaders to be more vulnerable with each. We teach deeper listening as a core practice so leaders are able to notice what’s going on for their people emotionally, rather than listening to fix and problem solve, which is our default.
As we begin the process of surfacing the inevitable doubts and confusions that arise in our senior leadership roles, we create a shift where work moves from a dilemma that I must privately struggle with, to work becoming a complex problem that we solve together. This brings a palpable sense of relief as we invest less time in managing the impressions of others, and more time delivering together.
From this place of greater openness and trust, we introduce participants to conscious leadership as a mindset, encouraging awareness of when we are operating from stress and unconscious defensiveness and reactivity, rather than an open minded curiosity and commitment to learning.
To operationalise this we practise ‘shift moves’, which are cutting edge body and mind practices to embody a drama free, collaborative culture. For a deeper initial insight into my approach, I recommend reading The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer.
Next we encourage a culture of continuous feedback. An unconscious commitment to withholding facts, thoughts and feelings is the major obstacle to a culture of radical candour.
To enable this we teach a practice from Non-Violent Communication to unpack our experience when interpersonal tensions arise, teaching people to differentiate between the facts of the situation, and the inevitable stories and projections that arise, bringing a greater confidence to reveal ourselves to those we are having a challenging dynamic with.
We then move to the subtle ways in which blame culture arises when things inevitably go wrong, and introduce the framework of the drama triangle, where different people or entire teams and departments unconsciously assume the role of victim, persecutor, and rescuer, rather than asking in what ways their actions or omissions may have contributed to the issue.
We normalise responsibility taking, and in doing so encourage a culture where it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as we learn from them.
Finally we end on an emotional high with mastering the art of appreciation, which begins, once again, with the subtle psychological ways that block us from receiving appreciation. We talk about the subtle ways in which we deflect appreciation, and then share the four steps to masterful appreciation, taking people from generic praise, to a deeper form of recognition where employees feel truly seen, heard and understood.
Participants leave the workshop with a palpable sense of belonging, having been truly valued by their colleagues in a moving closing practice.
The off-sites are usually followed by a six session learning journey where leaders meet for one hour every two weeks to integrate the frameworks and tools and practice new leadership behaviours.
The presentation is accompanied by a 20 page pocket sized playbook so everyone can have a reminder and step by step practice instructions on their desks back home.
Book a call with me today to discuss the programme content and approach in more detail.