As public participation professionals, our team work with leaders at the helm of city-shaping services across the nation daily. Articulous not only understands how to engage large groups of people, but also recognises how leadership through facilitation affects the involvement we receive in return.
Gauge the perspective of your team
In order to successfully develop, deliver and lead positive projects within an industry or organisation, you must understand the attitude of your employees using data that accurately and objectively represents them. Interviews, surveys, forums and focus groups should ideally be conducted by an external body. This ensures that the data isn’t reflective of internal influences, providing a truthful insight into the attitudes of your staff. This understanding can identify gaps within both the participation of staff and the strategic framework of leadership you use.
Unintentional intimidation
The most common forms of intimidation are commonly unrecognised and unintentional losses of control. These can result in negative reactions from the intended audience and the loss of positive leadership potential with them. Whether that be emotional or social control, the way you act and handle yourself as a leader ultimately affects your following. For instance:
- Looking over someone’s shoulder
- Occasional stressed yelling
- Laid back language
- Or playful teasing
All of these behaviours are categorised as forms of intimidation in the workplace. Without recognising their effects, these and many more slight but intimidating behaviours can increase the rate of anxiety, stress, depression and burn-out experienced by staff. Ultimately, this decreases enjoyment in work, limits open communication among employees and creates hesitation in reporting mistakes or asking for help.
Keeping a positive culture amongst your staff can certainly be achieved without the unintentional integration of intimidation techniques, but this must begin with the acknowledgment of them in all their forms and their damaging effects.
What we aim to teach in our engagement courses are guidelines to identifying areas of potential improvement within your personal leadership framework. Our courses will educate you about various intimidation behaviours to avoid, explaining why they might affect the attitudes and performance of your staff.
Training solutions
If you would like to know how to improve your leadership style, join us in our engagement courses next year:
Engaging with Influence is delivered in a single day and is an IAP2 certified training course. This course was created for leaders wanting to improve their engagement with influence within their organisation and the wider public.
Additionally, our specialised bespoke training course Delivering Deliberate Engagement can be exclusively designed to your requirements. This course aims to provide the “how to” in shaping your organisation’s engagement methods.
“On reflection, my engagement strategy and practice could have been improved if I’d known about the concepts and theories we learned during this course” – Training Participant
Allow us to design and deliver bespoke training solutions tailored to your organisation’s engagement needs. Click the contact button below and tell us what you want to achieve!
