LEADERSHIP THAT MATTERS IN THE AGE OF THE KNOWLEDGE WORKER

OUTLINE

Half-Day Workshop

The role played by a CEO of an organization in creating a successful leadership culture is well documented. Names like Thomas J. Watson Jr. at IBM and Jack Welch at GE are legendary names associated with creating strong leadership that permeates throughout their organizations. The role of the leader is even more critical in the age of the knowledge worker because the benchmarks of performance and the true measures of an employee's contribution to the success of the enterprise are much more complex than in a purely manufacturing setting. This is further exacerbated by the poorly understood complexities of the cost of absences due to mental disabilities among knowledge workers versus physical injuries in manufacturing.

To put this into context, knowledge workers drive today's economy. Their contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is in excess of 85%, while traditional labor contributes less than 15%. Therefore organizational effectiveness and business success are determined by the mental performance of employees. Full employee engagement is impossible without emotionally healthy employees. Under these conditions, creating a work environment that promotes both employee engagement and employee emotional well-being becomes a primary challenge and responsibility for all managers.

This workshop will involve the participants in an interactive process. It comprises a mix of presentations and exercises. The process is designed to help the participants to learn leadership behaviours and workplace practices that directly contribute to peak performance of the knowledge worker. These leadership behaviours are based on the research that is taken from the best selling book, Energizing Organizations, by Michael Koscec. This book received the Publisher's Choice Award, the Readers' Choice Award and was the subject of a lengthy article in the Globe and Mail, by Harvey Schachter, the Globe's feature columnist on leadership and management.

In addition, one cannot talk about leadership behaviour without discussing leadership ethics. Therefore, there is a section that will discuss the role of leadership ethics in sustaining a healthy workplace culture for the knowledge worker.

Participants in this workshop will:

1. Deepen their understanding of the leadership behaviours that make a difference to the performance of the knowledge worker.
2. Acquire practical skills that are based on a new leadership model that emerged from research into managing knowledge workers.
3. Gain new insights into leadership behaviours that unlock the maximum potential of a knowledge worker.
4. Learn the difference between leadership behaviours that drive employee engagement and leadership behaviours that promote emotional well-being. They are not the same and yet both sets of behaviours are necessary for the knowledge worker to achieve peak performance.
5. Gain a deeper understanding of leadership ethics and the role that leadership ethics plays in promoting employee engagement.
6. Learn which misaligned and toxic workplace practices reduce both employee engagement and employee mental and physical energy thereby lowering their overall performance.
7. Discover a new model of employee engagement that came to light from breakthrough research that examined the relationship between workplace practices and the emotional well-being of the knowledge worker.