Management development is important to businesses who want to take a proactive approach to growth. Training opportunities increase employee retention and motivate employees, resulting in a knowledge and driven workforce. If your business is to grow, you need to invest in the most asset, your employees, and upskilling is an essential growth strategy which can be successfully initiated with our help.

Develop a culture of innovation

Your managers have a thorough knowledge of your business and they are some of the best-placed people to be suggested new products, services or improvements. With training and confidence, you can develop a team of innovation managers, which will ultimately lead the way in business improvement and product development.

Retain your best employees

Employees want to feel as though they are progressing in their chosen career path and improving their skill-set. Ensure you invest in your employee’s professional development. If you fail to do so, this could lead to your employees leaving in search for other opportunities. After all, if employees feel you are investing in their future, they will be more willing to remain where they are, ultimately reducing your costs.

Gain competitive advantage

Maintaining a competitive advantage against your competition is vital. Ensure your managers are equipped with the essential skill sin order to distinguish your business from competition. Whether it is a short intervention to instantly improve an individual or a company-wide training programme, we are able to successful development your managers.

Management success

Management succession planning allows a business to keep moving forward when the inevitable occurs. Succession planning encourages staff development and makes employees aware that you are serious about developing people. Having a successor from within the company can also save time and expenses as well as aiding continuity.

Negotiation skills are extremely important in business. After all, negotiation is a method which people use to settle differences. Whether you are looking to compromise or reach an agreement, it’s a useful method to achieve win/win outcomes.

In order to achieve a desirable outcome, often following a structured approach helps. Take a look at our five tips to get you on your way to successful negotiating.

Plan your negotiation

Analyse the problem to determine the outcome you want - A detailed problem analysis is extremely useful.

Firstly, identify the issue, the parties involved and outcome of goals. Identifying each issue can help to find a compromise for all parties as it’s important to understand the interests and positions of the other side in relation to your own interests and positions.

Remember: Ensure you have considered all variables which may arise and be prepared.

Listen carefully

Active listening involves the ability to read body language and verbal communication. It’s important to listen to the opposing party and find areas for compromise. This may mean looking outside the box and taking a different viewpoint to the one you're used to.

Emotional Intelligence under control

It’s vital that you keep your emotions in check. This is where emotional intelligence comes in, allowing you to control your emotions during the negotiation process. It’s especially important to keep emotions in check, as if you don’t, this can lead to a communication breakdown which can have a significant impact on the time frame of settling a negotiation.

Questioning and listening

Communication skills are vital when negotiating. What outcomes do you want? Often misunderstanding can occur if you don’t specify your case clearly. Whether you are doing this written or verbally, it’s important to communicate a clear case and one which is easy to understand.

Put your skills to the test

Come along to one of our effective negotiation courses, where you will get the chance to practice your negotiation skills and gain expert knowledge and advice on how to improve your negotiation skills within the work environment.

Pattonair is a leading global Aerospace and Defence supply chain service provider – working with a wide range of customers across the world with over 40 years of experience in the industry. With its headquarter in Derby, the company employs around 1,000 people in the UK, USA, Singapore, France and Italy.

Having grown significantly over the past four years and invested heavily in the development of processes and procedures, Pattonair identified the need to develop leadership and management skills across the company.

Pattonair has a policy of promoting from within the company and recognised that a training programme was required to support senior managers whether they were recently in post or had been in that position for longer periods of time.

Although the company supports staff with practical training through apprenticeships and higher education support and whilst senior managers were promoted on the strength of their ability to do the job – there was widespread recognition that the softer skills of people management and team motivation often needed to be addressed.

The company also recognised that, in a competitive recruitment market, it was important to clearly demonstrate to applicants that Pattonair is a company that values and invests in its workforce.

Pattonair worked with us to develop the bespoke PILOT programme – focusing on the ‘softer skills’ linked to relationship building, such as communication, personality profiling, delegation and conflict resolution.

The objective was to support senior managers in their role and to give them the ability to better manage and disseminate skills across their teams to increase efficiency, raise standards and boost productivity.

The company therefore brought together 70 managers from across the company for a series of monthly training sessions over 12 months.

The programme is unique in a number of ways.

It is bespoke to the company with all theoretical training directly linked back to the company ethos and practice.

PILOT was developed in line with the company’s core values and behaviours which are at the heart of the company’s operations:

- Building with integrity, fairness and trust
- Challenge and innovate
- Always putting outstanding service first
- Making ambition work

PILOT was totally inclusive and open to all senior managers regardless of their previous qualifications and training with graduates working alongside vocationally-trained former shopfloor workers who had worked their way up into management roles.

Managers from across the business were divided into groups – enabling them to work with colleagues from different aspects of the business.

Training was classroom based our associates travelling to the USA and Singapore to deliver training there and then European managers travelling to Derby College for the majority of training.

The final sessions, focusing on Pattonair’s financial and achieving zero defects models, were held in- house.

The programme concludes with each team completing a community project which has so far included refurbishment work at a homeless charity’s premises, maintenance projects at an animal sanctuary and dry stone walling in the Derbyshire Dales.

Due to the positive feedback received so far, Pattonair has already returned to us to launch Co-Pilot, which is aimed at section leaders and is planning Auto Pilot as a follow up with the management teams to embed further learning into the workforce development programme.

Pattonair will also be working with Derby College to allocate its employer apprenticeship levy on the expansion of its apprenticeship programme (for young apprentices and for existing staff). This will continue the shopfloor training programmes including warehousing and business improvement techniques and expand into new customer service and administration apprenticeships.