Individual IT Leadership Mentoring
Up to 40% of Fortune 500 CEOs use personal leadership coaching services, not because they are weak, but because they want to get better. They need an accountability partner, or even a mentor, to ensure their daily actions are moving them toward their goals, and nobody within the organization is in a position to provide that for them free of organizational bias.
Most of the people in charge of IT groups need mentors badly, but either they don’t realize it, or they believe acquiring one will signal weakness to those around them. Even when they do decide to engage a mentor, it’s difficult to find one who is qualified, has the time, and is free of organizational bias. While the IT leader’s supervisor can be helpful in some ways, they rarely have the experience with IT to be a true mentor in that area.
Because IT leaders need mentors and accountability partners who’ve been successful IT leaders, Baton Pass is offering a unique solution.
For the cost of a typical week-long training, we provide a year of individual coaching support specifically designed for technology professionals transitioning to leadership positions or technology leaders looking to level up.
Our curriculum includes the following modules:
The Only Thing You Control Is You…And That’s Everything
This module emphasizes the importance of leadership development and the role of self-control and discipline in becoming an effective leader. The module covers various aspects of personal development, including goal setting, productivity management, attending to spiritual needs, prioritizing sleep, maintaining a healthy diet, continuous learning processes, and incorporating exercise into one's routine. The module provides practical steps and actionable advice to help technical professionals enhance their leadership skills and achieve personal and professional growth.Research on Effective Technology Leadership
The module begins with reading materials that explore the best available research on leadership, both in general and in the technology field. Participants will also undergo the Strengthsfinder 2.0 Assessment, which will reveal their five primary strengths. By the end of this module, participants will gain a theoretical understanding of what constitutes great leadership for them and how their strengths can influence their leadership style. The module emphasizes a step-by-step approach, guiding participants to read specific sections of books and complete actions in a particular order.Evaluating You
Module 3 discusses the importance of accountability in technical leadership and suggests a process for self-evaluation. It emphasizes that technical leaders often face unique challenges due to their role and the lack of understanding from both their employees and superiors. To address this, the solution proposed is to create an evaluation process that gathers feedback from the team members the leader oversees. Research studied in Module 2 is used as a foundation for the evaluation survey. The process involves setting leadership goals, communicating them to the team, taking daily actions to meet those goals, conducting periodic evaluation surveys, and openly discussing the results to receive constructive feedback for improvement.Integrating Strengths Based Leadership
In Module 4, participants are encouraged to integrate Strengths Based Leadership principles into their leadership approach. Building on the concepts introduced in Module 2, the focus is on helping leaders internalize and practice advice tailored to their strengths. The module also introduces methods for aligning individual strengths with the organization's needs, highlighting the role of leaders in supporting the growth and well-being of their team members.Evaluating Others
In Module 5, the focus shifts to evaluating others and providing effective feedback. The module challenges traditional evaluation methods and emphasizes the need for a feedback framework that builds trust, inspires individuals, and fosters strong relationships through the implementation of 3 principles. These principles redefine delivering negative feedback, positive feedback, and periodic goal setting meetings with employees.Specialized Hiring Processes for IT
This module focuses on the hiring processes in a technical organization and emphasizes the importance of establishing oneself as a great leader through those practices. The probationary period is highlighted as a critical phase in the hiring process, providing an opportunity to assess a new employee's ability to perform the job well. The module also discusses the significance of finding the right fit for the organization by aligning candidates' values with the organization's values. It addresses the issue of bias in various stages of the hiring process, such as application reviews, interviews, and reference checks, providing strategies to mitigate bias and gather more accurate information about candidates.Making Meetings Effective and Efficient
This module focuses on the importance of running effective, efficient, and engaging meetings. It recognizes the technical employee's tendency to dislike meetings, yet doubles down on their importance in creating an organization rhythm that's essential to fostering clarity, accountability, and team alignment. The module discusses at length the development of organizational outcome, mission, vision, and values statements, and how those statements should be integrated with meeting structures to keep participants aligned. It also reviews and describes meeting formats such as stand-ups, weekly 80s, 6 week tacticals, quarterly reviews, and annual reviews. Finally, the module highlights ideas such as meeting ratings and participant prioritization to ensure continuous improvement, topical relevance, efficiency, and speed.Leading Up and Leading Laterally
Relying partly on research from Gartner outlined in the book “The Connector Leader”, this module explores techniques for building strong reciprocal relationships with lateral department heads in the leader’s organization, lateral leaders in other organizations, and superiors. With a nod to the tendency for technical organizations to have transactional relationships with non-technical partner organizations, where others are constantly asking the technical leader to service them and their departments, this module helps the technical leader to build relationships where peers and even superiors happily “barter” with them to exchange important information and services that increase the technical leader’s ability to get things done.
During the course of completing these modules, you and your coach will work together to answer the following important questions, customized for your situation:
How do I become a person others want to follow?
What do I really want and why do I want it?
How do I know for sure if I’m a great leader?
What should I focus on to make the most improvement in a short amount of time?
Who are the people in the best position to know if I’m doing a great job?
How do I balance negative and positive feedback for employees?
How do I keep employees accountable without belittling them?
When I hire, how do I know that we’ve chosen the candidate with the highest probability of success?
How do I align my team to our goals and keep them aligned and accountable?
How do I create and maintain the kinds of lateral and upward relationships that help me be effective across the organization?