‘What Do Leaders Really Do?’ and a ‘Lesson in Sporting Excellence’.

Two of the highlights of the 2012 Evolve Staff Conference were the sessions led by keynote speaker, Jeff Grout.  Jeff was formerly Business Manager to Sir Clive Woodward and is now a prominent independent business consultant, specialising in leadership, people management, team building and peak performance.  Jeff is a well renowned public speaker and the Evolve team are extremely privileged to have been able to attend Jeff’s seminars.

What do Leaders Really do?

During day one of the Staff Conference Evolve’s directors, regional managers and other senior staff attended a seminar titled ‘What do leaders really do?’  This was full of extremely valuable advice on how to develop leadership skills and some of the topics that Jeff discussed were:

• The top three key things that all great leaders must do.
• The importance in prioritising your goals.
• The skill of how to manage different kinds of people, ranging from those who can be described as ‘stars’, to the ‘lazy’ and ‘uninspired’.
• The importance of giving recognition and showing appreciation towards to those who deserve it.
• The ways in which you can make effective changes in your company in order to improve.

Jeff went into great detail when explaining how these things can be achieved and he gave excellent advice that Evolve’s management staff will be able to utilise in the future.

Lessons From Sporting Excellence

Later on that evening Jeff led another presentation for Evolve.  This time, all of the Evolve team were present and this seminar was titled ‘Lessons From Sporting Excellence’.  This was a fantastic talk that focused the reasons why successful athletes achieve. The presentation was filled with videos and pictures of athletes, from the past and the present, being successful and unsuccessful in their chosen sport.  Jeff spoke about all the key skills an athlete must have and discussed the topics of:

• Setting goals
• Maintaining focus over time
• The importance of technique
• Analysing success
• Analysing failure
• Coping with pressure
• The importance of teamwork
• Taking risks

This talk was extremely interesting and the Evolve Health Mentors, many of whom are sportsmen or sportswomen themselves, found it extremely useful to both their performance as a Health Mentor and their wider sporting life.

These sessions led by Jeff Grout were fantastic and Evolve would like to say a huge thank you to Jeff for attending our 2012 Staff Conference.