MANAGING without POWER

Training for managers and leaders designed for building high performance teams and organizations, the human way.

Performance and humaneness are not opposites… they are inseparable.

Matching high performance with humaneness is crucial for peak performance. Yet few organizations combine both effectively and risk losing their best talent as a result.

In humane organizations, accountability is often lacking. You are then top left in the illustrated matrix. People are friendly, but you can't count on colleagues to deliver what was agreed. That causes friction and 'quiet quitters'.

Bottom right organizations might call themselves 'high performance organization'. Reality is often different: the tough culture leads to internal competition, and managers spend a lot of time 'managing upwards' at the expense of investments in teams. Sharp elbows are needed to survive. The organization becomes political and slow.

You get to the top right when managers and leaders consciously invest in teams. The more you invest, the higher you can raise the bar with fair and predictable performance management. That requires a new style of management: Managing Without Power.

About the program

Managing Without Power gets your organization ready for today's world of work

Managing Without Power brings the culture and effectiveness, that you typically find in startups, to growing and large organizations. Trainings are delivered through action based learning. The program enables managers and leaders to unlearn the unconscious use of power and nurture high performing, inclusive teams through human leadership.

Through Managing Without Power your organization will benefit from:

  • Increased productivity, less 'quiet quitters'
  • Increased team performance and moral
  • Reduced employee burnout
  • Increased talent attraction and retention
  • A genuinely inclusive culture built on trust and intrinsic motivation
  • Leaders with the confidence, skills and frameworks to nurture high performance teams

It’s the perfect fit for...

Large Organizations

  • Wanting to regain their original culture and entrepreneurial spirit lost during growth
  • Struggling to create momentum, maybe suffering from politics and low productivity, or lacking performance due to people not challenging one another
  • Wanting to make their organization inclusive for people with different backgrounds and working styles, with tangible and measurable progress
  • With flat org structures that lack performance management and need to reintroduce managerial roles without creating an unhelpful hierarchy
  • Struggling with consistency in management style and quality
  • Struggling to hire/retain talent

Start ups & Scale ups

  • Wanting to scale teams with consistent ways of working that retain effectiveness and culture alongside growth
  • Wanting to make their organization inclusive for people with different backgrounds and working styles, with tangible and measurable progress
  • With young managers needing professional support, without turning them into 'traditional style' managers
  • With flat org structures that lack performance management and need to introduce managerial roles without creating an unhelpful hierarchy
  • Struggling with consistency in management style and quality
  • Struggling to hire/retain talent

Course structure

Train your managers and leaders to set a new bar for performance and humaneness

Through action based learning we will work on real management and leadership challenges in your organization. With a systemic approach supported by proven frameworks and measurement we help groups of managers and leaders, and their management team apply principles of Managing Without Power. You'll co-create the management principles and structures needed for lasting change.

Trainings are run incompany, and are customized to the needs of the organization. Elements of the program can be run separately or be combined. We regularly run trainings during offsites, and can also guide individual managers, or do new manager onboarding.

Module 1

Brilliant Basics
Part 1
  • Applying the ten behaviors of great managers with situational and personal awareness.
  • Applying the five brilliant basics to build trusted relationships and intrinsically motivated teams.
  • How to manage effectively in a remote environment.
  • Optimising your performance through manager feedback from your team.
  • How to run personal and meaningful conversations about career and personal growth.

Module 2

Brilliant Basics
Part 2
  • Creating direction and clarity of expectations with OKRs.
  • Making all meetings effective.
  • Setting and cultivating healthy team norms.
  • Tracking progress, course correcting and providing timely feedback.
  • Running fair and predictable performance evaluations.
  • Creating accountability in a human way.
  • Dealing with low performers effectively and respectfully.

Module 3

High Performance
Through Human Leadership & Safety
  • What makes a high performance team, and how to combine high performance and humaneness?
  • Creating psychological safety through your actions.
  • Balancing safety and accountability.
  • Recognizing moments of truth to reinforce team culture through your actions.
  • How to make sure all types of people can succeed.
  • How do you flex your leadership style to the needs of different people while staying true to who you are?

Module 4

Org Transformation Space for change
Addressing the biggest barriers for change in any large organization
  • Keeping your vision actionable.
  • Five enablers to retain or regain a Start-up spirit.
  • How to create an organization that can reinvent itself over and over again.
  • Using data based experiments to optimize your people strategy.
  • Creating space to innovate in a growing organization.

Packages

Example: Training for leaders and Management Teams
2 days, incompany:
Five Brilliant Basics, Human Leadership, and building a high performing organization.

We'll explore desired leadership principles and the gap versus reality. We jump back and forth between the role of individual leaders as manager of their team and as role model for the organization. We will review and co-create supporting structures and tools to enable consistent quality and style of leadership in all layers of the organization.
€10,000
(price is per group of 6 to 12 leaders)
This is an indicative example. All proposals are custom. For large assignments a discount will be applied. Suitable for Management Team offsites.
Example: Training for groups of managers
3 days, incompany:
Ten behaviours of great managers, five brilliant basics, learning from manager feedback, and finding your own human leadership style.

We'll practice skills, explore tools that enable on the job application between training days, learn from peers, work on real challenges in your team and create a common language between peer managers. Sessions can be split in half days. Every element is customized to your organization.
€12,000
(price is per group of 8 to 14 managers)
This is an indicative example. All proposals are custom. For large assignments a discount will be applied.
Private course
Work 1-on-1 with Joris Merks-Benjaminsen: in 5 half days, with focused assignments in between, you apply the 5 Brilliant Basics of Managing Without Power to your team. You learn to consciously create psychological safety and make human leadership actionable. Manager feedback helps you find your own unique approach.
€5,000
(1-on-1, on-the-job training)
Due to the 1-on-1 setting this journey is always custom.

Customer testimonials

If you’re a manager, or are looking to upskill managers, if you want to establish an inclusive culture with start-up spirit in a large organization, or you’re a scale-up, growing rapidly but eager to maintain the culture you’ve built, then look no further than Joris’s Managing Without Power.

Kim Wylie

Global Director of People Development & Change at Farfetch

Managing Without Power is NOT ‘Edutainment’. It’s practical application of learning. It achieves change and transformation at a systemic level, which is the only way to achieve lasting impact in my experience. I can highly recommend working with Joris.

Stephanie Conway

Senior Director Talent Development EMEA & LATAM at LinkedIn

What makes or breaks a startup is the team and culture that you build. In the day-to-day chaos of building its easy to not be deliberate about building that culture. Joris provides practical, low-nonsense tools and training to help us create a high performance team in a human way. We would highly recommend him.

Stef van Grieken

CEO and founder of Cradle.bio

I've rarely worked with someone so conscientious and deliberate about modelling best practice in getting the best from individuals and teams. Everyone who works with Joris learns a thing or two about leading with thoughtfulness, consistency and humanity.

Shuvo Saha

Chief Client & Growth Officer Kite Insights

Ambitious managers + a legend in leadership = a lot of honest discussions, learnings, and things to implement! Joris has translated his experience as a hugely successful leader into workshops on scaling start-up culture while nailing brilliant basics of people management. Managing Without Power is inspiring, insightful and actionable.

Jordan Richards

CEO and founder of &above

Seeing Joris bring his book Managing without power to life and apply it to GetYourGuide's challenges was nothing less than energizing. It was a valuable binding experience for our group of Directors and VP's who were sometimes moved to tears.

Wouter Blok

Vice President Growth Marketing at GetYourGuide

Book Joris as speaker
for your event through
Speakers for Good

Speakers for Good is an extraordinary speakers bureau that takes courageous people and organizations on an expedition to Net Positive. Together with them, Joris speaks, inspires and activates on topics such as leadership in the 21st century, inclusivity, transforming organizations, human performance management and, of course, Managing Without Power.

About me

Joris Merks-Benjaminsen

Hello! My name is Joris Merks-Benjaminsen. I am an award winning author, trainer of managers and leaders, and a person who deeply cares about people as well as achieving great things together. I work with organisations to establish a thoughtful balance between human leadership on the one hand, versus structure and accountability on the other.

Over the last 12 years I helped hundreds of global brands navigate and conquer transformation challenges. As Head of Google Academy I became one of Google's highest scoring managers of all time. Based on that experience, as well as the work I did with many large organizations, I have developed a toolkit
to help build new human leadership capabilities in any business: the Managing Without Power program.

It offers a truly holistic approach combining data, action based learning, analytics and strategy with human insight, empathy and personal consciousness to create practical solutions that can create positive change in any organization.

Last year marked the launch of my sixth book: Managing Without Power. The book and program help companies embed a more human leadership practice within their business and drive their teams performance to the next level.

Some of the companies I’ve worked with:

Joris is a rare kind of leader and mentor: generous, super smart, insanely knowledgeable, insightful and humble. He’s truly collaborative, and fun with an abundance of quiet energy. He is the person you really want to be leading your team. And if you can't have that, you definitely need him to be working WITH your team to enable them to be the best they possibly can be.

Jo Royce

AVA Head of People, Culture and Capabilities, ex-Unilever

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