MANAGING without POWER

A program 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 very few organizations manage to nurture and balance both effectively and risk losing their best talent as a result.

Getting to the top right quadrant is like growing a tree. Pulling at a tree to make it grow faster is as useless as pressuring and micro-managing teams hoping to drive performance.

Nurture a tree and it grows into something stronger than yourself, just like personal care, trust, safety, clarity, encouragement, and meaning bring teams to the highest performance.

Clipping helps trees achieve full strength, just like dealing with low performers, and people who don't live by team norms.

About the program

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

Inspired by Google’s ethos and delivered through action based learning, this program aims to empower 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
Increased team performance and moral
Reduced employee burnout
Increased talent attraction and retention
A truly diverse and 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 DEI real within their business, with tangible and measurable progress. You don't talk about DEI, you live it.
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 DEI real within their business, with tangible and measurable progress. You don't talk about DEI, you live it.
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 by measurement of impact we help groups of managers and leaders apply principles of Managing Without Power. You'll co-create the management principles and structures needed for lasting change. Separate elements of the program, as well as the overall setup, can be fully customized to the needs of your organization. We can also guide individual managers and 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 DEI & 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 to make Diversity, Equality and Inclusion a reality, not just words.

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: Full course

9 weeks, all 4 modules, incompany:
Five Brilliant Basics, Psychological safety, DEI and Org Transformation.

Each module is 1 day of training delivered in person followed by 3 weeks on the job application. Every element is customized to your organization. Sessions can be split in half days.

€20,000

(price is per group of 8 to 16 managers/leaders)

This is an indicative example. All proposals are custom. For large assignments a discount will be applied.

Example: Short course

4 weeks, Modules 1 & 2 (Five Brilliant Basics), incompany.

Each module is 1 day of training delivered in person followed by 3 weeks on the job application. Every element is customized to your organization. Sessions can be split in half days.

€10,000

(price is per group of 8 to 16 managers/leaders)

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 DEI actionable. Manager feedback helps you find your own unique approach.

€7,500

(1-on-1, on-the-job training)

Due to the 1-on-1 setting this journey is always custom.

Get in touch

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

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

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

Joris makes complexity actionable and has a story that touches and engages people. He brings people along on the journey. He genuinely cares about making your organization better and more effective

Hank van Dijk

Managing Director at Yonego

Joris’s program is not for leaders looking to brush up a skill here or there. When you really have the ambition to excel as leader, team and organization, this is the program for you.

Niels FC Willems

Manager Transformation at HEMA

About me

Joris Merks-Benjaminsen

Joris Merks-Benjaminsen is an award winning author, and organization transformation expert specializing in cultivating inclusive high performance teams and cultures. Over the last 12 years he supported hundreds of global brands navigate and conquer their transformation challenges. Drawing on his exemplary track record of developing leadership skills at all levels while Head of Google Academy and having been one of Google's highest scoring managers of all time, Joris 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.

This year marks the launch of Joris's 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.