Trust, mutuality and learning mindset for leaders – advanced

Trust is the lubrication that makes it

possible for organizations to work.”

Warren Bennis

This course is part of a series of 3 packages which, together, form a comprehensive leadership development programme.

It is designed to enable you to build a community or team whose sustainable performance is built on strong foundations of trust, mutuality, learning mindset and shared purpose.

This series offers the following:

Trust, mutuality and learning mindset - introduction

This course focuses on the core understanding of trust building, and the underpinning leadership skillset:

  • Understand what trust is, how it is formed and damaged, and the performance and wellbeing impact that high trust has on the workplace.
  • Build your confidence and skillset in the art of great listening and impactful questions - to build trust and mutuality with others.
  • Understand more about how your presence as a leader, facilitator, host or coach, impacts the trust 'bank balance' in a group.
  • Start to build your own learning inquiry and trust practice.

Using yourself as a generative and authoritative presence, which helps others to connect, trust and collaborate better, creates the right conditions for innovation, performance and wellbeing.

Trust, mutuality and learning mindset - advanced

This course helps you:

  • Understand growth (learning) mindset, which enables trustful learning and adaptive change, and its enablers and obstacles.
  • Focus on processes and behaviours that create and support dialogic, generative practices in the groups and teams you work with.
  • Explores how trust turns up differently in internationally diverse groups.
  • Build your confidence and competence at handling difficult situations and conversations.

Most people are conflict averse, believing that tackling the trickier sides of group-life (like poor performance, or diverse, even antagonistic views), will damage trust and belonging.  But if these are handled with skill, compassion and mutuality, they can be trust-building.

Building purpose and trust in teams

Once you have mastered the underpinning skills of trust and trust-building as a leader, facilitator, host or coach - you are ready to take the step in super-charging your team's performance, belonging and creativity - and that is supported by building common purpose, and strength-based innovation, change and adaptive capacity.

This course helps you:

  • Understand, in depth, what it means to work from a deep sense of personal and shared purpose - and the advantages this confers on your organisation or team, in the forms of greater resilience, innovation and adaptation, customer-centricity and performance, and reduced attrition, absenteeism and insider-risk.
  • Focus on processes and behaviours that you can adopt, that support and enable purposeful engagement.
  • Enhance your skills, with advanced techniques and approaches to refreshing your team's sense of purpose and values, and orienting them around strengths and commitments.
  • Build confidence in responding to (apparently) 'blocking' energy from others, with generativity, curiosity and engagement, thereby benefitting from the wisdom and accountability embedded in the 'resistance' and maintaining adult engagement.

If we are serious about a flourishing workplace, abundant with accountability, adaptability, energy and innovation - then we need to lead them with adult-adult dynamics, giving up the comfort of control and imposition, and instead embracing the richness of shared creativity.

Each course costs £100 if purchased separately.  You can purchase all three courses as a cost-effective 'bundle' priced at £250, by selecting any of the individual courses, and then upgrading at your basket/cart prior to checkout.  If you do this, please remember to take OUT the original course, before going through checkout.

Ready to jump in?

£100.00 inc VAT

Programme contents

  • Trust, mutuality and learning advanced – course contents
    10 minutes
  • Introducing growth mindset
    45 minutes
  • Dialogue and generativity (draft)
    0 minutes
  • Introduction to facilitation
    25 minutes
  • Challenge, support and the ‘drama triangle’
    25 minutes
  • Difficult conversations and feedback
    40 minutes
  • Global contexts and cultures
    90 minutes
  • Global culture and trust-building
    30 minutes
  • Trust, mutuality and learning mindset advanced bitesize – reflective paper
    Text Based
  • Virtual Peer Support Groups – options
    12 minutes

This programme offers

Work through it in your own way - binge or nibble?

Some people like to 'binge learn', meaning that they allocate a whole day, and sink into a thorough immersion in a whole module.  Others prefer to take 2 hours per week, and work through a single lesson at a time.

Our courses are ideally suited to both - you are in control and you can work in the way you want, at the time you want.

Whatever your preference is, you are advised to book time in your diary, to ensure you get into a learning habit.

Different types of media to suit all needs

Each lesson will mix videos to watch, with material to read and explore.

Plus there are downloadable handouts, worksheets, templates and checklists to print and take away, and keep for future reference.

A little more about the 'lessons' included in this course ...

Want to find out more about the content in each of the packages?

Keep scrolling, you will find a summary of each element below. 

Want to talk to someone about how this might suit you?

1 + 5 =

More detail on each of the lessons

Introducing growth mindset

To enable change in ourselves and others, we need to adopt a mindset founded on learning and inquiry.  None of us are in this growth mindset all the time – and believing that you are would be the first sign of NOT being in growth mindset!

This lesson explains the basic underpinning ideas of growth mindset (drawing on the work of Dr Carol Dweck and others), with relevant examples.

It goes on to offer a straight-forward (yet challenging) way of engaging in your own journey from fixed mindset to growth mindset.  It deepens our understanding of our ‘triggers’ (stressor events) and helps us develop our ways of interrupting auto-pilot reactions.

Dialogue and generativity

This lesson explores the nature of dialogic interaction - the process through which joint meaning emerges, collaboration is at its best, and adaptation is most vibrant.

We will look at how patterns unfold between us and others - leading to more or less accountability, more or less adult-adult (or parent-child) dynamics, leading to safe, resilient cultures (or conversely, cultures dominated by wilful blindness and failure to speak up.

With practical processes to enable you to develop your skills and exercises to extend your self awareness and confidence.

Introduction to facilitation

This lesson explores the nature of the role of facilitator - or the activity of facilitation if you are a leader seeking to increase your facilitation competence when working with your teams and groups.

We will explore the different types of role, contract and activities that might be demanded of you when you are facilitating others.

You can apply this in everyday meetings, as well as workshops, events or in peer learning groups (for example).

Challenge and support and 'drama triangle'

One of the ways that groups demonstrate trust to each other, is the degree to which they enable and allow each other to offer and receive support and challenge.

  • Support lifts us up - our confidence and capabilities are built and acknowledged and our contribution is enhanced.
  • Challenge exposes our development opportunities - it catches us BEFORE we fall, by others spotting and generously sharing gaps in our thinking, it holds the mirror up to how we are blocking our own progress, or feeding our own pains.

But without trust, it can become distorted and dysfunctional - and this is where the 'drama triangle' of rescuing (instead of supporting) and persecuting (instead of challenging) takes over, reducing others (and ourselves) into a victim-like state which is turned either on ourselves ("I am hopeless and can't do anything about this") or on others ("this is nothing to do with me, it is his/her fault and they must change").  No learning or change comes from this dysfunction, whatever the intention behind it.

Rooting-around, trying to find the FAULT and CAUSE of this dynamic is pointless and helps no-one, no matter how tempting it might be.  This is because the very act of trying to allocate blame lifts us out of a deeper inquiry into how we are contributing to MAINTAINING the dynamic, even at a cost to ourselves.  It is only through asking ourselves about our own contribution that we can step into adult responsibility for making new and different 'gestures' into the dynamic.

This lesson explores the best and worst practices of these dynamics, giving you a language to understand what might be happening.  ALL groups fall into this dysfunction some of the time (families, clubs, communities, teams and organisations) - but you don't have to stay there.  If there is sufficient will and courage to experiment, new habits can be formed.

Difficult conversations and feedback

Most of us are conflict-averse.  When we face the prospect of offering a challenging point of view, holding the mirror up to problematic behaviour, or confronting people with the consequences of their choices, we risk all sorts of fractures to our ongoing relationships, peace of mind, and own comfort zone.

In their book Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project, tell us "Delivering a difficult message is like throwing a hand grenade.  Coated with sugar, thrown hard or soft, a hand grenade is still going to do damage.  Try as you may, there’s no way to throw a hand grenade with tact or to outrun the consequences.  And keeping it to yourself is no better.  Choosing not to deliver a difficult message is like hanging on to a hand grenade once you’ve pulled the pin."

This lesson offers an overview about confrontation, challenge and difficult conversations, with a model to improve the quality and sensitivity (and ultimately, positive potential) of your feedback processes.  It also offers a downloadable preparation tool, to guide you through your own thinking.

Global contexts and cultures

This suite of lessons draws on the work of Erin Meyer, Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars and Richard Lewis (amongst others) to take a substantial but pragmatic look at the challenges and opportunities that arise when working across multiple geographies, with different cultures and norms.

The lessons firstly open up the core models that are of most use, and then applies them in a deep dive into how different assumptions and societal norms play out in the realms of:

  • Complex communications
  • Trust and trust building
  • Influence, education and motivation.
  • Evaluation, challenge, criticism and feedback.
  • Power, authority and imposition.

Each lesson offers downloadables and exercises that you can use to develop the creative potential of a diverse, global team.  Your programme may offer all, or a selection of these topics depending on the course topic.  The full range is available in our Global Leader Programme.

Reflecting 'out loud'

You may find that some aspects of this work touches you in ways that you will find uncomfortable, perhaps even exposing 'edges' that you hoped that you were hiding really well.

You can be pretty sure that you are NOT masking them very well at all, despite your best 'stories of yourself' (even if some of your stories sound convincing, and you are able to tell them even to yourself).  Facing your vulnerabilities with integrity and humility will build-up your credibility in the eyes of those around you, whereas trying to present an inauthentic version of yourself merely exposes your insecurity to all.  Our defences often allow us to be 'expert' for many years, and as long as we stay in expert-style jobs, we can carry on this way.  But the minute we get into real, senior leadership, we are SEEN.  Choices have to be made, it is time to return to self-development rather than self-protection.

If access to this package is part of an ongoing consulting support project with Lacerta Consulting, then please use the 'assignment' process right at the end of the package, to capture your learning, explore the questions it asks and complete some writing.  The more you open up, the more your consultant will be able to help you.  This is, in itself, part of the process.

If your access here is NOT part of a supported programme, please feel free to complete the paper anyway – we are always willing to offer our thoughts and point you in the direction of new support or learning.  And of course we are always delighted to receive any feedback about how you have experienced our learning products.

Whatever you write, it is ONLY seen by the Lacerta Consultant assigned to your programme.  It will never be shared with anyone else, and gives us the opportunity to understand how this is impacting you, what help you might need individually, and offers ideas how we might support the whole team.

Ready to jump in?

£100.00 inc VAT

Frequently asked questions

How long can I access a programme or course?

Your programme, course or module will be accessible to you for 1 year from the time you start it.

However in each lesson there are also PDFs, tools, products and exercises, that we think you will want to keep – you can download them, or print them.

What if I fall behind and out of step with the programme timing?

All significant learning commitments require some dedication.  This means making conscious choices, and carving out the time to acquire, experiment with, and reflect on what you are exploring.  Sometimes, this is going to clash with other priorities and occasionally it might feel a little overwhelming – even for the most dedicated learner.  If you know that a busy period is coming up, plan for catch-up time in the weeks that follow.

Some of our longer programmes involve following a specific timetable with a group – with new modules ‘starting’ at a given time.  This may tie in with Peer Support Group meetings, and/or with workshops or webinars.  If this is the case for your programme, an important aspect is that you are not alone – but in a community of learners.  The timings of ‘live’ experiences or group meetings are rarely changed once the programme starts, as this would impact negatively on your colleagues and co-learners.  Keeping up with others, so that you share your learning and benefit from their experience, is important.

Get into the learning habit, and if you have concerns about whether you will be able to do this, and if you fall behind at any time, just reach out to us and we will try to help.

Can I bundle one course or programme with another and save money?

Some of our courses are already bundled, in particular the shorter courses shown in our ‘bitesize’ section.  If the course you are interested in IS available in a value-for-money bundle, proceed with your purchase, and before closing the ‘sale’, you will be notified of this choices at your ‘Cart’.

If the other courses you are interested in are not bundled right now, just contact us, as we can put a custom bundle together for you.

Can I commission custom courses for my organisation?

Many of our programmes and short (bite-size) courses have been originally developed especially for a client – and, where appropriate, then adapted for a broader audience and turned into an ‘open’ programme.  It is our clients around the world that ‘pull’ new content and commission what we go on to build, to meet their needs at any given time.

If you would like to either curate a custom programme from our existing stock, or you have an area of new content that you would like us to look at, just contact us and we can help.

What if I'm not satisfied with my purchase?

Our courses and materials are getting great feedback from users – but of course it might not suit exactly what you are looking for.

We are always happy to refund you if you start a course and find it isn’t what you wanted.  Please contact us straight after completing the first lesson in the course if you would like us to refund your payment or switch you to a more suitable product. 

Please note that we are unable to refund a course that has been more than 50% completed.